[1] On Bloor Street, after a week of being away from the wash of humanity - this discounting all the many people who asked him where things - from grape leaves to anti-aging face creams - were in retail store a few football fields large, in which he labored to earn his daily bread - he encounters a motley group of women, waving banners with assorted slogans ranging from stopping Iraq wars to asking for increases in government support for childcare to expressing solidarity with all mothers of of the world. In other words, to him, it appears to be a protest rally with no definite purpose, even if the lead sign says "International Women's Day - 2007"

Given that the temperature edged up above freezing after weeks, and that many of the women in the rally were beating drums and shaking cymbals, he stands at the street light watching this tiny procession under a citified prairie sky pass, scanning the faces of those mostly older women, and recalling a line by Walt Whitman:

"A woman waits for me —she contains all, nothing is lacking"

[2] Reading a novel set in the Canadian prairie during the 1930, in which an older woman recalls her days as young school teacher, his memory takes him back to certain scenes of his childhood: sitting in a narrow gully of earth gouged by the monsoon, scribbling lines and maps of countries (Italy's boot, the French pentagon etc - things he had just read about, and escaped to through his geography textbook) in the sand washed up by the rains' run off, the voice and the presence of his favorite, and perhaps the best, teacher of all time, in second grade teaching him how to write cursive, and then her gift of a picture book at the end of the school year for his academic performance as she left the city of his childhood and his life forever. The picture book which was about Pinocchio's travails and triumphs. Did the teacher foresee that some 20 years later that this little attentive and adoring student of hers' would undertake an experiment to re-invent himself by turning his life into the artificial and wooden mode of a puppet acting out fantasies of a corporate life.

[3] In a bookstore - given his inability to maneuver out of solitude into a life of social acts, this is how he spends his weekends, attempting to dissolve the tiredness of the work-week in the alchemy of the word, - he chances upon a book intriguingly titled "Picturing and Poeting", and thus falls into the completely magical world of Alan Fletcher, and his brilliant wordplay-diagrams composed using discarded cardboard boxes, labels, random signs etc and the anagrams contained in those words - Evian, the best selling water brand, for example, contains the word "naive" in it.

A short excerpt from a Fletcher's article titled "Gbobledigook Rlues OK":

"Orus is the age of sbusttiutes: isntead of lagnuage we hvae jragon; insetad of gneuine iedas, Birght Idaes.

He copies this in his notebook for this is also snapshot of his life; had he not recently traded in a life for a "lifestyle"?

[4] On the street, eyes bleary from an afternoon spent reading poetry and non fiction at a bookstore, he notices a woman's - abmer eyes, women in Toronto have the most brilliant range of eye colorations - gaze upon his unkempt face with its weekend bristles, thinning hair in the need of a haircut and in returns bestows her his "life is suffering" grin.

Knowing Toronto a bit, is that the giant megastore I think it is, and do you actually work there? ^__^