I’ve been seeing and really dislike the number of slop-generated signs I’m seeing downtown…
you have a phone in your pocket, and even a chump like me can take a damn good photo with a new iPhone/Android
similarly, free software like Canva has a zillion free templates you can use to make signs
these pictures do not look like food; it’s all brown moist stuff that looks like the worst dream of a 1980s station wagon
if you don’t care about quality control or craft for your sign, why on earth would I trust you with my food?
Now, I can hear the complaint: “it’s too hard! It takes too long! It’s not possible for one mere human to make the kinds of artful designs that this environmentally destructive, creatively bankrupt engine of horror can make!”
Friends, I put that to the test. I challenged myself to make an outdoor sign for a restaurant. 30 minutes later, I had this, using only my phone and entirely free design options on Canva. It is entirely possible to make kind of shit posters using real photography, instead of kind of shit posters using AI. Check out this masterpiece!
Clearly some people are going to how dare you about this, but I’m just saying for me, personally, AI food photos are a way Nature tells me a restaurant is not to be trusted with my mouth, health, or dollars.
It’s odd to say that a chunk of collapsing ceiling in my kitchen made me grateful, but here we are.
It’s great to have the kind of upbringing that made me feel like I could tackle this; friends who know a lot more about drywall than I do to help me figure this out, the available cash to buy what I needed for the fix, the tools to do it, the time to do it.
Zooming out, it’s given me a chance to reflect on what really rankles me about an age where we’re moving backwards on sensible taxation, public services, and a general understanding of a social safety net. I could point at this fix and say “I did it all myself,” but the truth is, I didn’t.
Accidents of birth, how I was raised and educated, prior good fortune in finding the kind of jobs that gave me cash I could flex into this, a network of friends, the kind of career that grants me time and mental space to envision the fix and have the energy to tackle it. SO MUCH has happened to help me be a guy without a hole in the ceiling.
Nobody “did it all themselves.” We’re all parts of complex systems. We need to recognize that being the person with the time, energy, friends and stuff to fix the hole means we have a responsibility to look out for the people who can’t fix their holes. Or create systems that help them do that.
(also, I know it’s not that great a patch, but it’s a 100+ year old house and you should see the rest of the ceiling!)
There Is Nothing In The Rules That Says A Dog Can’t Play Basketball But There Is At Least One Rule That Applies To Those Dogs While They Play Basketball
Walking north of the causeway, I took the split off toward the tiny hamlet of Barriefield because I’ve never gone that way before. Seeing this small footbridge to the side of the road, I poked my head in and saw paths…
…turns out this was the back entrance to the Barriefield Rock Garden, which is a goddamn delight. Winding paths, stone and wood benches, even small altars for child sacrifice.
On the far side there’s a cairn and the proper sign for the place, as well as a disintegrating church-shaped birdhouse.
Bonus photos: both sides of the elevated walkway by the Royal Military College.
Walking down around Cataraqui Street and up River Street, I came upon an overlowing dumpster next to a clearing in the woods.
Behind it, a cleared-out homeless camp. I don’t know if this was a police/city action, or what. But it was vast. I initially stuck my head in, then took a few steps in, then kept going, and going. I must have walked 250m into a long chain of connected clearings, beat down by human traffic, before I backed out. Largely because I was being devoured by mosquitoes. I don’t know how far back it went. There was lots of expected detritus — tarp, mattresses — but also a car bumper and other stuff.
Coming back out, the dumpster again. Tents, tarps, clothes, construction supplies.
Just past the dumpster, written along the sidewalk, a poem by Mary Oliver:
(forgive my anti-steadicam lurching gait!)
Where are all these people now? It can’t have been easy back there, in the heat, the humidity — as mentioned, I was being gangstalked by a horde of mosquitoes after about 30 seconds. It surely can’t be easier wherever they are now, without whatever community was back there in the sprawl of clearings, tents, and tarps.
There are a zillion studies that show that homeless people are not all drug users or petty criminals, but that default stereotype drives a lot of resentment — even hate. Hell, I’ve had trespassers steal things out of my back yard, off my laundry line; my garage has holes in the door where somebody tried to pry it open. I’ve been furious about “them” making me feel unsafe or inconveniencing me.
This really unsettled me in its scope. It’s easy to see a tent in a park or a couple of tents by the roadside and think you’ve seen “the problem”. The depth of this, the extent, really hit home for me. This was an entire village, out of sight, now wiped out and scattered and thrown in a dumpster.
Here’s that Mary Oliver poem, for those who don’t want to watch me read it poorly:
Of the Empire
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
