sometimes i forget that i live in a real place. there's nothing specific that deterritorializes me, it's a series: growing up on the internet, between here and America, the west and the east, white and non-white, old buildings and new, what the north should be and what the south is, the definition of my part of the world for me gets lost between all of that. it's probably the oldest 'Canadian' problem there is: where am I? globalization has only intensified that feeling. before i get into this, i should preface it by saying this is not some nationalistic crisis of faith. i have never had any sense of patriotism, especially not for a fucking regime. i have always rejected that shit wholesale. so, this is not about jingoistic longing to be whole, this is about ontology. as i said before, where am i?
in quarantine, i tried to answer that by reading a lot about what Canada is as a way to orient myself. it's not like it didn't help little, but given that books are just representations, this still added to the abstraction of the place. what helps is actually being outside here, moving around, watching others and them watching me, then talking to them, being around their buildings, our buildings, under our sky.
the best way to do that - or the best way that i have done that, at least - is by bicycle. it's more confrontational than a car, as you're not sealed by anything but a frame and your seat, but it's quicker than walking. it's also perfect for western Canadian terrain, as the cities here are some of the most park-laden in North America. on top of all that, it's the pandemic, so everyone is out in the parks. you don't have to look very hard to find something to see.
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i have ridden a bike since i was a toddler. i'm pretty good at it. my youngness outpaces my out-of-shape-ness, so i can go pretty far in not that long. i have gone very far on the one i have now. the city and town i spend the most time in are both not very big, but i have spent many days wearing out their streets back and forth. nowadays, i bike in the evening, dedicating an area of wherever i am to be conquered by my rubber. i would not consider myself 'street smart' though, despite all the ground i cover. i have never had a reason to be. im a rich country boy, what the fuck is a 'street'?? yuh mean like uhhhh a backroad?? is there something out daaaare? yee haw! well illll be, dang gommit, Shucks! which one yous tawking awbout?? ill brang my horsie Rawhide out to give er a look! lets moooooove em out! *whip sound* but i don't think i'm a dumbass. i know not to get involved, i know not to draw attention to myself, i think i have some common sense. but i wonder when my curiosity - which very often outpaces that - will bite me in the ass (this happens to actually not be a story about that).
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today i was biking around the park behind my college. it's by a highway and leads into a ranch by the Sports Hall of Fame, between which is a forest and the river, where i spent most of my time in. it's not that big in the college park, but on the other side of the river beside the larger city parks, the forest bulks up as you go further into the prairies. most people hang around within the parks, of course, but i usually get bored of the bike paths, so i wander around.
i haven't been to the college park until today, so most of my time in this area has been spent on the other side of the river from it. earlier in the year, i made a few treks outside the city parks, always under the highway bridge, and into the prairies. there wasn't that much out there to see. i was told there'd be a homeless camp up the way i usually went (which i never intend to go into, more on that later), but all i found were abandoned grocery carts and backpacks, a few interesting tags along the bridge, and more ranches. i always spend a while staring at the abandoned stuff. i never rummage through it, i have no idea what's in there and someone is probably waiting for it. i just look around at it, reminding myself that this was/is somebody's belongings, and somebody will be here for a reason. like in every city, the homeless are literally an underclass, thought of as drug-crazed savage beasts who have bled the downtown dry and are now at the gates of the suburbs, decency's last stronghold. of course, i think that's dehumanizing bullshit, so i try to remember they're people. ghosts to me, maybe, but still people with pasts and futures. the middle class of this city likes to forget that and think of this as a disease that demands indiscriminate antibodies to remove these invaders, but it annoys the shit out of me that they forget to ask is that if this is a disease, where it did it come from? how does it happen? they seem very certain of the next question though, which is what do we do about it? there answer to it is obviously just get rid of them, wait it out. push them out until they die off. if they're right in saying this is a disease, is it a reasonable response to just ignore it? that's what their answer amounts to, getting the problem until it's out of their sight. do you just ignore a disease that seems to be killing you?
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the forest in the college park, on the contrary, isn't very big so far. it's a thin slice alongside the ranch next to it, littered with a few ponds and BMX terrain. there's probably more to it, but i didn't get the chance to go very far in today. i did get to scope out the parameters, however. the first thing i did was hit the steep hills and make a beeline for the ranch once i stumbled upon a dirt road, which lead me to a hill overlooking the highway and the prairies. the sky today was my second favourite kind, next to it being brilliant in deep summer: on the darker side, mostly clear with a few big clouds which reflect the setting sun. i feel hopeful whenever it looks like that, that the sky is huge, the world is more so, and there will many tomorrows to see it all. which is ironic, given that i found one of the many fabled camps up there.
first, i found a bike trailer that was left right outside of the forest before the hill falls again into the highway. i knew what this meant but went to check it out anyway. conventional wisdom is that they're unsafe to be around, which in spite of my anal self-righteousness, isn't a totally illogical thing to assume. it's not like homelessness in itself is exactly all that safe to begin with at the very least, among other things (it's called the opioid crisis for a reason). plus, i don't know these fucking people. but the primary way i look at it is that if they're hidden, they probably don't want to be found. a general rule of thumb is to not make what is not my business my own, as i said earlier. i still went to check it out, though. i barely saw any of it, just a heap of garbage and sleeping bags and tents, which i imagine all as industrial moss. i assume there had to be people there at the time, but i only peaked down the hill it was on for less than a second and raced right back to the park, trying not to get noticed. if i have ADHD, this would probably be the time where i'd have the most attention.
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by my college, there's this huge arena that was used for a Winter Games a few years ago. they built an equally large parking lot for it, which has been mostly desolate since the Games ended and the pandemic started. so i farted around there for a few minutes before i made the trek back to my car, further into the city. i thought i saw a cop in the parking lot. my catastrophic thinking made me wonder if they'd ever ask me about the camp if i actually saw a cop who also happened to be interested in it. in the moment, i was fully prepared to lie if they did, but obviously, i would never be asked about it. there weren't even cops there. it doesn't really matter that i was thinking about that outside of that these few seconds of barely interesting things happening to me oriented me in the world again. i have started asking questions about it again, questions i'll have to look for in the real world, whose answers have consequences in it. questions like what is the history of this city? how did homelessness become a problem here? who is at fault is there is anyone? how and why did the opioid epidemic come up all the way here? what are the economics of it? i don't know where I'm going to find out any of this, but what important is that these thoughts feel weighted, and so do i again. this is the real world that is happening, and it means something whether you think about it or not. it was never not here, i just had to look for it.
(this is a very high school essay-y and a little lame, and not much of a story, but i just wanted to experiment writing a long-form uninterrupted thought instead of a series of them. the goal wasn't for it to be all that good, i just wanted to practice doing it.)
