Yesterday I walked down a couple of miles on Bloor St West*, to situate myself a little more throughly in this city. The main objective was to find a masala dosa and filter coffee place, which I failed to fulfill.

What is fascinating, however, is to see how the nature of commerce changes all along this street; close to the hotel I am at, it is all high end designer boutiques. Half a mile down west, most of the stores then, seem to have tailored themselves to the students of University of Toronto; numerous cheap bookstores (I bought Richard Wilbur's "Collected Poems", in hardcover, for one third the retail price, along with Czeslaw Milosz's "Second Space"), and cheap eats. Further down, one runs into Little Korea with its Korean churches, karaoke bars, and barbecue places (I prefer not to eat meat for a first meal, and hence didn't bestow my patronage on places that looked yummy and cheap - I am tired of eating those $40 hotel entrées, which get served when I order room service).

Later in the evening, as a break from reading in a local Tim Horton's (Canadians unlike the obesity-plagued American seem to believe in smaller portions; the medium coffee I ordered was smaller than the small coffee one gets at a Starbucks), I took the Subway (a poor East-West & North-South cross-like grid, very similar to Atlanta's) down to King's Street (yes, Canada was - still is? - a dominion of the Great British Empire) to go to a photography exhibit, and meet some locals.

It is there I realized that I can't make conversation without threading in references to books that I have read, or am reading. What I keep forgetting is that contemporary society's reading habits, give or take a few hidden bastions to be found in every city, span no further than gazing at this web of manufactured cultures that envelopes up. Also that to be considered hip is to have a wide education in the music scene; if you know your bands, conversation is easy, meaning and emotion can be discussed in the armature of a fleetingly popular song.

So for most part, I stood around, a total stranger with my tongue back to its tricks of slurring and tripping over words, making doggish noises that pass for English, but noises which many of the others' ears could not decipher. With the few folks I did manage to have conversations, I discussed cities, occupational hazards to turning a serious hobby into a paying job, and Italian emigrations after World War-2. Walking back, I realized that it was on the very same stretch of King's Street that I had written this poem, on a similar night, couple of years ago.

...

Today I will walk down Bloor East, across the Bloor Street Viaduct, so memorably described in Michael Ondaatje's novel "In the Skin of A Lion", over to Don River Valley, to go to Greek Town for dinner.