your fate is my toilet

house made bacon sliders two ways by 'enville' at '1000 tastes of toronto'

rating: Beneteau Oceanis 48 / 10.0

PICASSO EXHIBIT - IV

My mom shows up and we walk to the Art Gallery of Ontario. We are going to meet my dad there to see the Picasso exhibit. My dad parks in the residence parking lots of OCAD. We stand at the long line at the front entrance. I go up to the front to see if it is the right line. 

There is a big man in the front directing people all around. Everyone is entering through only one of the many doors. Only a few people are using the other seven doors. I go through one of the other seven doors and the people at the front reception stare at me and then smile. I try to smile back but I am too tired. I try to figure out why they put a big man out front to direct everyone through only one of the doors. I also wonder to myself why no one uses any of the other doors. Maybe the other seven doors cast a spell on you when you walk through them—a spell that keeps other people from ever falling in love with you. I am able to walk through these other doors without caring though because someone already cast that spell on me many years ago. I am immune to the seven magic doors of the AGO. I feel good about myself but also sad.

I go up to the line where they are selling tickets for the Picasso exhibit. I call my parents to the front. They are already married, so the doors don't do anything to them either. We buy tickets. They are discounted today, because the whole museum is free every week at this time, but the special exhibits are discounted. We walk up to the exhibit and wait in a long line to get in. I am excited. I can't wait to hear yuppie art students spew out thousand of words a second to each other and pretend to know a lot about Picasso and his art.

The exhibit is really busy and crowded. You kind of have to inch your way into a line if you want to get a good look at each of Picasso's works and read each of the abstracts next to them. Then you have to wait for the person next to you to move sideways a bit, so you can move to where they were just standing and see other details of the work that hey just saw. You are always living in someone else's past. Sometimes all you see is blank wall. That is when you cry, because the person you are standing next to has an empty past just like you.

It is a slow moving train. I am on this train. I imagine the train is on its way to Paris. I imagine when the train stops, I will get off and be in Paris and meet Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Owen Wilson and Woody Allen. Maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald will whisper to me, Oswald Chambers is right and so is Hemingway. You have to be a man. Peaceful retreat only ends in bitterness. You don't want to be bitter. It is a mistake. Sadness is an illusion. Just look at me. I am dead.

I have two and a half hours to finish the exhibit. I learn a lot about Picasso and there are so many pieces that I'm a little surprised. I actually rush through the last two halls of his work. I jump off the train because Paris is no longer a viable option. I run around in reckless abandon. I might kill seventeen thousand people because I am running around so fast. When I am finished everybody is still okay. I did not kill anyone. It is a miracle.

I look at the Picasso brochure they gave me. They have a timeline of his life in the middle. It is divided out into periods and the feature that takes up the most space is a vertical Gantt chart that shows all the major women of his life. Six in total. At the exhibit, I saw how he took each of them, and dismembered them into so many dimensions of passion and love. That's why they were his muses, they had so many beautiful dimensions. If Picasso had painted me however, it would just be a thin blue line running down the side of the canvas. It would be a tear; the canvas would be crying for me. I would be that tear that the canvas cried. I would feel like I was drowning in myself. I would eventually drown and die, but forever be immortalized in the oeuvre of Picasso. Then girls would wait for a hot Wednesday in July so that they could go to the AGO to get discounted $12.50 tickets to see me. They would stare at me and adore me and pretend to know a lot about me. But it would be too late, because I would be dead.

The exhibit closed at 8:30. I went to the washroom at the AGO and then my parents and I went to Swatow and ate chinese food. Then we went home, and I slept.