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Jun. 26th, 2010 09:26 pmI don't know how to wrap my head around this.
I'm out of town right now, in an exceedingly nice hotel room with a view of Windsor, Detroit, and the river between. Back at home, in my city, in my neighbourhood, there's this happening.
They're rioting in my city. There are cops firing rubber bullets into the crowd outside my office and arresting people face down in the grass in the park where I eat my lunch. There are SWAT teams on the paths of my university. There are police cars burning out front of my favourite movie theatre, a couple blocks from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
bakkaphoenix, and the stores on Yonge where I checked in on Thursday to try to get a mirror for the new apartment, some tights for work, my groceries, have had their windows smashed in. There are pictures all over the internet of violence, destruction, anger. I've been refreshing the #G20 Twitter feed here for an hour or two. I'm pretty sure I've annoyed my friends by staying in to do that instead of coming out for dinner.
I can't stop looking. I want to cry. I am crying.
I've been trying to intellectualize this, trying to process it all day; to write something here for you that would communicate the worth and weight and heft of how this feels, to write about how a building is not just a building, but a node of experience and memory; about neighbourhoods and what they're made of, their tacit social contracts and how the Annex tastes different from Church/Wellesley feels different from the Beaches; about how I dream the Don River sometimes, swim it in my dreams or watch it run like lifeblood under the Bloor Viaduct, joke about how years of drinking unfiltered Toronto tap water has bound me to that river like sympathetic magic or a geas and now I'll never be able to go somewhere else for good, lest I wither and die.
I've got nothing. I have nothing wise or pointful or calm to say. There's no art in my fingers right now. All I want to do is wail.
The overriding theme, which I`m sure my mother would disagree with strongly if she read my LJ? I should have stayed home. I am a big fucking traitor.
I really, really want to go home right now.
I'm out of town right now, in an exceedingly nice hotel room with a view of Windsor, Detroit, and the river between. Back at home, in my city, in my neighbourhood, there's this happening.
They're rioting in my city. There are cops firing rubber bullets into the crowd outside my office and arresting people face down in the grass in the park where I eat my lunch. There are SWAT teams on the paths of my university. There are police cars burning out front of my favourite movie theatre, a couple blocks from
bakkaphoenix, and the stores on Yonge where I checked in on Thursday to try to get a mirror for the new apartment, some tights for work, my groceries, have had their windows smashed in. There are pictures all over the internet of violence, destruction, anger. I've been refreshing the #G20 Twitter feed here for an hour or two. I'm pretty sure I've annoyed my friends by staying in to do that instead of coming out for dinner.I can't stop looking. I want to cry. I am crying.
I've been trying to intellectualize this, trying to process it all day; to write something here for you that would communicate the worth and weight and heft of how this feels, to write about how a building is not just a building, but a node of experience and memory; about neighbourhoods and what they're made of, their tacit social contracts and how the Annex tastes different from Church/Wellesley feels different from the Beaches; about how I dream the Don River sometimes, swim it in my dreams or watch it run like lifeblood under the Bloor Viaduct, joke about how years of drinking unfiltered Toronto tap water has bound me to that river like sympathetic magic or a geas and now I'll never be able to go somewhere else for good, lest I wither and die.
I've got nothing. I have nothing wise or pointful or calm to say. There's no art in my fingers right now. All I want to do is wail.
The overriding theme, which I`m sure my mother would disagree with strongly if she read my LJ? I should have stayed home. I am a big fucking traitor.
I really, really want to go home right now.
