Patrick – Page 22 – decode•it

Departures: Part I

I begin my farewell to CityPlace.

With school starting in September I’ve had to make one of those easy hard decisions. You know the ones… It’s perfectly clear what must be done—that’s the easy bit—it’s all the resultant work that’s hard. In this case it’s the easy but hard decision to move out of my apartment, a decision I needed to have made months ago, but one I am thankful I have made now. You can only spend so much time looking back at what you didn’t do before realizing the only time you’ll ever have to do or not do something is right now. As Col. Sandurz so eloquently put it, “You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.”

I’ve been here just over a year, here being a fourth floor apartment looking out over Spadina Ave in the largest residential development in the city to‐date: CityPlace. I read about this project while at my first job almost fifteen years ago. I saw the plans and the towers and I wondered what it would be like to live there. And here I am now having found out. Funny that… They hadn’t started building anything then, and they haven’t finished building everything now.

So what is it like to live here? In a word—loud. The noise makes me miss my house by the ravine in Scarborough. It was so peaceful. I felt like I was living right in the forest. But here my ravine is replaced with the traffic moving to and from Lake Shore Blvd and the Gardiner. It’s an amazing sight, but when I’m finished enjoying all the great cars I see from my windows, finished laughing at the hilariously terrible attempts some drivers make to get through what I’m sure is one of the worst intersections in the city, when I’ve watched the sea of fans fill the street after a Jays game, or people getting stuck in the streetcar right of way, at the end of the day, when I want things to be quiet, they aren’t. I sleep with ear plugs, and I can still hear the city.

However—despite the racket—I have loved living here. For the few things that bother me about this area there are far more things I’ll remember fondly, so in celebration of some of those things, it’s photography time! These first pictures are from an afternoon my dad and I spent last August on a brilliantly clear and hot summer’s day wandering around Roundhouse Park, South Core, and Queens Quay.

But before the pictures, some more words.

I take a lot of pictures. A lot. There are boxes of prints from my 35mm days. No one has seen them. It’s the same with digital. Gigabytes of files. And again—no one has seem them. I’ve never known how to show my photography because I’ve never known how to speak to it. I want to change that. So I’m going to start—now.

Things catch my eye and I want to capture what I see, but a lot of the time what I see isn’t the picture itself, it’s an element of the picture. Photography is often so sharp and literal, but when I look at what I like about my pictures it’ll be a shadow or form or texture or angle. I like the idea of breaking the literal image into something else—I’m struggling for the words here—but I like to derive abstract concepts from the literal form captured by the camera, to reduce the image into shapes and colours that just are and no longer represent what we see them as.

Pause as I notice the time—12:21am—and realize I still have three hours before I even need to think about going to bed. I love my afternoon work and night shift. I get to be creative during the day, work at night, and eat and sleep between in the gaps. And I get to finish this post.

I remember where my head was this day back in August—and it wasn’t anywhere good. I was unhappy at work. My job was unfulfilling, frustrating, and in hindsight, the working environment was abusive. I felt worthless despite knowing my worth. I wasn’t sleeping properly as I’d not yet started using the ear plugs, and again, in hindsight, I was forgetting who I was as a result of fatigue, but didn’t know it at the time. I thought it was normal to feel yourself fading away…

I look at where my head is at now, so far from where it was then, and I am happy to have made my easy hard decision to move. I’ll have more to say about my new neighbourhood in coming posts, suffice it to say it follows a rule it seems my places of the past have followed, and that’s I pass by them for years and then I’m living there. I’ve walked by this house so many times. I’ve walked through this area and wondered what it would be like to live there.

Actually—now that I think of it—my place now does not follow this rule. I’d never regularly be down in this part of the city before moving here. Maybe that’s why it never really felt right unpacking. Maybe that’s why my easy hard decision was actually easier to make than I thought it would be. Maybe all that time I’d been kept awake at night was by the noise of dreaming someone else’s dream.

I give you CityPlace.

Restart

“It’s a beautiful day in the city of shining light. It’s a beautiful day. This is where I find you.”

Was the last post too sad? Who’s sad from the last post? This will cheer you up… I’ve got a new track on repeat. And—I’m working!

I’m doing something I believe in for the first time in my life instead of doing it for the money as I have previously. It feels so, so good.

My new job is at a local food warehouse. We work with farms around the city to distribute sustainable and ethically grown and produced food to restaurants in the city. The hours are strange, but I don’t have to get up early in the morning, and I’ll be driving around the city late at night to get home—I love it. Plus there’s lots of moving around and heavy lifting, so I don’t have to exercise anymore. My job is hours of exercise! My coworkers are friendly and welcoming, and they nod in agreement and respond when I say things instead of just saying their thing even before I’m finished saying mine. It’s refreshing.

But the most important thing is I’m working in an industry attempting to do something other than just get money. I was sick—physically and mentally sick—of helping people who already had more money than they and their families would ever need get even more money. Money is like energy—you don’t make it, you just convert it and move it around. You can’t get more money yourself without moving it from somewhere—i.e. someone—else. You can play with convoluted conversion paths to hide this process, but that’s how it works when you do the math. Anyone who attempts to convince you otherwise is either ignorant of how our current economy functions or a bastard flush with other people’s cash.

It matters to me how and why money is distributed the way it is. And I know there’s enough here for everyone and everyone else, so rather than going horse trying to explain it I’ve decided to live it.

Loss

“All my life I have been searching for someone honest just like you.”

Sometimes I will put a track on repeat—listen to it over and over and over—as I write. Something about the music will hold me in a moment I need to be in to get the words out. Once I am there I will stay there until the words are done. Write. Repeat. Write.

Today I am writing and have a track on repeat, and today I am writing about loss, the deepest loss I have experienced—the loss of self.

In the face of the many homes and friends and families I have lost to all the many wars fought between homes and friends and families I have watched myself insulate and absorb, change and adapt, rebound and recover, and have it happen all over again. I become so accustomed to it I become it. I know I’m a warrior. But I also know I’m a warrior who does not believe in war—I’m often lonely.

A few years ago I needed a friend, but what I got instead was a commercial, a piece of targeted advertising promoting ideas which sounded good to the ear but never materialized in action—your classic snake oil sales rat. Why did I buy? Because I wanted to believe I’d found someone else who believed what I did. I thought I’d found another me, an ami as the French say. But that was the goal—to make me think I had. We all trust ourselves, right?

Make friends with the forest so it doesn’t notice you cut it down. Make friends with the river so you can change its course, pollute it, then bury it. Make friends with the wolf so he doesn’t see all the hot dogs you eat. Flatter the Earth and make it look like you…

What I lost of myself I know is returning. I feel it with each passing day. I claw back what I remember was mine to start with, but until now I hadn’t seen how much I’d forgotten of myself. This is the loss I mourn—a me I liked to be.

I know I will be me again.

Copy Cat

What side of the door are you on?

The post from the other day was fun. I had no idea we’d end up were we did. Just write, and I did, and I ended up with new insight into a project I’ve been struggling with for the last couple of months.

Today’s insight comes to a project that’s over ten years old that I’ve never been happy with, and even at the end of this post, I’m still not going to be happy with it. Such is—as I’m told—the creative curse. Firstly—nuts to you. Anyone telling me anything is just the way it is because that’s how it is, is, in my opinion, partially wrong. Statistically the best they will ever be is almost right most of the time. Secondly—I’m not sure the creative curse applies when you’re trying to copy something someone else has done. By then it’s a commentary on the actually somewhat hilarious juxtaposition of the pride in your own work against knowing you could have done a better job ripping off someone else’s.

About a million years ago I was in a photography course during my first year of college. As part of an assignment we were to select a photographer from a website and then select a photo of theirs to attempt to copy in as many ways as we could—composition, theme, subject, whatever. It had to be as close to the original as we could get it.

I was a bit of an ass back then, so I picked what looked like the easiest one from one of the first photographers listed: an untitled piece by Robert Adams. It’s a door. A door in Denver. And you can look at it on—I’m not joking—the exact same webpage I found it on a million years ago. Nothing has changed, not even the page where you can order a CD-ROM version of the site for… wait for it—$50USD. I’m not sure what’s funnier: the price itself or that for the price you get a CD-ROM sent to you in the mail of the site you’re already looking at.

Okay—so maybe I’m still a bit of an ass. Irregardlessly, a door is a door. How hard could it be to find a door at the end of a hallway, snap a picture, get it developed (remember this was a million years ago when that sort of stuff happened), scan it, slam it into Photoshop, crop, convert to black and white, punch up the grit for that low light, high ISO seventies interior chic, and be done with time to spare? I didn’t think it would be hard at all, so I put my time to spare at the beginning of the project and did other things ever-confident my low hanging door would be only a hallway away.

Turns out no such door existed in my halls. Ever-confidence was replaced with real-panic and I did a slap-dash copy cat job with no processing of what looked just like a door at the end a hallway yet somehow, impossibly, looked nothing like the original. Like a good racecar driver I’m going to start with blaming the equipment. At the time I would have been using a Canon AE-1 with a fixed 50mm lens which meant by the time I was far enough away from the door to get the floor and ceiling in the shot the door was way at the end of the hallway. Then I’ll blame the conditions, saying there wasn’t time for proper processing of the image. Then I’ll blame the track, saying I’d have been better off picking an Ansel Adams.

I did get an 80% on the assignment. Not bad—but I know I could have got a 95% or more if I’d put real effort into it. I don’t like knowing I could have done better. I’d much rather know I did my best and have that be the end of it.

So now I’ve got this original door looking back at me. And the more I look back at it the more impossible it becomes. I must find this impossible door. But where does one find something so desolate? So devoid and yet so contrived at the same time. It looks perfect, but there’s not a single piece of symmetry in the entire composition. Everything’s just a little bit off. It’s gorgeous in its visual dissonance. Beautiful in its offensive ordinarity. I hate it. And I must find it!

It’s now last year, a million years later, late spring, and I am walking down a hallway toward the door to the office I’m pretending to work at. I don’t like pretending to work there because at the time I think I actually am working there. As I walk I’m wondering why the company feels so desolate, so devoid yet so contrived. It looks perfect, but everything’s just a little bit off. I hate it…

Then I see the door.

I like to think I nailed the door. But this is the part I told you about at the beginning of the post where I say I’m still not happy with this project. I’m not. It still doesn’t look right. It’s just a door. How hard is it to find a door?

So I look again at the untitled door in Denver. And I see the door is only half of the picture. The rest of it is the hallway. The hallway is what makes this picture feel the way it does. It’s the hallway creating all the discomfort, all the dissonance. The door is perfect. It’s the only thing in the picture that is.

And then, for the first time in all the times I’ve looked at this door, I see a sliver of light coming from behind it. It’s actually open a little tiny bit. It’s been open all a long. All these years I’ve been looking for a closed door at the end of a hallway when it turns out I’ve been inside the room the entire time, a room I can leave and lock behind me. The hallway is beyond.

The door I’m looking for leads out—not in. And… it’s already open.

About Me

I like to be.

I’ve added some pictures to the About Me section. It needed some sprucing up—and self-promotion has never really been my strong suit. It’s actually something I wrote sitting in a bath.