VIEW FROM HERE
2002

The trick to describing any window’s particular view is, I think, to capture the essence of the room you’re looking out of. You have to start from the inside since that, supposedly, is where the reader’s mind-eye will be standing before they cast it out the room’s window to take in the view belonging to it. In my way of looking at things, the window belongs to the room, the view to the window. Others, more philosophically, might try to argue that the room belongs to the window, and the window to the view. But I prefer to keep things simple and see them as the builders intended rather than as god or Descartes might like best.

Anyway, describe the room first. It’s the “living room”.

That’s a good place to start a description since most people have living rooms and will gain an immediate understanding of what a room called that probably contains. They will picture a television, a couch, a coffee table, stereo system, cds, movies the owner has already seen in the cinema or on rented tapes but has purchased anyway, never to be viewed again like trophies of past movie watching or trophies of past movie understanding depending on the intellectual highbrow-ed-ness of the collection.

And all that would be a fairly good start as far as assumptions go. This room, does in fact, have all those elements in place. And since they’re not, as far as I’m concerned, what makes a living room a living room anyway, I’m not going to debate, defend the uniqueness of, or go into detail about any of these things.

This particular living room is what it is because of what it feels like to stand around inside it. Which I do quite a lot. I also sit inside it, but surprisingly, not really as often as I stand. The feeling you get when you stand around in this room is that there’s a lot of space in it. The ceilings are surprisingly high with white moldings all around the edges. The moldings have a gray tinge to them now because of the grime that comes in through the windows during the summer. But, wait, no window talk, I promised! We’re not there yet.

This building was originally a shipping warehouse. The street it’s positioned on, Queen, used be quite close to the water though the city has since laid landfill 4 city blocks out into Lake Ontario to give itself more room to breathe. Since this building’s no longer very close to the water, it’s hard to imagine the barrels of whatever and the boxes of something and the bails of whatnot that might have been kept piled up in this room once upon a time. But I’m happy that it was a storage place and not a residence since that keeps the ghosts to a minimum.

The very high ceiling has a large industrial-style fan hanging from it. It isn’t authentic, I put I there myself after I bought it at Home Depot the summer I moved in. But it looks kind of authentic. And it has a pleasant way of shifting the air around the high-ceilinged room and making things feel very loose.

The walls are a soft brown colour. Tan maybe or Taupe if you’re happier in more expensive sounding surroundings. It’s a colour that reminds me of someone’s sheets. But it didn’t at the time that I painted it. I didn’t know him then. The room has gained this sexual flavour since I met him and slept in his soft bed.

The furniture in this wide, airy, soft brown room, is placed on odd angles and has a lot of cat hair on it. I brush it off every day, but it reappears. (this isn’t a mystery, there are cats) There is no furniture in front of the window because that is this room’s best feature and what I like to stand around looking out of for long stretches of time.

If you stand in the street and look up, you’ll think, “Hmm, windows aren’t very big. Look at the neighbour’s windows! Much nicer.” And you’ll be absolutely right, the neighbour’s windows are much nicer. However, I’ve had the opportunity to stand in front of my neighbour’s windows too and I can tell you, they’re not quite as interesting. Bigger, yes. But the couch is in the way and they don’t have the EXACT same view, which to me makes all the difference.

Anyway, these windows don’t seem small when you’re standing in front of them on the inside. They seem to take up most of the north facing living room wall and you’ll forget all slitherings of neighbour-jealousy once you’re looking out them from this position. There are three cream coloured curtains hanging in front of this window. Two pulled to the side and one tied in the middle. All the curtains could do with a wash. There’s your frame.

Now, the window itself. This is what you’ll be looking out of. Like your lens to the view and it is, itself, an important thing to describe. The glass is spotty with grime. That’s what happens when you live downtown anywhere. There is mesh in two quarters of the lower half (where parts of the window slide across to let air in) to prevent cats from falling out and down the 3 stories to the street. That happened previously so the mesh is really very practical.

Once, I took some pictures of the view using a low quality camera. They came out surprisingly well. In one, you could plainly see that you’re looking through the upclose black crisscrossings of mesh. In the other, the mesh was just a slight blur. The smallest visual disturbance. And that’s how it is when you use your eyes too. Depending on how you focus, you either see mesh, or you see street. While I wouldn’t discourage anyone from viewing the world in more than one way, to save time, I’ll only describe the street.

Queen Street isn’t a very wide street despite the fact that it’s a major thruway spanning the downtown core. It’s got 4 lanes, two jammed with parked cars. This particular view is of one small slice of Queen Street West, Toronto’s grubby, artsy, bohemian playground. The glittering piercing on a flat-stomached goddess of cool. This section is crawling with hairstyles, mangy dogs without leads, fake laughter and buckets of tulips out front of chinese-owned convenience stores. There’s a lot to look at if you like to look at people. Especially from the safe, third floor distance of a living room window. This is the only place I’ve ever lived where I can watch out the window and without fail, see someone I know. It’s like living in a small town, only the beauty is that it’s not a small town so seeing people you know is pretty unlikely even though it happens every time.

You can look directly into the apartments of the people who live across the street. I try not to, but if they’ve got lights on and it’s getting dark, it’s hard to avoid. I once watched a woman come out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her and rifle through her dresser drawers, choose her clothes and pull her panties on underneath the towel. She took the rest of her clothes to another room to get dressed. I didn’t feel guilty about watching because I’m pretty sure she knew she could be seen and that’s why she didn’t drop the towel. And besides, I’ll bet people watch me all the time and fair’s fair. That’s what I figure.

The people on the second floor to my view’s right watch television all the time and I feel concerned for their sex lives. I’ve never seen them (well, I’ve seen their feet) but I feel sure that they’re lesbians and are suffering from “lesbian bed-death”. That’s the name for what happens when two women share a life. They forget to fuck. Happens all the time. Women are like that. If there’s no man in the picture to remind them how fun it is, they invariably fall out of the habit.

The boy whose room is on the second floor in the middle of my view, one over from the TV couple, he has a big mural on his window of a crazy cartoon boy face. It says “Casual Casual”. I don’t know what that means. His father’s a guitarist. I know that because he leaves his windows open when he plays. I suspect the boy’s father of being high a lot and a pretty bad Dad in general. A few times, at night, I’ve seen the boy moving around his room with his arms stretched out like an airplane. I hope to myself that the boy has secret dreams of becoming a pilot. I’d like the boy to have secret dreams for some reason.

There used to be an old man who lived on the third floor where the towel woman lives now. He sat at his window all day, smoking cigarettes and flicking the ashes into a yellow coffee cup. He got booted out I guess when the landlords decided to renovate that apartment and make it fancy. All part of the welcoming of the internet generation to the neighbourhood. The young couples who have enough money to afford the high rent in this run down block. Cool tax. I’m one of them though, so I try not to despise them too much just because I was one of the first interlopers. That doesn’t make me any more deserving of an apartment here than them. I’ll bet an old guy used to live in this living room, flicking his ashes out the window where I’m standing now.

Anyway, a small part of me is glad that old guy has been replaced with the towel woman. He got in trouble with the police once when my neighbour, Carly, figured out that he was shining floodlights into her apartment so he could watch her at night.

Working left to right, on the ground level, there are stores and shops.

Delphic is a clothing store. Skater style but with heavy price tags. I’ve been in there a few times and it’s usually empty. Someone’s rich father must be paying the rent because I never see anyone go in or out except the two ultra hipsters who hang around behind the counter.

Beside Delphic, you’ve got Coupe Bizarre. This place is a magnet for the city’s weirdest people, and not-so-weird people who have weirdness aspirations. It’s a hairstyling place with fun-fur on the walls and stylists who seem coked up and pretentiously casual. Casual, Casual. From this living room window, you can see the people sitting in the waiting area. Watch them pretend to read magazines. They usually look kind of nervous and I don’t blame them. The few times I’ve had my haircut there, I’ve been glad I live so close by because I can go directly home and fix what they’ve done.

Next, there’s a new store with no name and some very uninteresting items for sale like yellow vases. I haven’t investigated this well enough to say what the hell it is.

Then the Stephen Bulger Photography Gallery. Big and white. Sometimes he’ll put someone’s work right in the front window and I can consider it from the comfort of my own living room.

Beside that, McBurnie and Cutler Booksellers. It’s a dusty second hand bookstore. The counter guy has long blonde hair in a ponytail and he stands out front to smoke a lot. He often looks up to my window when I’m standing there looking out, and he sometimes nods at me. I used to imagine wearily that he probably thinks he’s the person I’m meant to spend the rest of my life with only I can’t see it because of the ponytail and the slightly creepy nodding. I stopped buying books there because of that uncomfortable suspicion.

The Red Tea Box is a Japanese bakery/tea shop/restaurant that I’ve never been inside of. It had a stellar review in one of Toronto’s hipster weeklies and it’s been overrun with our city’s “elite” ever since. I hate the elite and I refuse to go where they go, even if it is right across the street. I’m not much interested in tea anyway.

Then there’s a jeweller. Then there’s an empty space that I wish I could buy and open my own sex shop or coffee house in but I will never have the money for that kind of adventure. Then there’s the Toronto Dominion Bank.

The sidewalks, as I said, are littered with people and dogs. Especially when the sun’s out. It’s raining today so there aren’t as many people or as many dogs. The sidewalk is a depressing, lonely gray. The sky’s a depressing lonely gray too. Everything’s wet.

On days like this, the view fills you up with a sense of hollowness. You might be inclined to pull the gray chenille blanket from the couch and wrap it around your shoulders. Shiver under the cold that seeps through the glass. You might be prone to thinking about all the less-gray places you might live one day. Greece, maybe. California. Italy. You stand there, bare feet on the wooden floors, and you think outside the view. You think of the streets you grew up on, the snowmen you’ve built, the ice rinks you’ve skated, the cold, cold, cold that’s just a part of being Canadian. You think about the children you’ll have one day and wonder if they’ll grow up to look at this view too or if they’ll have the lucky inheritance of some bold move you made before you were too old to get yourself a new view.

You can’t live here forever, you think to yourself. There’s not a blanket in the world big enough to keep you warm when it’s raining and crap out like this. Just when you’re thinking all that, a bright red and white streetcar rolls past. It clangs and blares and shudders across the view, obscuring everything else for a second or two. At least you’ve got streetcars, which break up the grayness a bit.

I think this view might be different if it isn’t yours. You might like it more or less depending on how permanent it feels to you.

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