On a totally fun note, today is DR’s birthday. He’s turning 44 and he’ll be watching The Watchmen on BD Live with the movie director later on today. I hope there’s cake… I love birthday cake.

I was so surprised to see the tons of videos online about Toronto Strike conflicts all around the city for the last 5 weeks… I don’t know why I never even thought of searching for them before yesterday, but I was flabbergasted by the amount of them and even more so by their content. I don’t want to promote them by posting copies here, I’m disgusted by the way people act on them, but still, they might be worth a viewing for those who think that Toronto isn’t really affected by the strike. It’s a whole can of crazy, be prepared.

What I do see daily from my circle of strike though is the continuous need for citizens to drop by to insult us. I understand we are easy targets, we are wearing strike signs, we are walking in a circle in front of a city building, we are supporting a group that is working on our behalf so that benefits they won for us in the past won’t be taken away, etc.

Still, let me give you a few pointers if you think that coming to Dundas and Victoria to scream insults at us is a good idea and want to continue living. I’m not saying that any of us would take any measure to injure people, far from our minds, but some people act so carelessly that I’m surprise we haven’t had the need for emergency services already.

ALMOST ACCIDENT #1
One guy driving a pick-up truck southbound on Victoria St. stopped just before the intersection and rolled down his window to scream “GO BACK TO WORK FUCKERS” and then pressed on the gas as a mean of quick getaway only to slam on the breaks and screech his tires realizing the light had turned red, almost slamming into a car that was driving through on Dundas.

ALMOST ACCIDENT #2
One woman on a bicycle riding illegally on the sidewalk zoomed past us and started yelling gibberish and stopping one inch short of ramming herself into a wall. See, she was riding fairly fast and was quickly turning her head in the direction she was going and then to the direction of the strikers every other word, not really paying attention to the fact there was a building with bricks and cement ready to stop her stride… All we heard was a rapid succession of words that couldn’t really form a sentence as we couldn’t hear the words yelled when her head was turned to the direction opposite us… it sort of went like “You (blank) money (blanK) stupid (blank) work (screeeeeeeeeech) SHIIIIIIIIT!!!” She came to an abrupt stop, then sheepishly looking down, turned the corner and dissapeared.

ALMOST ACCIDENT #3
One man was so excited at our sight that he completely stopped in the middle of the intersection. Standing there immobile and looking at us, he started yelling that we were just being lazy and wanted time off during the Summer. Meanwhile a car was waiting to turn and seemed hesitant as the driver couldn’t tell if the man would continue on his way or retreat back from where he came from. At the exact same time, both of them decided to move… heading in the same direction. With one opinionated man jumping backwards and avoiding a car wheel on his foot… Apparently it was enough of a scare for him to just turned around and continue on his way…

ALMOST ACCIDENT #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9
Every morning, around 9:30am, approximately 100 exchange students from Brazil (or so their backpacks say) swarm the corner on their way to a Ryerson class or meeting. You’d think that at least one of them would notice the street light at the corner, but oh no… every morning they all arrive following each other and cross Victoria St stopping any traffic that would be coming their way. Cars can be honking their horns as loud as they can, they continue on walking across. Hopefully they’ll get to the “crossing the street lesson” soon.

ALMOST ACCIDENT #10
This one has nothing to do with the strike, it would (and will continue to) happen on any regular day in downtown Toronto. This homeless came by, drunk out of his mind, holding a half full-bottle of what seemed like pure alcohol and was trying to light up a cigarette butt probably freshly picked up from the sidewalk… I kept expecting him to go up in flame at any time as the handling of the bottle and the striking of the matches made the booze pop out of the bottle and was soaking the front of his shirt. He finally managed and blew smoke in our direction. Man On Fire = 0, Smoking = 1. This time…

Everyone has the right to their opinion of course, I’m not saying people shouldn’t feel angry at strikers they see in the city, and I’m not suggesting they should sympathize with them either, but if the need to scream at someone arise at anytime, please do it in a safely manner. Or if you walk directly to the strikers and ask a question instead of throwing insults, you might see a different side to all of this mess.

Also, drink pure alcohol and smoke responsibly.

Although I stand firm with my concerns for possible health risks, I know I have used poor judgment with the illustration accompanying the post, and for that I am very sorry. Dr. McKeown has been nothing but professional with us throughout the strike and deserves the same from me. I know it’s little consolation when I say it was meant as a joke, but there was really no other ulterior motive to my bad artistic comment.

(Man! Who knew so many people read this blog…)

It’s incredible the friendship that has developed in the last 4.5 weeks too. Although we’d all rather be at our respective jobs, my circle of strike is a place we now all feel comfortable with each other, we look forward to greet each other, we all like to share our views on the news of the evening past or stories we read in the daily newspaper. We continuously change walking partners and the camaraderie keeps on growing. I’ve really lucked out in finding this many people that share the same idea on the way to conduct ourselves during the strike. We remain pleasant to everyone around us preferring to wish them a good day than to engage in negativity. Killing them with kindness is our motto.

But today was kind of sad, we’ve said goodbye to one co-striker who’s leaving us for a full-time job… It’s a weird feeling, you kind of get attached to some people and hate to see them go, and even though you’ve only known them for a very short period of time, you have to want the best for them too.

Wishing you the best of luck in your future my friendly co-striker, your exciting stories will be missed in the pacifist circle of strike.

Incidentally, we now have an opening for a friendly co-striker, we will be holding interviews from 7am to 11am daily.

I left home this morning at 6:45 am not feeling that great. I hopped on my bicycle and started my way to the circle of strike. At Jarvis and Dundas I stopped at the red light, the first stop since leaving home, I had managed all green lights on the way… woohoo. When the light changed I started pedaling and all of a sudden my bike started to shake, like I was going to lose my wheel or something. One quick look and I saw that my back tire was now completely flat. Another quick look behind me revealed a broken bottle I had not seen…

I got off the bike, took it to the side of the building, not blocking the flow of walkers and I teared up. Yeah, I’m that tired. I’m just like this stupid tire, totally deflated… Mostly I seriously don’t know if I can even afford to repair it. it’s that bad.

This strike has really gotten to me personally now and I’m done. Not just because of a flat tire, but because I’ve just lost a full month. It’s an entire month where I haven’t been myself and I need to do something to change this. I don’t know what yet, but I’m certainly taking this afternoon to do some serious thinking…

Right after I finish folding the laundry…

As I’ve mentioned before, the group I march with share my views on not stopping anyone wanting access to the City offices. We are present on the line and we continue to be informative if we have any new information to share.

There is one exception though, every morning since going to our new picketing location, we do stop one person: our city’s Medical Officer of Health, David McKeown. We don’t detain him or anything, but every morning when the group has arrived, we make a point of thinking of a few questions we can ask him. This is a man who has the power to basically end this strike if he thinks it is bringing health concerns to Toronto residents. Mr. McKeown continues to say that all measures are taken to keep our dump sites clean of infestations and that there are no concerns for our health… yet.

This morning, when he arrived, it was the same ritual, I asked him if we could take some of his time for our question of the day and he politely agreed. As it is every morning, the entire group stops walking and swarms around him, not to be intimidating, but because we’re all concerned and curious. My first question was in regards to his press conference from last Friday when he said that there were no more rat sightings than usual in the city and if there were, they are certainly not being reported. So I asked him if he cared to elaborate on that since rats have been seen outside of dumping sites and in residential areas in the last few days. He said that all measures were taken to control the pest at dumping sites and I alerted him that the rat that DR saw was on the streets nearby where we live which is far from the nearest dump site. He looked concerned and said that if it had not been reported, we should indeed do so. He asked exactly what area it was, I told him it was close to the Central YMCA downtown. He said he was going to look into it… Others had questions for him and like a gentleman, he took the time to answer all questions.

After he was had left, I told DR he should report the rat incident to Toronto Public Health. With a quick look at the website, DR found their phone number (416-338-7600) and called to register the rat sighting officially. He was told that since he didn’t live at the address where the rat was seen, they couldn’t take his complaint???

HUH????

EXSQUEAK ME?????

That doesn’t really jive with what this person’s boss just told us outside his office… I guess the next thing to do now is to call Toronto’s 311 services to complain about the offices of Toronto Public Health for not taking a rat sighting seriously and see where that goes…

Oh… and I already know what my question of the day will be for Mr. McKeown tomorrow… which I’m sure he will politely respond to.

Today, I’m taking a break from this strike, so I thought I’d relish you with stories of our walk yesterday where we noticed this fence in Cabbagetown. It seemed a dog owner has taken to leave his furry friend’s leftovers behind on a display… I didn’t have the nerves to go and pick them off the fence to throw them away in the nearest garbage bin. I was quite surprised to see this in that particular location, it’s very residential, very neighbourly, busting with a constant flow of people, and especially very disrespectful as it seemed the same person has done this more than once recently judging by the 2 very similar bags. It might also be just a silly joke, who knows. I won’t be checking the content of the bags anytime soon.

Further on our walk, we stopped to watch the softball games at Riverdale park and all of a sudden DR noticed this couple behind me at the top of the hill. She was somewhat hiding by a tree, topless, while her partner took some pictures… Daring I thought.. then this group of hikers came up the hill “chasing” the couple away… We noticed them on the other side of the park continuing their daytime public pastime:

I only had my phone with me, nothing with a zoom on it, but trust me, she’s topless lying in the grass… I wanted her to take the camera and start taking pictures of him naked, but that didn’t happen.

We continued on after that. Walking is one free thing we can still afford, so we’re doing a lot of it lately… We ended up closer to Alan Gardens and then the rain started pretty heavily. We took cover and waited it out for a bit. When we resumed, we noticed that the doggy park was totally empty, there was our chance to go take pictures with the statues:

DR and Green

Me and Blue

After getting home, we finished watching Norma Rae, pretty topical I’d say…

(click to enlarge)

Day 27 – A 30 minutes walk through Chinatown…

And then we thought DR saw another rat:

By the way, the breakfast was really delish. We’ll go back again.

On our way back home, we saw a couple of city employee crews bagging up all the different piles of garbage, and yes, we did hear some severe swearing as they were obviously disgusted by what seemed the dirtiest city block I’ve ever seen…

Not much happened today during our circle of strike. Not one person yelled at us, not many people actually showed up to work at the location we’re at either. In fact it was so uneventful that even the managers monitoring the picket line disappeared after a few minutes.

We found them later on, sitting in Dundas Square, unmonitoring, and yet still being paid their full salary too.

But, I did read a very cute article in the Toronto Star about a 16 year old student who was hired as a lifeguard for the Summer and is now walking a circle of strike like our group is. She is a super sound young adult indeed and says exactly what most of us feel. Way to go Tamie. You can read the article here. I especially like the fact that The Star gave her a columnist job for the duration of the strike. The Toronto Star has been reporting news about the strike in the best of bias fashion, not only showing the negativity of it. It’s the only paper I read now.

The other nice thing that happened today is that we received our second strike paycheque. So that means I’ll be seeing Harry Potter tonight… Ha! Maybe I’ll learn a spell or two to try and end this strike.

Today started out with a bang. I was first to arrive at the picket line and the place was an absolute mess. Ok, I understand that there is a major problems with homeless downtown Toronto, but we’ve been there all week and this is the only day that so much garbage was decorating our circle of strike area. It took me approximately 15 minutes to pick up all the Tim Horton’s coffee cups and lids, all the newspapers, all the napkins, all the empty bottles of water… AND the “Do Not Cross” yellow tape that was wrapped around one of the trees. There was enough cigarette butts to fill a couple of ashtrays, but I drew the line there… Problem is, I just can’t be sure that this garbage wasn’t left there by the group that took over us after we left yesterday…

Then again, what a difference a day makes… Yesterday I was majorly down after coming home and didn’t get much better by watching the press conference announcing 3 new temporary dump sites either… So today, I was prepared for the worse, especially after such a “trashy” welcome. No, today turned out to be much better and for many different reasons. We won at lotto 6/49. All of us put in $2 and played as a group and I had visions of us on the 6pm news cashing our cheque and laughing. Well, it’s not going to happen today, but we re-invested our $5 winnings into Super 7… Wish us luck.

Seriously though, today was made better by the people we talked to, the people that stopped to wish us well… the lady that actually took a $20 bill out of her purse to treat us all to a coffee at Tim Horton’s, or even better, by the man who showed up with a dozen coffees to share with all of us… What a change from the last few weeks when all we heard was negativity and insults.

I think it helps too that people have observed our group and seeing that we do not block people’s way, we offer the little information we have, we actually engage in conversation with some and ignore the idiots that scream at us from afar…

This is the guy that bought us all coffee, how fucking sweet is this?

Also, a little message to my union leaders regarding this “solidarity gathering” for all the strikers to meet our brothers and sisters and engage in live music, food, fun and excitement at the Opera House yesterday: Not one person is in the mood to party at this time, let’s wait until this is all behind us with what ever solution has been decided and then let’s do a solidarity gathering and you can thank your members for sticking with you all this time. I’d rather know that you are all sitting at the negotiation tables trying to end this strike. And if you’re going to spend money for events like this, please make sure that the strikers receive the money they are owed too… would be nice to buy groceries.

Every morning of this strike after my venti mild, I need to excuse myself and find the closest washroom. It’s been Eaton Centre for the longuest time but where I am at right now, Tim Hortons is just across the street and I wait until someone needs to go buy a drink or bagel and go with them and use the facilities while they are ordering.

So this morning I make my way there with a co-picketer and while he orders I zig-zag my way into the 2 person male washroom. Someone is already in the stall, so I plant myself in front of the urinal and unzip. There is a very bad smell in this washroom and all of a sudden the guy in the stall starts lamenting:

Guy: “OOOOooooo noooooo!”
Me: (silence)
Guy: “AAAAaaaaahhhh”
Me: (silence)

FLUSH SOUND

Guy: “Oooooh lord!”
Me: (silence)
Guy: “Nooooooooo”

FLUSH SOUND

Me: (silence)

The smell is atrociously pungent.

Guy: “Nooooooo”
Me: (silence)

FLUSH SOUND

By this time I’m done and am washing my hands extra hard. The stall door opens, I look up in the mirror and see this small man walking out, with no intention of washing his hands, opening the door and going into the restaurant. I use my foot to keep the door open, I have no intention of touching the door knob after him… and then I see it… his sweat pants are covered in shit… of course that was the smell, and of course he didn’t make it to the washroom in time… it’s vile and disgusting.

Today, more than any other day since that strike started, I feel like that pair of sweatpants. Eventually they’ll get cleaned and get back to new, but today, they’ll go about for awhile just disgusting everyone around them for no real fault of their own.