BUFFALO

Buffalo

Andrew's Room

Back in the US

Back in the US

Back in the US(A)SR

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA II

Things have improved.

My new view on Bay Street. 

But only she is allowed to take pictures of she.

TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA

Canadian Customs was incredibly reluctant to allow me into the country. First agent was skeptical, second agent was frustrated and annoyed, third agent googled her and gave me dating advice. She was the small girl by the large column. I had been sweating for hours and hours, mostly in customs.
I tried to sleep on the plane. I’d been up drinking until 4am when I booked my hotel. If I hadn’t booked a hotel, they probably wouldn’t have let me in. Sleeping on the plane was nearly impossible though. The hotel shuttle took us to some strange hotel somewhere in the middle of airport semi-industrial nowhere, near the racetrack. Pretty much everywhere I’ve stayed has had a look like this:

We walked through the little shopping complex, a Tim Hortons (Canadian Starbucks), a fertility clinic, and 10 empty storefronts. That kind of place, always around that. The next hotel was the dirtiest and strangest I’ve ever seen. The enormous room with the stained carpets and the huge windows with tacky curtains with smelly hallways and back stairs that said ‘Fuck You’. I bought a knife and ate the spiciest potato chips ever, good job Canada. This hotel is far North basically in her little suburbtown, it’s much nicer than the other places and is comfortable; been watching too much food network though. Trying to get an airbnb place to stay downtown, but it’s all runaround so far as I can tell. She laughs very loudly.
Other good things:

It’s been raining more than snowing, and has only been incredibly cold on the days we ended up walking around.
The subway is almost silent.
The accents are completely entertaining (also Canadians LOVE cussing in fucking public).
I found a Mexican food restaurant that is on par with anything in the Southwest.
I haven’t felt sick too often.
        

Some not so great things:
Corona is 45CAD for a 24pack, and 5ths of american whiskey are about 40 dollars as well.
       
I have to leave by the 21st or I can be arrested and deported; customs gave me exactly 30 days, which is shitty and made me spend so much more money.
It does get Flagstaff cold but with more moisture in the air.

Running out of money and feel like a true consumer.




Toronto is pretty cool. The CN tower is out there somewhere

and it belongs to the dead.

Canada

In The Hotel

It said "Fuck You".

In The Wooded Places

and maybe

if lucky and let to breathe

they would have wounded each other

as we have

while we let our hearts pump blood

into each other’s open chests

as we have

feel the fear of death

as we now know what it means to

live

You will bleed on me

when I break into your secret

but we will have prepared

and trained for it

as soldiers do we will know that blood is the sacrifice for even the hope of everything good

kept in the open and never to rot

and never be thrown away

Jessicat Blackwood

Let me inside you. I will walk the hallways of your heart, I will sweep and mop the floors. I will polish and dust all the little trinkets made of memories and emotions. I will make the beds and do the laundry. And finally I will open that door that holds only cold and silence and blackness and I will walk in that space and fill it with candles and torches and singing and laughter and the darkness will be purged, and then finally you will emerge shy and timid and I will hold you close.

NO MORE KETCHUP, EVER

NO MORE KETCHUP, EVER

 At 3:31 PM PST Daylight Saving Time on June 30th 2012 all ketchup on the planet Earth
vanished;
as if some omnipotent cocktail napkin meticulously wiped down every plate,
dabbed every lip; as if some magic faucet paired with the eternal sponge
from beyond the stars emptied and flushed every bottle;
every vat and pot all scrubbed immaculate by this supernatural and sentient
pressure-washer;
all lazily made barbecue sauces turned into
vinegary mixtures of onions and spices in their bottles;
like some red-haired angel drank the ketchup from the earth and with each drop herself
became more a demon.

The H. J. Heinz corporation (and other smaller ketchup manufacturers) immediately began scrambling to restore production, though it’s unclear if it would have made any difference; H.J. Heinz’s CFO probably knew that and that’s why he fell to the Pittsburgh pavement. 
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, and many stock markets across the globe immediately fell steeply. 
National leaders urged their nations’ citizens to be calm; some news stations in an attempt at levity dubbed the situation ‘Ketchupgate’. Religious leaders, however, almost unanimously preached the event to be a sign of the end of end of days; maybe they were right. Continuous prayer vigils by every major religion. Nearly total global panic. Riots in Athens, Toronto, Los Angeles, London, Helsinki. The whole population of the planet feeling the fear and dread, the anticipation, everyone just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Extreme and nearly immediate rise in crime, followed by an even steeper rise in violence, and suicide, as the human race tried to cope with a phenomenon of such magnitude, of such insignificance so important. Perhaps if the recipe hadn’t changed humanity would have had an easier recovery.

The scientific community at a complete loss for any feasible or actually listenable theory began looking to the fringes of realistic thought.
“Possibly,” said some, “this is an example of some as yet unseen phenomena related to quantum mechanics; in this case all the particles that make (made) up ketchup were immediately moved to another place in the universe.” However, tomatoes, tomato concentrate, vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, salt, ‘spice’, onion powder, and ‘natural flavoring’ (a.k.a.: the ingredients that Heinz uses to make “ketchup") were not affected except when combined in the final form of ketchup.

The following month showed an even higher trend toward crime, violence, suicide, alcohol consumption, drug abuse, and all forms of 'destructive behavior’ as the world tried to cope with the true horror:
The recipe change.
When the ingredients, no matter the minor variations between recipes, were combined in their normal fashion what was produced was not ketchup but something seemingly more like crude oil. This flavorless black liquid, which was quickly said to be lightly toxic, affecting the central nervous system and brain with seizures, then paralysis and coma in extreme doses was immediately subjected to every type of testing available, with no real result, even it’s chemical makeup could not be explained exactly. It seemed this black liquid was not of this planet. It had no apparent uses, was as mysterious as it was black, with no possible explanation for it or how the same ingredients used in so many things, when combined to form ketchup created this strange and somewhat harmful, though essentially inert, liquid. This substance and it’s formation (which can be made at home though is not advised) is still perhaps the hottest topic among men of science, even with all that has happened since. 
The favored explanation among lay people (especially front of house restaurant staff) is that a server in Boston, Massachusetts wished ketchup out of existence with her pure hate for the ‘evil red substance’. Maybe she exists, or maybe it was the collective will of all restaurant workers that removed ketchup from the universe. The completely baffling nature of the anomaly are rivaled only by what has occurred after, though those events seem somewhat predictable after the absurdity of all ketchup disappearing forever...