The Sad Truth

I was born in Hamilton in 1984 and for as long as I can remember I always wanted to leave the city forever.

The first house I ever lived in was on Aberdeen Ave. in the wealthier area in Hamilton. I don’t remember much, if anything, about my time there. What I do know is that my parents did not own the house we lived in but rented it. When they did buy a house it was on Cope St. north of Barton St. E. Now this area isn’t known as the wealthiest area of the city, and the house was extremely small, but what I do know is that I was nothing but happy while living there.

In 1989 my parents, more financially stable and needing more room for a family that now consisted of four people, bought a house on Somerset Ave. The house was located on a block with many children when we moved in and quite soon I had plenty of new friends both from the neighbourhood and from my new school.

Things were generally fine for me growing up there. My parents were, and still are, fantastic. I was brought up in a fairly lenient environment and but I knew my boundaries. School was ok, I had my run-ins with local bullies and what not, but most kids do. My life was pretty average.

When it came time for me to go to high school I left the neighbourhood. The local school, Scott Park Secondary, was going to be closing and I would have to go to Delta. My parents thought if their son was going take the bus to a high school why not a better one?

I fought this for a while. Why did I have to leave the neighbourhood and the friends I already knew to go to high school? It was looking like I was going to Westmount Secondary School, which is located on the complete opposite end of the city where I lived. “You want me to spend an hour on the bus just to go to high school,” I complained to my parents. Yes, they did.

So when I was 14 years old I started bussing up to the West Mountain everyday for high school. Around this time I also started really hating the city of Hamilton.
To get to Westmount I would have to take the King bus to Gore Park right in the middle of downtown Hamilton. So on my way I would have to sit on the bus and deal with the “unwashed” who used the Hamilton Street Railway. I would pass the run down area of town before I entered a new run down area of Hamilton just before we reached the ghost town that is the downtown core.

When I reached downtown I had to transfer busses and take the College bus which stopped at the local community college, Mohawk, before my bus dropped me off a mere five blocks from my high school.

On this part of the trip I learned two things:
a) the “Mountain” is a fucking dull place to grow up
b) Mohawk College kids weren’t as bright as I thought they’d be


So now I had become aware of two places in the city that I was generally unaware of before high school and I wasn’t impressed with either of them.

During my high school years I made friends with people who lived on the Mountain. To them I was “Cameron the kid who lives ‘downtown.’” Through them I was introduced to the Limeridge Mall area and the East Mountain. Again, I was not impressed. I was starting to think that “maybe this town is just really boring.”

By the time I was 17 I knew I had to leave Hamilton forever.

When I was 19 I moved to London to attend the University of Western Ontario. I was really excited to move to a college town. I figured if this were a place where people moved to attend places of higher learning then I would get to meet all types of interesting people. Well, I was wrong.

As it turns out I met all types of uninteresting people during my time in London. By the end of my junior year I was tearing my hair out at the chance to move back to Hamilton. I was already coming home just about every weekend to visit my family and friends. For my senior year I transferred to McMaster University in Hamilton.

My senior year was a disaster to say the least. I wasn’t motivated. I was living with my parents again. Most of my friends, not surprisingly, weren’t living in Hamilton. By the time April rolled around the school year was over and I didn’t have a degree to show for it. Obviously this had to be the fault of Hamilton. I was being suffocated here! I needed out! The people are dumb! The town smells like shit! There’s nothing to fucking do! So in order to get out I got a job in Cambridge that I would commute to and I would stay at my parents on Somerset Ave. while I saved my money.

My game plan was that I would work for two years or so and then go back to school in Toronto. It’s where I wanted to be anyway. Toronto would solve everything!

Two years passed and I left my job and moved to Toronto. Things were good. I knew the city from my many trips here. I had some really close friends living here. Yada, yada, yada.

I was so happy with myself that I never went home to visit. In between September and Christmas I went home once, for Thanksgiving (a turkey dinner will always get me home). If anyone wanted to see me they’d have to come here. To Toronto, the home of the intelligent, witty and interesting!

But a funny thing happened after Christmas. I really started to miss certain things about the city. I started going home again recently and was nothing but happy when I came back to Hamilton. I would go into town and go out with my parents and things just seemed to be more pleasant there.

Everything was more relaxed. If someone bumped into you there was a good chance you’d hear “I’m sorry about that” from the person.

Soon enough I started thinking about things I missed and they were all Hamilton things! I missed going drinking in Hess! A place I once regarded as a shithole that only jocks and whores went drinking. I missed boring nights driving my car, which I scrapped when I moved to Toronto, aimlessly on the Mountain. Worst of all I missed the fucking people. My god! I miss Hamiltonians!

Holy shit, I think that I miss Hamilton.

My Secret Love(s)

This might be only me but are there things that you really like but don’t really tell anyone?

You aren’t really ashamed that you like these things but you’d rather not tell the whole world that you do love them. These days some people, it seems, are really concerned with what other people think about their choices in any topic. There is no worse offender than myself. I don’t beg for the approval of others, I’d just rather be known for liking reasonably cool things.

I am this shallow.

Well I want this to change. I want to tell people about some of the things that I like that might not be the coolest, or best, things in the world and it’s going to start right now. It’s time to come clean.

Let’s start in the world of music. I love music. It’s the one thing I love above all other things. I would rather be listening to my iPod than talk to a person. It’s not even close. I would have my headphones glued to my ears for all time if such a thing were possible.

I am also very opinionated about music. I will scold a person, at the very least in my mind, if they have what I deem to be bad taste in music. I’ll tell a Lady Gaga fan that I liked her routine more when it was done in 1983 by Madonna. I’ll tell a Fall Out Boy fan to quit their faux “emo” phase and listen to Morrissey or Rites of Spring instead. Any country fan will be told how much I love country, but none of that CMT crap. I’ll take George Jones and Steve Earle thank you very much! But truth be told, I admire the fact that they can come out and tell me why they like these bands. I never do this.

One of my all time favourite albums is Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair. It’s one of the most personal albums that I’ve ever heard. This is partly why it made it so hard for me to articulate why I love this album. Personal and confessional lyrics are what I look for above all else when I listen to music but the majority of music I listen to comes from a male perspective. However with this album that all changed and I could emphasize with Liz Phair’s problems with her “Johnny” and “Joe.” After all, a person being dicked around is something that happens to males and females alike.

Now having said how much I love personal lyrics I’ll move to the complete opposite. R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet, or as I call it “God’s gift to the 21st Century.”
When I was in high school, pre-Trapped, I had a friend who claimed to love R. Kelly. His love was apparently not ironic. He dug the lyrics, he dug the beats, and he dug the cornrows. Needless to say he was on the receiving end of a lot of insults. One day while I was in his car he played for me the twenty minute extended, “operatic,” version of “I Believe I Can Fly.” It was the worst free car ride I had in my entire life.

In 2009 I saw Trapped in the Closet for the first time and it changed my entire perspective of R. Kelly.

A 22 chapter “hip-hopera” where R. Kelly sings every part? A video where every character has a gun pointed in their face at least once? A midget hiding in a cupboard? R. Kelly rhyming “dresser” with “berretta?” Rosie the Nosey Neighbour?

I want all of that!

When I’m asked what my all time favourite move is by people I’ll usually say Ghostbusters or Boogie Nights but the true answer is Trapped in the Closet.

In 1984, a whole 19 years before R. Kelly dropped that bomb on an unsuspecting public, another batshit insane musician made a film (and soundtrack) that now hovers near the top of my favourites list. That man was Prince and that film (and soundtrack) was Purple Rain.

I love everything about Purple Rain but it’s not something that I go around broadcasting to everyone. Sure, none of the “actors” in the movie were good but I can put that movie on any day of the week and watch it. Just the thought of Morris Day & the Time playing “The Walk” makes me smile. Also, a movie where I get to look at Apollonia and Wendy for about two hours will always get my vote.

However, the real reason I love this movie so much is Prince himself. Everything he does in this movie is awesome. The guitar solo at the end of “Let’s Get Crazy” is amazing. His purple motorcycle is badass. The best part, for me though, is the final concert at the end of the film. Prince & the Revolution rip through “Purple Rain,” “I Would Die 4 U,” and “Baby I’m a Star” in succession. During the last song, in mid solo, Prince basically jacks off his guitar which then sprays water all over the crowd. It’s amazing.

Now I could go on and on about other things that I absolutely love that no one else really knows about (like the fact that I love Back to Black by Amy Winehouse) but it would really get tedious. So for now I’ll just stop there.

I’m sure sooner or later I’ll find some more stuff to write about.

A Monumental Test

I moved to Toronto last September from Hamilton, Ontario. It was something I had always wanted to do.

I can remember when I was young, around age 10, thinking about how amazing it would be to live in a city with both a Major League Baseball and National Hockey League team. I would go to games all the time, befriend people in the stands, and just generally revel in the fact that I was this lucky.

Of course when I entered my teenage years all of this changed. I noticed that going to sporting events cost a fortune. Who can afford $300 tickets to the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Around this time I also became increasingly disgusted with sports fans. Every one of them, I thought, sounded even dumber than the last. I still loved sports as a teen (and I still do) but when I went I grew more disgusted with sports fans.

As a teen and into my 20’s I did not grow to hate Toronto because I thought it was filled with dumbass sports fans, far from it. What I did was learn to love it for something else: its hipness.

I wanted to move here because this is where all the cool shit was in Canada. There was the Toronto International Film Festival, Kensington Market, Lee’s Palace, and an unimaginable wealth of artistic talent within the city. I figured if I moved here I’d be likely to catch an amazing concert on a Tuesday and go to an art gallery on a Wednesday, something that simply wasn’t going to happen in Hamilton.

So in 2009 I moved here. It was great. I got a shitty little apartment on Parliament and Howard St. in St. James Town. Life was great.

Around November of that year a new annoyance hit me: Yuppies.

I would walk the down town area and would almost go blind with rage. “Who the fuck do these people think they are,” I would ask myself almost daily. Every day I would see them wearing their clothing that I knew they could barely afford. Clothing they bought to look presentable in the offices of a company that was most likely destroying something that I love. I’d see these vermin in bars either networking with other douche bags or drunkenly hitting on women and looking like potential date rapists.

I hated them. I hated what they did and what they stood for.

As any of my friends would attest, I was not silent in my loathing of these people. I would tell anyone who would listen about how much hatred I directed at them. It went so far that I refused to cut my hair and shave my face just to be the anti-Yuppie. “I will not be a part of your lifestyle,” I told myself.

By the end of November I hit my anti-Yuppie high water mark. I decided that from this point on I would never, ever, go south of Queen Street and into the financial district.

It wasn’t difficult. If you don’t work in one of those financial offices you can easily avoid that area of the city. Days, weeks, months passed and, except for rides on the subway, I avoided Yuppies like they carried an airborne and contagious strand of cancer.

I felt stress and anger, for the most part, melt away. Sure, I would still complain about Yuppies from time to time to my friends in Hamilton but for the most part I was comfortable.

Two weeks ago I had grown so comfortable that I decided that it was time to finally cut my hair and shave for the first time since August or September. I went to a barber shop on Parliament St.; I knew I wouldn’t find a Yuppie in there. It looked great and I no longer looked like a hobo. Maybe I was wrong, maybe these people don’t deserve all the hatred that I’ve projected upon them. Actually, if I put a nice suit on and maybe carried a briefcase I might have been able to pass as one.

So yesterday I called my friend and asked her if she wanted to do something after work. She works in the financial district but I don’t hold that against her. She said yes and said she’d take me out for dinner.

At this point I did something drastic (well, for me), I said I would meet her outside her office when she was done work. I was so confident that I could now walk down into the Lion’s Den and not have a complete meltdown.

Around 5:20pm I began my walk from the Eaton’s Centre on Yonge and Queen St. towards her office on York and Adelaide. I was so confident that nothing would upset me that I decided to take the long way and walk down to King St. past the Toronto Stock Exchange.

“Surely, I have to be strong enough for this by now,” I thought.

I walk down to Bay and King St. where the Toronto Stock Exchange is located. I smell something odd. It’s a sweet smell, but it’s not something I’m used to on a day to day basis. I took a look around to see where the smell is coming from and I couldn’t believe my eyes. A stereotype had come to life right in front of my face.

There I was face to face with a man in his mid-40 to early 50’s wearing a navy blue, two-buttoned suit and a black overcoat. He was holding a copy of a financial magazine in one hand and in the other a large cigar that he was smoking.

I couldn’t believe it. I had seen people like this on television and in the movies but I didn’t think people like this existed. He was a fictional character come to life. He looked like Gordon Gecko.

This was a huge chance for me to blow up. This guy would have made me pull my hair out just two months ago. What I did next astonished me; I didn’t get angry. I simply chuckled and shrugged my shoulders and kept walking.

One small step towards normalcy!