By Jove!

The other day I ventured into the smoggy and dreary city that is Toronto. Having been country confined for a month, I felt like a foreigner. But if you've ever been to Toronto, you'd realize everyone was a foreigner. I rather loathe Toronto, as the mecca of Canada is an unfavourable location for a simple country lad such as myself. Mind you the country is fanged and blood thirsty with stygian mosquitoes and other sinister insects. This is maybe a paradox: Nature and I are opposing ends of magnets, and my curiosity and infatuation with nature leads me deeper into Her heart; but in this heart lies a skulking darkness, which ultimately swarms and repels me so I rapidly scatter to re-trace my steps back towards humanity escaping this feigned utopia. We're drawn together but we destroy one another like a celebrity couple.

Anywhoers I met up with a dear confrere with the noble intent to browse secondhand bookstores and recoup forgotten literary works to revel in. After I indulged in a everythingonit veggiedog, Cajun spiced fries and an Evian, I informed my amie that I was nourished and hydrated for the body, but not yet for the mind - so our trek began. On the way, we bypassed some toothsome Irish dames - think Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries (from her good angle)- and as the hobbledehoy I am, I shambled around them so they wouldn't be caught under my shadow; primarily so they wouldn't be deprived of sunbeams they unequivocally craved (they are Irish after all: the milky skinned, freckled type).

Ah, there it is - our desired location - "Seeker's Books." Eagerly, we tottered inside this ancient subterranean shop with rickety shelves and cement walls oozing moisture. And there he is - the epitome secondhand bookstore owners - an anti-Zionist Jew with a passion for conspiracy theories and a penchant to ramble on about these theories to every unsuspecting soul entering his little shop.

Not long after we began digging through forgotten arts, brosif cried victoriously, "Ah, will you look at this!" (he holds up a forgotten work, which remains forgotten to me) "In high school I read this in French," he adds superciliously. Delicately, he opens this novel and feels the pages and I think: this is either an avid book collector or intellectual snobbery; I remain undecided.

After much mulling and mock chatter I decided to purchase a novel by beat generation author Jack Kerouac and a collection of novellas by Thomas Mann.

These events should of been documented with photos but my failing memory failed me; my camera was forgotten unlike Sal.