The speed of light is a constant; I rather like vanilla milk shakes.
I don't have them often, mind you. Heavy. But a couple of times a summer, especially if I've biked or walked a distance and can get a good one? Absolutely. In Pulp Fiction, Vincent makes a big deal about the Five Dollar Milk Shake. He didn't know if it was worth five dollars, but it was a pretty fuckin' good milk shake.
Thirty years later, five dollars would be a pretty fuckin' cheap milk shake.
Times change.
The speed of light does not, much to the chagrin of science-fiction writers and would-be space explorers.
When you cruise near the Falls you feel as though you're swimming, as the birds must feel when the dive into the rising mist and moisture.
Sunfest 2024 came and went, start of the summer, bands from across the globe. A nephew drove up for the weekend. We walked to the site the first day and drove the second. He had incredible parking karma, finding the lone spot remaining alongside the park, presumably abandoned just before we passed.
You can't see every act. We caught Krut from Ukraine and the Tune from Korea, among others. Les Aunties from Chad. Zar Electrik blended north African trance with Mediterranean instruments. Juice Joint joined jazz fusion and hip hop. We missed one of the more conventional folkie groups, an Ontario band called The Pairs. They'll play town again.
The second day, a hot day, I ordered a vanilla milkshake, nursed it for at least an hour. It was pretty f*in' good.
The light hit the festival 8.5 minutes after leaving the sun.
My wife joined us in the evenings.
On Sunday I was on my own, my nephew having returned to Toronto and my wife deciding to opt out of the final night. It was a good one though, with my highlight being Pantera Acido, electronic funk and Afro-Andean. The scene looked a little like a late-90s rave with a mostly-adult crowd. That particular stage is licensed. People drink beer and cooler at Gentleman's Club prices in the evening sun. An older woman sitting near me cannot keep her eyes off an inebriated lesbian couple on the dance floor. Amusement? Discomfort? Jealousy? Longing?
No idea.
Being alone at Sunfest allowed me to engage in that most notorious of writerly habits, people-watching.
"What's your cool sitting pose?" one boy asked another. I'd sat to rest. The teen boys, some Caucasian and some Asian, were at bench waiting for friends: students, as came up in their conversation, at a local Catholic high school.
"Dude, ______ said he was coming here after church."
"Do you think they're hanging somewhere else without us?"
Suddenly, one grabbed more attention than he likely wanted, in what seemed a queer-friendly crowd, by yelling, "Gay man alert! Gay man alert!" Their friends had finally arrived. One of them wore a brightly coloured shirt, floral sort of summer garb.
He turned his attention back on his friend's sartorial choices, critiqued his footwear. "Go sell your fucking shoes. You have too many. You only need two pair."
What are you, a girl?
Perhaps the most interesting encounter occurred when I sat down beside a woman in her early seventies and struck up a conversation. We had, in a sense, crossed paths previously, She had been one of the original IT people at the local university, a job which overlapped with my time there as an undergraduate.
She's also a longtime SF fan.
She has a copy of Live Nude Aliens.
One of our nieces and her husband will have their first child in a few weeks. We attended an analogue to a shower, an all-gendered event, held on his family's land, rural, north of here, very large. Both expectant parents are former varsity athletes. Attractive, fit young adults populated the event.
His grandfather showed us his collection: maps and tiny things, his father's knife from the Second World War, a puck signed by Bobby Orr.
We bought a dinosaur mobile that had been on the expectant couple's wish list. They're two of our favourite people. I wish the world a bright future in part because their progeny deserve one.
Of course, "a man said to the universe...."
We held our own party. I’ve retired from my day job. Last summer we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary, though the date fell on a family wedding and we kept it low-key. We've both reached landmark birthdays.
The mid-July timing meant that a good many people could not come, but we had over one hundred people over the course of the day, neighbours, friends, family, writers, musicians, colleagues, collaborators, some former students, the acting president of the local Pride organization, some SF fans and a congregation of Janeites, the inspiration for one of my characters and her family, a woman in her nineties and a child who has just learned to walk.
My wife sang "Only You."
JB, from Wisconsin, sent his regrets.
Set up for our party was delayed and strained by events beyond our control. A good friend, husband to one of my wife's oldest friends, an athletic man who seemed in better-than-average health, had an unexpected, massive heart attack. By the time anyone reached him he had died, clinically. Paramedics revived him but with little hope of returning. The damage to his brain had been too severe.
They finally disconnected him.
Our party went ahead.
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
Another couple we know, much older, prominent figures in the local music scene, held a different event in their yard, one week later. Fifty years married.
I have spent too little time writing this summer and too much time at parties in large yards on sunny afternoons.
JB finally made it up last weekend. We wandered around the city, attended the local the local Pride Parade with my wife, Nancy, and my sister Jo.
Monday we drove to Niagara Falls. Before riding the Hornblower (the lesser known Falls tour boat; the Maid of the Mist only runs on the American side), we walked up Clifton Hill. During that phase my wife rested under a tree in the park. The natural wonder and unnatural spectacle: House of Frankenstein. House of Dracula. Wax Museums and gaming arcades. A Ferris Wheel (my wife and I went on it the last time we passed this way) and dinosaur golf, go-karts and ziplines and the Hard Rock Café. A giant Frankenstein Monster head noshes on a hamburger. It's a comic book street, drawn by a talented child. JB snapped a picture of an unconvincing Taylor Swift in the Movieland Wax Museum foyer, opposite Thor and the Hulk.
We didn't enter any of the tacky tourist traps, but we did have ice cream. Vanilla, in my case.
He chuckled at the narration that came over the Hornblower's PA and through the thick mist, sensing a bit too much emphasis on the larger size of the Canadian falls, the fact that the American side will erode because of the softer clay.
JB hails from Milwaukee, so he faced more questions than seemed reasonable about how someone with his American nationality and identities felt about the political situation.
His phone exploded soon after the parade, news of a game-changing and dramatically-timed resignation.
I nevertheless cannot shake the fear that someone will read an historical note in centuries to come about the American experiment with democracy, and its first and last elected leaders. The first, reputedly, could not tell a lie. The last, allegedly, could not tell the truth.
I hope a better history will be written. I cannot write it, except on paper.
We were on Queens Ave, though the parade turned at Colborne and then made its way to the park. I preferred last year's parade, which featured more interesting and creative participants. This year's was fun, but leaned too heavily into walking corporate ads, "see, we'll sell to you too!" Jo really liked it. She doesn't attend the Toronto one any more, due to the crazy crowd density and the sporadic nudes, public dangly bits.
My sister’s second book will be out in the fall: Just Gone. It concerns queer refugees, most of them victims of horrors beyond the imaginings of people who celebrate in outsize yards.
Some things seem to be constant.
They held a candlelight vigil in a park last night: a seventeen-year-old, killed by her former boyfriend, fatally stabbed. He had attacked her earlier this year, choked her. Part of his bail conditions involved staying away from her. In that final altercation, he stabbed another person, non-fatally, and ultimately confronted police. They shot him.
I knew the story. I did not learn his name until last night. I knew the perpetrator, a little, when he was in his early teens, an often-unpleasant student who seemed to have had both a difficult past and an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
He tended to make poor decisions.
The bullet that killed him moved considerably slower than the speed of light.
The knife with which he murdered his teenage ex moved even slower.
I could have a vanilla milk shake now, but I don't know that I'd enjoy it.
A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
--Stephen Crane