A Cock and Ball Story….

It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper rant about the humans, but this weekend presented just too many horrid examples to ignore. Based on the behavior of most everyone, I could have sworn that we were smack dab in the middle of a full moon, but apparently that doesn’t occur until next weekend (and lord help us if this weekend was just a warm up). It started on Friday night at the FBW, with the Traveling Kidburys erupting into song for ½ an hour in the shop. Several Ripster families (as I’ve come to call the Cherry Bomb latte-swilling Roncesvalles newbies that continue to squeeze the life out of the ‘hood) and a gaggle of their 10-year-old daughters decided to stage an impromptu concert while milling about in the store. It’s a bizarre sort of newly-minted public behavior that the nurturing hordes have thrust upon the rest of us – this spectacle style of parenting where every waking moment of their children’s lives are perpetually projected outward – like the vile lovechild of Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darndest Things and an endless loop of Roncesvalles Idol. It’s obnoxious and hugely intrusive and yet strangely impervious to any form of outside intervention. To ask the warbling-wonders to cease and desist would likely cause a major neighbourhood incident and I’m almost certain that the Howard Park Public School P.T.A. would instantly convene and pass a motion blacklisting the Film Buff into bankruptcy… far earlier than the ongoing collapse of a thinking society will inevitably bring about.

No, we live and ply our trade in a particularly freakish corner of an increasingly flaky world where all sense seems to have left the building. Strange little iPeople dominate our culture and remain impervious to the beams of hate-energy emanating from the rest of us. The rise of the entitlement class seems an almost inappropriate label anymore. The entitlement gene manifests itself in so many ways and has filtered through so much of society’s strata that the term has almost ceased to mean anything. It is the topic of nearly every private conversation we have and yet it mustn’t be uttered in mixed company except in the most hushed of tones. A half-crazed, 55-plus dude wandered into the FBW last night, stood for a minute scanning the shop, looked at me and then said; “Well, at least the youth haven’t ruined this place yet like they have restaurants, all human interaction, the telephone, child-rearing and the housing market.” I burst out laughing until I realized that this raving lunatic and I shared almost carbon copy world views … and then it didn’t seem quite so humourous.

In keeping with the car-accident theme of the weekend, a technology meltdown transpired on Saturday (why is it always Saturday and never Tuesday?) at the FBW with our second video terminal losing its mind right at the opening bell, necessitating a flurry of swap outs with our backup machine and a trip to the computer shop to have a new brain installed. Of course, given the pall that hung over my very existence these last few days, the backup machine failed two hours later, requiring yet another trip to the computer shop and a furious re-swapping of old PC’s for new ones and vice-versa later that afternoon. Up and running at full computer strength by 6:30 last night, the evening was mercifully light on junior troubadours and a cast of long-time regular customers kept me from downing a full bottle of Drano after close. Other than several people with designs on bringing their dogs into the shop (FYI – you can’t do that because the Toronto Health Unit forbids live animals in places where food is served. It’s a bylaw), things went pretty smoothly.

The joy-drought continued on Sunday however, with Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) snapped in half by the person who rented it with a note inside the case explaining that “it promoted violence against women” and they decided that it needed to be destroyed. I shit you not. Thankfully, this thought-police reject didn’t rent our out-of-print copy of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, but it further reinforced the nearly-unbelievable rise in people’s proclivity to impose their will, personal views, cell phone conversations and child prodigies on everyone around them. Well, I’ve had enough of bozos like this dude and he won’t be given access to the Film Buff’s collection ever again. Period.

One of the few glimmers of hope (and the absolute high point of the weekend) was the giant white cock spray-painted on one of the FBW front windows sometime during the wee hours of Saturday night or Sunday morning. At least I can get my head around that little bit of teenaged vandalism because the rest of the world certainly confounds me. It was a pretty good likeness too, with balls and everything. 15 minutes with a scouring pad and some acetone and the most interesting recent visual on south Roncesvalles had been relegated to a distant memory. I even hesitated to remove it at first, until I considered what the Scorsese renter would do if he saw our front window festooned with a giant white woman-hating penis. Visions of Who’s That Burning Down My Store came to mind, so Donna and I erased the erection … leaving me to quietly mull over the ironic metaphor this presented for a man who smokes too much and is barely hanging on to the front face of 50.

So I found myself standing on the sidewalk in the glorious Sunday afternoon sun, surrounded by reams of Cherry Bombers milling about with their half-caff yuppucinos, perfect children, SUV strollers, and entitled puppies, staring at a giant white painted cock, proudly erect for all the world to see. I couldn’t help but consider that it was a sign from above put there by unknown forces to gently remind me that, despite my disconnect with the world around me, I needed to continue down the road of life to its natural conclusion (cancer). Through the sunlit Film Buff window, behind the freshly-painted phallic street art, I spied the same bottle of Drano that had called out to me mere hours earlier, smiled and took to furiously rubbing the giant white penis off the window… uneasy metaphors notwithstanding.

A few minutes later as we were heading home to the quiet sanctity of Segredos, I ran into Mark Askwith, one of the most interesting, accomplished and engaging residents in the entire neighbourhood (and a long-time patron of the store), and we chatted for almost 45 minutes about things near and far. My impromptu conversation with him marked the second sign from above in as many hours as to why we do what we do and it further served as the elixir I needed to get over the shite weekend I’d experienced. Another friend of mine had emailed me on Friday with a link to Christopher Hume’s recent Star column about Toronto’s many failings and I couldn’t manage to muster up much a defense for old Hogtown’s increasingly-limited merits (opting instead for the obvious suburban slag “Well, at least I don’t have to live in Burlington”), but with a few extra days to consider a more appropriate response, I would now counter with “giant white cock graffiti” and “Mark Askwith” and consider the argument won.

Blow me Calgary. T.O. is still the centre of the known universe.