May 2, 2005

In the category of never before done by yours truly, the province of Ontario is to my right, I have a lily in a pot by my feet and a crying 1 year old to my left.

I have been travelling for an hour. The train is whistling, which I hear over my headphones. Daddy is hugging the one year old, who has stopped crying and is sticking his fingers in Dadas mouth.

Now I am in a white birch wood. There are large pools of water at the base of the trees. The nimbus around the distant trees is a reddish green, hard to describe, red oustide with an overlay of pale sap green.

The sun is out again, some skycrapers in the distance are killing the effect. Southern Ontario is certainly not a pristine wildernes.

Here's something I wrote before I realized that because I got bumped to first class I would be able to blog. This is from just outside Toronto:

The train is two feet away from the edge of the lake. Waves are drifting up against the window. The jetties are arabesques of coloured pebbles in silver water, the lifeguard chair just a reminder of verticality and chemical tones. Destroyer is on my headphones, the guitar crunches kindly over smoothness in my spirit. In an instant the trees mask the beach and than part to reveal largish suburban homes one after another in rows of ugly progress and possession. I think about how much happier people would be if they had quantitively more desserted beach to stare at then tract housing.

I feel so weird. Usually I just stare out the windows of trains wishing I could describe the scenery/ my emotions of going and coming and the fricking toronto to montreal corridor in an art project or something... If I had a digital camera I could be doing this for real....

but I can't produce and view/process at the same time it's schizophrenic. it was better writing into my notepad.

Also it is better if there are some places (like trains) where I am not able to stick my head in a 14 inch monitor and ignore the outside world. I already feel like a byte travelling on a tube in a packet full of information - I don't need this much motion.

Well still, I did it.

Now I am going to stare at the landscape and listen to the baby, who is making little blrrrblrr noises and spitting out his dum dum over and over.

Oh we just passed some crufty looking white cows with curling fleecy hair on a high bank close enough to the train that we could have have touched and high enough up that they staring down at the passengers. The sun is slanting over everything now and the colours are crisp and direct. The cows were lit from the left and they had a glow to them. To be honest, I have never thought of cows as being noble before... The clouds are high cumulous. Baby is freak out city, hates the dum dum, hates the soft book, likes the little yellow dragon with blue plastic loops to play with.

Southern Ontario is never really name-dropped as a scenic drive, but it's good to watch evening fall from a train. All natures colours are coreographed by motion, lime green and yellow fields with fresh black mud fade into a burgundy and navy sumac grove, an aluminum outbuilding turns mint-green with the skys reflection which cleans the pallette a little. One shed is contructed using part of an ancient sign, the words "Fall Caring" painted in ornate typography.

It's been raining often, so small lakes have been deposited in all the fields, and all the groves are blooming out of swamps for the time being. I see a piicnic table on an atoll under a stand of birch. The air doesn't get mistier in the evenings in ontario it gets clearer and clearer and then everything turns blue and then it's dark.

Okay I am stopping this, real-time blogging from a moving train. I wish I could be saying bllrblrbrll over and over again, drooling, while sitting on someones lap. Is it wrong to be jealous of the attention babys get, just for having big eyes and no teeth. I really like the brrbrlr noise, basically it's a very melodic raspberry.

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