Train ride - Feb 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometime earlier this year, I pulled a Sheldon Cooper, (no this is not going to be about TBBT and its’ fandom), and rode an express train rather than a bus, through the GTA. The impression? The express train was fast, naturally, and quite comfortable to sit in; but the view outside was something else: I never realized just how downtrodden the GTA, and especially its’ outskirts, can be. Everywhere I looked, there was desolation, emptiness, and graffiti; the latter were certainly colorful, but there was no one and nothing to appreciate them, and given their proximity to the railroad tracks, I wonder if the graffiti artists were paid to draw the artwork in question, in order to decorate the scenery around the tracks. If so, it did not exactly work, as for such a desolate place, the tracks certainly had a lot of garbage around them.

No, seriously, I kid you not – everywhere we rode, (in a straight line, true, but still), there was garbage and trash – on tracks, next to tracks, on the streets next to the railroad, there it was. Again, there were no people to manifest it per se, but it was there already. If ‘The Last of Us’ or some similar franchise wanted to shoot a scene there, or even several, the place was right for the shooting: empty streets, dead vegetation, (since it is February – the end of winter), no animal life, and buildings, covered in graffiti by people, who’re long gone from this place, apparently. This scenery goes all the way into Toronto’s downtown, BTW.

Now, the downtown of the city where I live – it is a different story. It is a bustling metropolis, or at least it attempts to – the U.S. cities, such as NYC or Washington D.C. are much grander and bigger than it is…but their outskirts are the same story: see the paragraphs above. It is the same mess, although more spread-out, proportionally. The city of Buffalo, located in the New York state, however, is not in the league of the bigger U.S. cities, and is just as bad as Toronto is, with a greater crime rate, proportionally. Isn’t real life grand?

Back to Toronto… so my family lives in the outskirts of the city, which is proportionally greener than the downtown is… at least during the warmer half of the year. Right now, at the end of winter, there is no greenery at all, and, admittedly, the sight of bare tree/shrub branches, black against the still-light evening sky is decidedly disturbing and scary for the soul. At least the downtown is still illuminated by artificial lights, even though the winter holidays are over. Toronto really does go for the entire metropolis that never sleeps look – good for it. Anything else?

Yes, the wildlife. In Toronto’s outskirts/suburbs, where we live, one can usually see some type of wild/feral animal or bird, even in winter, even if it is just the rock pigeon or the grey squirrel, (which are predominantly black-colored in Toronto). There are also the red-tailed hawks that hunt the pigeons, (though with mixed success), as well as gulls, house sparrows, lately – some of the local songbird species, so there is wildlife. In downtown, there is not even them, just humans, and sometimes their pets, (but mostly not). Again, it is depressing and kind of sterile. No wonder that those American Apocalypse/dystopia stories tend not to show any sort of wildlife in their narrative – the American society does not really have a place for it. Even GM, whose Westeros is notably different from the RL planet Earth, but who is also British rather than American, has some sort of animals in his novels, even if they’re just window dressing at best. The same can be said about another British author – the late and great J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Middle-Earth works – all of them, BTW – are decidedly anti-industrialist. His villains – Morgoth and Sauron - hate everything natural, and their domains – Angband, Utumno, Mordor – are devoid of natural wildlife and vegetation; by contrast, the domains of the ‘good guys’, such as Galadriel, are often lush and green. The dwarves, it should be noted, are more ambiguous: their best kingdom, Moria, fell to the Balrog because the dwarves ‘dug too greedily, dug too deeply’, (or something to that effect), and upset the natural balance.

…Mind you, in the original novels, the Balrogs were depicted differently than in modern culture: rather than stereotypical demons, with hooves and horns, the Balrog from the novels was little more than a featureless shadow, sometimes wreathed with dark fires, sometimes not, but always deadly. Gandalf killed him all the same though, but we digress.

Well no, not really. My point was that Tolkien did not care too much for cities or industrialism, and his Middle-Earth works reflect that. GM is not as extreme in his series, but he also does not seem to be too fond of the cities; whereas American novels tend to be urban, as is the rest of the American mass media – it is a difference. After riding around Toronto outside, the reasons behind that American outlook has become somewhat clearer for me, that is all. Real life sucks, you know?

This is it for now, see you all soon.