clark walk

I just went for the most incredible walk. I walked from Prince Arthur and Clark all the way up to Arcade and Clark where it ends and curves off to the left across the highway. It was such a fucking beautiful walk. Above all, it was beautiful because of the sky. The sky, I kept thinking for some reason, was like the Gatorade flavor ice. It was grey and silvery and powerful, looking at the clouds you could believe that lightning gets formed in those dense puffs, they looked like the stuff from which the hands of gods are made.

I’m in K's house and N is in his room making funny noises, every now and then he laughs so suddenly and abruptly that it sounds like a violent hiccup. I really want to go see what he’s doing, but he had sturdy headphones on when I came in that make you feel the privacy of not being able to hear yourself. If I came in, it’d probably be a bit of a shock, maybe as if he’d been bellowing his secret amusement like the way I talk much too loudly when I blast my music in the library. He literally forgot himself, felt too loudly. What a wonderful thing, a terrible thing to interrupt

Clark is a phenomenally beautiful street, but what I remember best is just after it ended, in that awkward shape around rue Arcade. There was a fat brick of a building in front of me, just beneath the quicksilver elephant sky, and on top of it was a fat, squatting water tower. It looked like a water bug, but also something to worship. Off to the right, across the highway, were two NDP billboards featuring Jack Layton with blurry, photoshopped features. It is difficult to express how crazy and appropriate they were, as if one of those quicksilver elephants had assimilated itself into the rigid dimensions of the earth and launched a political campaign straight out of the sky, as if the transition from sky creature to Canadian party boss was a bit hazy, but that would only add to the mythos.

Later, after I met K and gave her flowers that are also called Protea, that I had carried with such clumsy delicacy on this very windy evening, like a sea captain who had to take his little girl whale hunting (unfortunate custody battle) when she should have been skipping rope and who ached with impotence when she got lashed by the waves and rigging. It is horrible to have your flowers hurled and jerked by the wind, we saw some Hasidic ritual. There were about 50 men, dressed in that black, formal garb, marching in ovals and singing. It was a beautiful sound. There are a lot of Hasidim in Kira’s neighborhood, and I always see them individually, walking purposefully somewhere or another following rhythms of life I do not know. I remembered that Shabbat was Friday night because of the bizarre number of them on the street at hours I felt didn’t befit religious observance. Seeing all of them in this parking lot, circling, was like stumbling on an exquisite ant colony after so many in isolation, and all the more like an ant colony for how symphonic and wondrous it was. Concentrated, their eccentricity was totally magical. Overlooking the marching men were half a dozen little boys standing on a fire escape staircase that descended the wall above them. Unlike the men, the staircase was lit up and the variety of the light made me want to invoke painters of whom I know nothing but their names if only to express how historical and uncommon the moment was, how worthy it was of the talent of centuries if they would deign to be alive.