Just another Tuesday for Mephistopheles

dear journal,

this evening is when they turned the fountains on, at the new glass building by the prahmahnahd. the new glass building might have been architectured by a pretentious nineteen-year-old, and i will compare its shape to a robot teardrop.

i had to dodge people with much more caring, tonight, because i was blessed with velocity, because i was donning my bicycle, which i have not let hurt my ass since maybe february, in florida.

i used to live in florida. just a little over two months ago. this is able to be forgotten, fairly easily. i can only tell by the messed up sense of seasons that i have had, with my december and january and february and march being so much sunnier and warmer than my april and may. despite all of these things, i do not miss florida.

journal, i have not properly introduced you to my second burlington. my first burlington was in 1998, in vermont, and that will probably remain my favourite, since i was twenty, and full of hormones and intensity, and in return, my first burlington was full of glancing sunlight and starry eyes and autumnals of circumstance. oh, once upon a time i had it made.

in my second burlington, i live in a very swank fifth floor condominium, which is very expensive. i would not be able to afford my swank condominium except that my company decided that they were really putting me out, to force me to work in canada and all, and so they are paying a substantial monthly stipend for the exclusive purposes of rent.

i do not know any of my neighbors at all, just like i have not known my neighbors anywhere. except there is gary, across the hall, who introduced himself in the elevator on sunday night. i introduced myself back. we are the youngest people in the building, probably. everyone else is well over sixty, and cranky. they are under the impression that this building is intended for "senior citizens", but they are wrong.

within twenty paces of my swank building's front door are two glorious english-style pubs, an indian reaturant, a japanese restaurant, a martini bar, two bistros, another pub, a beer store, and a liquor store.

i choose my abodes well, mayhaps.

i am two blocks from lake ontario, which is the same lake that i grew up twenty miles from. for this reason, i consider lake ontario to own a sort of gravity.

i started exercising out of boredom in florida, and i have been able to continue here, and i run almost every day along the prahmahnahd, which is a lot of red bricks that follow the lakeshore, and then i continue running along asphalt and dirt, and almost all of the way to the ship channel, where barges are entering and exiting the lake from burlington bay, appearing out of or disappearing into smokestacks and rusting towers.

so i was on my bicycle for a change, and i rode halfway to oakville, on the streets, through mazes of mansions and contented suburbias, and there was so much lawncare happening, or driveway basketball.

and then i rode to the ship channel, and i sat along the side to take pictures. unfortunately, my camera just does not have appropriate zooms, for being so far away. if your visions are prolific, then you can see the burlington skyline, which in actuality is much less pathetic than the picture makes it seem.



the last picture is a portrait of one of my darlings on the traintracks, behind the parking lot, at the factory where i work. it is a newer model combustion turbine, delicately wrapped in plastic. hamilton is where they made all of the turbines that i used to work on. i don't know where this one will go. probably across a few oceans, because no one in north america is buying them lately. this is the first combustion turbine i have ever seen on the train tracks, even though it used to happen all of the time.

that is all i am going to write for now, because i am hungry.