your fate is my toilet

baja fish tacos at 'grand electric'

rating: 1999 Toyota Sienna / 10.0

NXNE Part One

I always felt swallowed by some sort of disarray when I was at his place. I imagined every time someone on this planet mentioned the word 'happening', they were in some vague way referring to this very place. The strange thing was that on this particular day, everything in this place seemed to be moving in slow motion, or was bound by some form of heavy lethargy. There was a blanket of lonesome melancholia that hung above everything inside here, and it was both unsettling and relieving at the same time, but I wasn't sure how.

This place was where my friend lived for a third of each school year, and it was the same place where the rest of his family lived. He was the first one who had introduced me to the secret language of genteelness and social nuance. That is why I frequently felt that he did things for me out of obligation. We had settled on the fact that we were friends one day, and I thought that he felt obligated to do things for me based on that distinction our acquaintance had come to carry or something like that.

I sensed he was not fully taken by the various aspects of culture that interested me, but he took some care to them simply because we were friends. He was also someone who was deeply critical of my interests and my work. But I have a growing suspicion everyone on this earth is just as critical as he was, if not more. The only difference was that he was not afraid to be brutally honest with people. That was something I greatly admired about him. He presented truth with this stark, unfaltering realism. I was sure 'genuine' wasn't exactly the right word to describe him. He was simply just a real person, in the very truest sense of the word 'real.'

Today was one of those days, however, I felt this tension of obligation in the air, and hence the irony of his brutalist approach to honesty. We had made it an occasion a few weeks ago to go with a group of people downtown to watch some free shows at Yonge & Dundas Square. Psych-legends The Flaming Lips were headlining, and 'of Montreal', 'Portugal. The Man', 'Parlovr', and 'Oberhofer' were going to be playing along side.

By the morning of our 'occasion to be' every other person had become busy with something they had to do, and he was the only one left who was willing to come with me. I reached his house slightly later than I had promised, and Parlovr was to be playing in an hour. I thought we could make their performance if we set off right away, but I never told him because I felt obligated to follow him into his house when he invited me in. We longboarded for a bit; I mostly filmed him longboarding. He had developed the ability to pull off this rather impressive sliding maneuver since I had last seen him skate. The first time he showed me the maneuver, however, he flew off his board and rolled a few times, and ended up bruising his leg rather badly. He walked around with a limp for the rest of the day.

We went back to his house, traded a little bit of conversation in his backyard, and later ate some food his mother had just prepared called 'saag' with some basmati rice. It was divine as food could be. After we finished, we left for the Kipling subway station in my dad's old 1999 Sienna. The parking there was free on weekends. We bought some subway tokens, and headed off towards downtown.

We decided to get off the subway early and take a streetcar to his place in Kensington. It was mid afternoon, and Kensington had just the right amount of people in it and just the right amount of sunlight as well. Music tumbled out of a few bars, and phone conversations about the Yonge & Dundas shows lingered a little in the air. We went up to his place for a while and chatted with his housemate as he sipped on some beer. His leg for some reason was hurting more and more as time passed. He finished his beer and we took to the sun-spotted streets, strolling down Dundas towards the Y&D stage, stopping a few times so he could rest his leg.