your fate is my toilet

slow roasted pulled turkey in coffee bbq sauce at 'the fuel house'

rating: John Deere 60 / 10.0

SUMMERLICIOUS WEEKEND 1

I'm a little unsure why I'm so embarrassed to reveal my life as one that is marked by any sort of consumeristic habit--as if being an anti-consummerist is being selfless or something. Reading passages in a Jane Austen book about two characters talking about hats, and thinking to myself how stupid that was. "I saw the prettiest hat you can imagine, in a shop window in Milsom Street just now — very like yours, only with coquelicot ribbons instead of green." Looking at lives of leisure flaunted around in classic literature and being disgusted. I'm mainly just disgusted with my own life. I read that and think, that's me. I really look that stupid. There are people who can't afford to eat their next meal. How can I so casually live a life marked by any sort of consumeristic intentions while this hangs in the back of my mind? Consequently, I live with this assumption that anything that involves money is stupid and pointless and a waste of time--and worst of all, it is all that is wrong with the world.

How can money come along one day and think it has the authority to subjectively assert value to things and experiences--but worst of all people's lives. It has no right because Qoheleth already claimed everything under the sun was meaningless; all that assertion means to me anymore is that everything material has no purpose and hence no value. All money does is try to subvert that. 

The material, to me, only seems to exist because God wants us to experience the world, in part, through physicality. But why does physicality even exist; all anyone intellectual ever alludes to is how the spiritual is a much more noble focus than the physical. Did God create physicality as just a means of distracting us from the spiritual? Is the spiritual simply too overwhelming, and the physical only a means of escape--like some drug that allows us to live in bliss whenever we can't bring ourselves to deal with the spiritual? Or is there more value to the physical than that? After all, you only have to observe the way Jesus heals the blind to notice that there is something very significant about the physical actually. Maybe the physical is what connects us. Does money have a real and appropriate place in the physical? Why does money always make me feel so embarrassed? Why do I think of anything associated with money as shallow, like I am simply being sold something, and hence am stupid because of it? Why do I feel like people just want my money, or like money makes me less of a person? Why does it make me feel less important than itself? What value does money really hold?

I really don't know. All I know is everything I'm about to talk about right now has been tainted with this green stain that embarrasses me. Why is money the colour of envy and sickness? This is a really stupid thing to say, but I envy those that have no money. No that is an ignorant thing to say and stupid and probably dishonest. I think it comes from an honest place, but it is probably dishonest. I don't really wish that. Maybe I only wish I can continue to say that for the rest of my life.

I once watched this lecture on Ginsberg and Kerouac and beat culture. The professor claimed that the beat generation was obsessed with this idea of embarrassment, and that all embarrassment came from some form of excess. I'm ashamed excess and money have such a direct relation attached to my psyche, while an incomprehensible number of people are starving to death somewhere else in the world. That is why I'm embarrassed to admit that I envy people who are starving--because that is an excessively stupid thing to say.

About my family -- it consists of two parents, mostly my mom, who are avid lovers of a food 'festival' in Toronto called Summerlicious, where pretentious and over-priced restaurants offer a prix fixe menu for a certain duration of time. I went to the Boiler House yesterday and REDS Bistro today. Both meals were good but overpriced--overpriced despite the fact Summerlicious is an event that is 'apparently' supposed to make 'nice' food more affordable for everyone. 

The Boiler House is my image of an over-polished Williamsburg warehouse loft where affluent people gather together every evening to convince themselves that they are cool and have good taste. The menu prices reveal that they are really just try-hards, but who is to say effortlessness is more noble. Effortlessness is probably, in reality, either just lazy or a greater intensity of a try-hard, maybe even both. The Boiler House is that eatery in the Distillery District with giant flowerpots in the front that light up. It probably has one of the most appealing eating environments I have ever experienced. It has this stripped down and bare feeling, but also the feeling that each piece of furniture inside it costs thousands of dollars more than any piece of furniture you will ever personally own, even though they are just pieces of reclaimed wood and stuff. That feeling is a problem though.

The food at the Boiler House was okay. The mussels are a good choice for the appetizer, the soup is way too sweet so I'd recommend skipping that. The sirloin strip was good and the dessert was okay. I think the ambience is what really made the experience worthwhile. They had this band up on their loft thing playing soul covers from Ray Charles to Gnarls Barkley to Ottis Redding. The overall experience is fun, but really does not call for all that money in my opinion.

I also went to REDS Bistro. The space looks kind of stupid in my opinion, just another space where business executives like to gather after work to show each other how well they can appreciate cheap wine. They pair like everything on their menu with three ounces of wine. We went with the wine pairing prix fixe menu. Despite how the restaurant gives off the feeling that it is situated within the lobby of some expensive hotel--that being kind of a bad thing-- the food was some of the best I've personally had in Toronto. I store restaurants under certain categories in my head. REDS Bistro is the kind of restaurant I file under pretentious fine-dining restaurants business executives frequent. Out of all the restaurants in that category, the experience in my opinion ranks itself a comfortable second after Nota Bene. I haven't been to too many of these restaurants however as I mostly try to avoid them whenever I have the chance. So my opinion shouldn't matter all that much. I just feel like these restaurant types cost a lot of unmerited dollars and are pretty tasteless while at it.

All this money talk reminds me of this passage in The Sun Also Rises. I read that book a few weeks ago. The protagonist Jake, which I always just imagine as Hemingway himself, said near the end of the book, "...I overtipped him. That made him happy. It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend by any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money."

I have no appropriate segue to follow this quote, other than some vague and troubling sense that money somehow does buy happiness--a terrible form of happiness. This store called Home Sense is basically my new favourite store. I also realized Dollarama is one of my favourite stores as well. I used to hate Home Sense as a kid, and I was sure then that it was the most boring store in the world. I'm pretty sure it's under the Winner's TJX umbrella, but instead of clothes, it sells pretentious lifestyle products at unpretentious prices in a far from pretentious environment. For example my dad, and also me I guess, love these Yummy Earth organic candies. We found a bag of assorted Yummy Earth organic candies at Home Sense. A bag half that size with only one flavour, which you can find at Whole Foods, costs about the same as this big bag we found at Home Sense.

My favourite things they sell at Home Sense are kitchen products and little boutique food and beverage items. I found Dry Rhubarb Soda there. I bought it basically because Jasmine Zoo drinks Dry Soda, even though she claims it to be an 'yuppie' drink. I think I do that a lot. Do things just because people I look up to do them. There seems to be something thrilling about being irrational. I'm like Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises. "I was sorry for him, but it was not a thing you could do anything about, because right away you ran up against the two stubbornesses: South America could fix it and he did not like Paris. He got the first out of a book, and I suppose the second came out of a book too." I am Robert Cohn. I want to go to "The Purple Land" because Richard Lamb went there. South America is where I belong.

I hate that I'm like Robert Cohn though because everyone in the book ends up hating him. I sometimes feel like everyone I know hates me in the same way. I think back to moments in my life, and when I read, 

"It's no life being a steer," Robert Cohn said.

"Don't you think so?" Mike said. "I would have thought you'd loved being a steer, Robert."

"What do you mean, Mike?"

"They lead such a quiet life. They never say anything and they're always hanging about so."

I cannot help but confirm I am just like Robert Cohn and everyone most definitely hates me. The only differences between Cohn and I, is that he is a fighter, more specifically a boxer, and he is persistent in an annoying sort of way. I, on the other hand, am a defeatist and give up and feel like everything is pointless, and though I'm not persistent, I have the inescapable feeling I am annoying to people. I just finished reading Tao Lin's "Eeeee Eee Eeee" and found this in it. "'Japan is better than New York City,' he said. He didn't want to elaborate. It would take forever to elaborate. Someone would eventually realize that the conversation was just a matter of semantics. Was there even a point to talking?" I feel like that all the time around people. Is that why Robert Cohn just sat around with nothing to say all the time, even when he was unwanted somewhere? Pretty sure that's why I do.