Skip to main content

Smoke You!

On my walk to work today, two women, in front of different office buildings on Yonge st, nonchalantly flicked their still-lit cigarettes towards the street, and both almost hit me.  If only they knew how disgusting and filthy they were- oh wait, they do, because I told them both :)

You may look cool, Bette, but if you throw that thing at me, I'll kick your ass.
Supposedly only 21% of Ontarians smoke, but let me tell you, I walk past or behind most of them each weekday.  I'm constantly varying my speed to try to stay out of the clouds of smoke, especially if I've just washed my hair.  Sort of ruins my day to go from smelling like high end shampoo to an ashtray less than an hour out of the shower, you know?

I walk behind them, but I also live below them.  The first thing I do each spring, before planting new herbs and flowers, is dig out the cigarette butts my upstairs neighbours have thoughtfully tossed over their balconies and into my plants.  And I haven't gotten the worst of it; a few years ago, some dick set fire to his downstairs neighbour's patio furniture, and caused major damage to the side of the building.  This has caused me to rethink my long-standing habit of leaving my discarded, dried up Christmas tree on my balcony until April, but that's another story.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing at Night

This is how I do it.  My brain turns on at the weirdest times. I first saw a pen like this when I was in my 20s, in a TV report about a movie reviewer, who used one to take his notes in a dark theatre.  I searched everywhere, and finally found one.  Before I had it, I tried a few other tactics to help me save for posterity the incredibly deep, meaningful thoughts I felt I was having at night. I tried just writing with a pencil in the dark, but that didn't work out too well.  My writing, on a good day, looks like someone suffering from the DTs sprayed Silly String  on paper during an earthquake.  What I mean to say is, it's really, really bad.  So, the pencil thing was a bust. Next, I bought a mini-tape recorder, but my middle-of-the-night mumbling was almost worse than my writing.  It seemed like my Shakespearean musings would be lost to humanity.  How tragic! The pen. Then, I got my flashlight pen.  It was a revela...
1 comment
Read more

New Old York

"You'll love Toronto, Liz.  It's just like New York, but without all the stuff!" -  Gavin Volure, as played by Steve Martin, 30 Rock I live in Toronto, but I  love  New York.  I've loved it from my first visit as a teenager , when I stayed at the Edison, and Times Square was still seedy and gross, to my most recent visit a few months ago, when I stayed at the Sofitel, and ate at Balthazar and Babbo again.  I learned to love New York from movies as old as The Thin Man, to The Godfather and When Harry Met Sally. The joke is how many New York movies were actually shot in Toronto. Spring St on Adelaide St Yes, this has been going on for decades.  Whenever our dollar is in the toilet, the American productions ramp up.  Legend has it that set designers used to have to make fake garbage to litter our streets, since Toronto was so tidy that it didn't look authentic.  Thanks to Rudy and Bloomberg cleaning up New York, and Rob Ford turning To...
Post a Comment
Read more

Again with the Rain

Summer storm season is here.  By that, I mean it's wherever I am.  Apparently, I brought it back from New York  with me.  Last Wednesday, I left the office with my  Wayfarers  on, and walked home in bright sunshine,  thinking to myself, what are those morons on the Weather Network talking about? It's not going to rain!   10 minutes after I got in the door (for once, I was lucky), sheets of water started falling from the sky. Seriously. An hour later, the lobby ceiling in the other condo in this generally lovely complex, which my friends call  Cabrini Green , because the elevators break so often, partially collapsed when a storm drain broke.  This left both buildings with no hot water Thursday morning. Great.  I discovered this at 7 AM by sticking my leg under running water I assumed to be hot.  The shriek I let out woke me, and probably a few neighbours, up. There was no way I was taking an ice cold shower, so I j...
Post a Comment
Read more