sunday night was spent burning electronic copies of the court material and generally getting everything in order. i was planning on printing on monday morning at the library, with the hopes of taking advantage of the cheaper rates there, and i was in the end able to print my 300 pages for $0.07/each, cutting printing costs down rather dramatically. it was when i was walking into the library in a dirty sweat that i first started to realize i was actually sick.
it was actually relatively warm on monday night, though, so it was a pleasant walk back and forth from the library, which i'd never been in before. i just haven't really had any reason to go to this campus. but, now that i know that the printing costs are so much less...
i forced myself to sleep for a few hours in the evening when i got back, so that i'd be ready to go in the morning. it didn't really "take", but i nonetheless ended up at the bus stop for a little before 8:00 with my mass of papers, a laptop and some more appropriate winter clothing. i napped for a bit from guelph to mississaugua, but was otherwise alert for the whole way, and i'm starting to get a better concept of the distance, and the landmarks that occur in between, along with their ordering. i'm used to coming into toronto from the other direction, remember, having grown up in ottawa. the bus was a little bit late, but it wasn't bad; i was there around 1:30, which gave me plenty of time to get to the courthouse to file.
were there some problems? well, i seem to have missed s. 4 of the rules of civil procedure, altogether. s. 4 has rules for presentation - things like book binding, regulations on font size, etc. i just didn't even see it, or see it mentioned anywhere by anybody. so, they wouldn't initially take it - i had to argue with them to accept it via a deficiency, and if the court decides to reject it on the basis that the font is too small, given that i gave them a digital copy, i'm willing to appeal that to the next court up, on principle. i saved hundreds of pieces of paper by filing it the way that i did. i'll defend that decision to whatever court i need to; bring it on.
besides these trivialities regarding the presentation of the documents, it was otherwise fine, and they did otherwise accept the perfection of the case. i will now need to wait for the oiprd to file their own documents in the same court, and send me the links. they've given me a time frame of before the 20th. i'm expecting them to miss this, but i won't start getting pissy until after christmas...
and, then it was something like 15:30 and i had some time to blow before the bus came to take me home at 1:00 in the morning. i was hungry, and it was bmt day at subway, so i had to stop to eat. i then went directly across the street to get some pot, and came out with two grams of 10% thc for under $20.
the bottom line is that i don't smoke a lot of drugs. so, if i found the brand that i bought last month, which was closer to 20% concentration, to be a little heavy, then the next step is to try something a little lighter. i found that the 10% was more along the lines of what i wanted, even if it was itself a tad light. so, we're getting closer. you don't have these discussions with friends or acquaintances, you just use adjectives like "good" and "potent", so quantifying it is going to take some experimenting, and that's alright. like, i didn't walk into the beer store at 18 and know what i could and couldn't handle, it took me some time to figure it out. likewise, i could be at this for a few tries before i get it right.
but, the 10% was about right for the night, even if it faded on me a little too fast when i got home. so, next time, i might try something closer to 15%. i'll have this down to a regular order, eventually.
i got out of the store and basically walked into the first bar to roll, when i inquired about the price of beer on the way out. $5 for a tall can? well, that's not too bad, and it seemed like there was cheap food there, too. i've never spent much time in toronto, and it will take me some time to get to know it. i had a few hours to blow, as it was, so i sat and had a few tall cans, before moving on to the show.
the initial thought process behind going down on this night was that the tickets were cheapest and i'd get to see the joy formidable. but, the joy formidable turned out to be a pricey show. i know they're coming in from wales and everything, but they just priced themselves out of my range. you were looking at $40 after services fees; i'll rarely pay more than $20, and decided against it on this night.
instead, i hit a local experimental jazz show at a kind of community centre on burnswick nearly all the way to bloor. i actually hope i don't end up spending too much time in toronto, but this is maybe the kind of thing i'd be more likely to sneak into, on a random night. these were local musicians, playing their own work in an old bar, for what seemed like a mostly local if largely bourgeois crowd. it was pay what you can, and the beer was reasonably priced. let's hope i can get to more spots like this...
the main act called itself tyrannick love this week but was mostly improv and played two sets. it was anchored by the juxtaposition of a busier sax player with a more ambient, experimental guitarist that had a lot of floor pedals and wasn't afraid to use them. maybe it's because i was in toronto, but it had a distinct dmst feel at points that was pretty real; overall, though, the major aesthetic was a swirling, effects driven ambience that sidelined both the sax and drum players for long periods, as the bassist went motorik over some feedback and loops. it was an enjoyable cave for the space i was in, absolutely.
i can't find a video of this exact lineup, but the guitarist & sax player appear to have a lot of material online under a lot of different names, one of them being patrick reilly's wire circus, which is not entirely dissimilar to what i saw:
the third set was purposefully experimental to the point of being kind of a spectacle, and i consequently found myself more trying to figure out the physics behind what he was doing than actually listening to it. he seems to have essentially created a number of homemade speakers and more or less broken them in real time, although he surprised me in some of his answers when i questioned him - claiming, for example, that his chattering magnets were being driven by instructions on an sd card, like a chiptune piece, rather than being driven by the radio, which i thought was obvious. i actually initially thought he was setting up a theremin.
it was a sound installation, a demonstration, an experiment, rather than the presentation of any kind of actual composition. i'd consequently rather direct you directly to his page, which is here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/CMigone/videos
but, here is a video of something to separate the section:
there was a fourth set by what i believe to have been a local interpretive dance artist named "alicia grant", but details are scant, and the name appears to be in use by several (diverse) artists in the general area. i was actually rolling a joint through much of her set. so, she spent some time writhing on the ground, and repeating distressed statements into the microphone. listen: i grasp that specific subsets of arts students get off on the expression and rawness of something like this, but i largely found it sort of pointless. my tendency is to interpret something like this from a pretty far intellectual distance, and kind of shudder at the situation, but otherwise kind of emotionally avoid it. i just don't see the point in it, other than to point at the spectacle, and i'm actually too polite to even do that.
so, there's no link.
in all, i was there around 19:00 and gone around 00:00, with the necessity to catch the bus at 1:00, and that worked out just fine, in the end. if i get the opportunity to see something specific in toronto that i can't catch here the next time i go down, i'm sure i'll jump at the opportunity to see it. if not, i think i'd be just as happy or happier to check out the local scene, actually. so, that's the broader takeaway - i should be happy to catch a local jazz or psych show, and actually spend some time being in toronto rather than get obsessed with finding something from out of town; the local talent there is worth checking out, too.
i fell asleep almost as soon as i got on the bus and slept pretty much all the way back to windsor, but also first noticed myself seriously wheezing on the ride back in and thinking i was reacting to the exhaust - and maybe i was, or maybe it was as much about the dry air from the heaters on the bus as it was anything else. i was hacking though, and it's more or less still going.
the walk back home was cold in a really legitimate sense, too, requiring a serious bundle up. it's frustrating when you happen to have no choice but to go out in the one or two cold days of the year, but that's how it's unfortunately worked itself out, so far, hopefully, i should be able to avoid the cold for most of the rest of the year by just staying inside. we'll see....
i got some nachos on the way back, was done eating them by around 7:00, and in the end slept most of the day.
