Twelve hours from now, I’ll be in the process of loading a Uhaul truck, getting ready to drive away from Toronto toward the improbably beautiful Quebec City. Aside from Seattle (where I spent 3.5 years), this is the longest I’ve stayed in one place since 2009: 2.5 years in this strange, strange city. I will not miss it.
Toronto tries too hard to be like New York City. It definitely succeeded in attracting all the money, driving up the housing and rental prices, building a little subway and transit train system, and setting up one helluva zoo, but as for the rest… Perhaps it’s just the pandemic. Perhaps in some other, baseline timeline where that didn’t happen, the city would’ve been tolerable. As it is, all the annual summer festivals got cancelled for the second year in a row – and they won’t have enough money to come back in 2022. The subway system is a bit impressive, but it shuts down at 11pm more often than not. (Which makes Toronto “the city that never stays up” rather than “the city that never sleeps.” Heh.) God-awful drivers are enabled even further by the cops that don’t give a damn about enforcing any rules. (One time, I saw a cop – with his sirens off – blatantly run a red light. Leading by example, eh?) Last week, a woman almost hit me while taking a right turn smack into a bunch of right-of-way pedestrians. When I gave her ye olde stink eye, she yelled, “I didn’t hit you, did I?!” Fun times.
This city is the ground zero of the new Canadian housing bubble – or maybe it’s Vancouver, or both. The mechanism won’t be the same as when I lived in Nevada (these foreign buyers can definitely afford their mortgages), but eventually it will implode – and when it does, things will get for the Canadian economy. Let’s just say that when a) your Lyft driver starts giving you real estate advice, and b) local news shows have recurring segments on increasing your property’s value, and c) the local authorities don’t give a damn about their constituents renting out fire-trap basement apartments (one exit and a tiny window) for $1,300… Well, that’ll make one very bad cocktail. For what it’s worth, the Centre Island is beautiful, and so is Lake Ontario, and so is all the beautiful Art Deco architecture in the financial district. That’s not enough to make up for the negatives, though.
There is, of course, the emotional baggage. Toronto was the city where Amazon did their damnedest to make life difficult over the course of two years and two months. It’s also where my old flame killed herself… She came to me in a dream on the two-year anniversary. We had a long conversation I can’t recall. I’m not sure if that’s a giant red flag from my subconscious, or proof of the noosphere of some sort, or perhaps all of the above. Regardless, there’s a little too much baggage here to stay.
I still talk to xgf: she said a lot of her Toronto friends are leaving too – all at once, and almost all of a sudden. I think I get it: after about 18 months of this pandemic and the assorted lockdowns (which lasted longer here than anywhere else in North America), people got a lot of time to think. Think about what they want to do with their lives, what they’re missing out on, what their true priorities might be. It’s somewhat comforting to think that there are others like me, that I’m part of the grand Millennial covid migration.
I’m fairly certain I’ve written other “goodbye” posts for Vegas/Fort Worth/Tampa/Seattle on this blog before, but I can’t be bothered to look for them. I do recall that I left each of those cities with a sense of relief. Is there something in my personality that makes me squeeze every bit of value from a city before I abandon it and run off someplace else? Or maybe it’s objectively true that each city had, say, a better dating scene or some such. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve spent the last week slowly packing up all my stuff: when I made the long drive from Seattle to Toronto in March 2019, I’d managed to fit everything in my little 2013 Kia Rio. I’ve got slightly more stuff now, though I’m pretty sure if I tossed out all the giant pretty rocks, the bookshelf, and the mattress, I could still make it work. Maybe. As it is, tomorrow morning I’ll pick up the smallest Uhaul truck, load it up solo and in record time, and then hit the road. (Renting a Uhaul at the very end of the month is pricey, but still, I’ll save a fortune on the rent differential…) My Quebec City apartment complex (an 8-hour drive from Toronto) won’t meet me outside the business hours, so my brilliant plan consists of loading the truck, driving it for seven-ish hours to a rest stop just outside Quebec City, stopping there for the night (yay Kindle! yay snacks!), waking up hella early the following day, picking up the keys at 8am, and then unloading the truck, returning it, finally taking the much-needed shower, and going into a minor hibernation. Still less complex than my luggage logistics in Las Vegas, eh.
So here I am… Almost everything is packed up. All that’s needed now is to take out the trash, place the free stuff on the lawn for urban scavengers (the free stuff includes a juicer, a full-size shovel, and six cans of beans, among other items), and do some cursory cleaning as I pack up all the rest. I’ve just celebrated my last night in this city with a small $10 bottle of Prosecco, tiny store-bought and pre-packaged slices of toasted garlic bread, and six slices of that triangular Laughing Cow cheese. (Hey, I never claimed to be classy.) Aside from a short trip back in March to take care of some formalities for Project 2039 (more on that someday later), this will be it.
…it’s tempting, ever so tempting to just pour some gas on the sum total of all my material goods, throw a match, and just start over with a sleeping bag and a cellphone. Almost done packing, though. Just two days of discomfort, and I’ll be in my permanent home base. The only way out is up, right?
Grigory Lukin.com 