Knight Moves

King Of New Orleans – Better Than Ezra

First things first, here’s the Evan Longoria – Eva Longoria article thing. It’s not that funny at all, but I like wondering how much money sports writers make for writing stuff like this.

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While I was waiting for William to get off work yesterday, I stood in front of Eaton Centre for about an hour and watched this chalk artist do his thing. His name is Dave Johnston or, as he humbly calls himself, the Chalkmaster. He was drawing the cover of Kingdom Come #4, the image of Superman standing in red smoke. It’s on his website if you’ve never seen it. Bear with me for a minute if you’re someone with a lot of chalk art experience. I was blown away by his technique. To create the appropriate shades, he would scribble two or three colours on top of each other in seemingly random fashion. Then, he smudged the colours together and smoothed them out. He finished by blowing on the concrete, scattering stray chalk dust everywhere and voila! there was Superman’s arm! It was mind-blowing. What looked like chaos to me was already a fully formed image in this guy’s mind. What added to the effect is that this guy is such an average looking schlub. The kind of guy you’d expect to be working at a construction site or a tatoo parlor. Yet here he is, in Toronto, sharing his God-given talent with the world. Everybody stopped to take a look, most breaking out their spare change. Normally, if you passed a guy like this on the street, you wouldn’t give him a second look. But for that one afternoon, he owned the sidewalk.

I had lunch with Filgen earlier in the day. Before Thursday, I hadn’t spoken with her in person for…three years, I think? She’s working at the Toronto Rehab clinic at the University Centre. When I first heard that, the first thing that popped into my head was, obviously, drug rehab. I was worried about two things: 1) That my slight penchant for drug humour might offend her and 2) That my crack addict build would be accosted by nurses as soon as I stepped through the doors. That would be embarrassing. Luckily, it turned out to be a general rehabilitation clinic, like for stroke victims, physical injuries, that sort of thing. I wanted to surprise her so I wandered the building for a while looking for her. I took the elevator up the eleventh floor and when the door opened I was greeted by a wall of red. I thought, “I’m either having a dream right now or I’m in The Shining.” It turns out they were doing construction up there so the floor was sealed off. I sucked up my pride, called her, we met up and we went to lunch. She picked this nice Italian place right next to the clinic. It was one of those joints where the cook works his magic right in front of you. This guy had four or five frying pans lined up in front of him and was flipping and pouring and mixing and before you knew it, there was your meal. Actually, his performance was usually punctuated by a miniature flame burst, after which food would miraculously appear. This dude had skills.

We sat down and caught up on things. I remember I had a hankering to hang out with her again a little over a year ago. I was thinking about her and how she’d been there for me a lot even though we only talked on bus rides for the most part. Considering how immature (yes, even more immature) I was in high school and what a whiny girl I could be, it was incredible that she could tolerate me. I never felt that I properly expressed how grateful I was for her friendship. It wasn’t something that I brought up during this particular lunch. It wasn’t necessary, since things were going so smoothly and her life was interesting enough. She works at a place where she can help people, right? Why would we talk about anything else? Well, I did regale her with tales of my supermarket exploits, as I’m known to do, and lucky for me I was in good form. I was talking a bit fast though. That happens when I’m nervous. The lunch ended with my walking her back to work and vowing that I would attempt to drop by again next week.

After that I went to the Nike store and picked up the Carmelo Anthony 5.5s (which are so sweet that they bring a tear to my eye). Then I went to HMV, looking to buy anything that was part of a “2 For” deal. After about an hour, I ended up walking out with Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson‘s Smile. Those 2 For deals are always a lot trickier than they seem. To break in my new shoes, I wandered the streets of Toronto to kill another hour before meeting up with William. I walked all the way to the end of Bloor, then gradually made my way back to Yonge Street, moving in an L-shape pattern so as not to lose my way. It was cool, because I went through a lot of areas of town that I’d never seen before. Rich ones, poor ones, cultured ones, gay ones. I don’t know if I’ll ever visit those places again, but I’m glad I know where they are now.

Get off my car, Ying-Yang!