ManicWorld Magazine

Toronto The “Good”

“You know that I don’t play
Streets not safe
But I never run away
Even when I’m away” -Drake, One Dance

Unfortunately, a few of my former teachers got ‘cancelled’ a few years ago; allegations of ‘sexual misconduct’ spread around social media like an Australian bushfire. The stress from dealing with the reality of the situation forced me, as well as all my old classmates, to re-evaluate things. What really was all of that?

It’s incredibly difficult to come to terms with the fact that someone you once admired misused their power for selfish reasons. That a great trauma took place right under your nose. It’s a betrayal to the entire community of impressionable teens. There’s a short mourning process that comes with facing reality. Now, I often find myself asking, ‘How do I want to remember this?’, or even if it’s all worth remembering at all.

How do I make sense of all of the moments escaping into Toronto’s system of the ravine with my stoner friends, only to be joined by cokehead bankers and homeless meth users? The valleys were once seen as a place of escape from the concert jungle into an urban forest in which one could let their psychic id run wild.  A green oasis to run away from all the stress. But now I don’t know.

However, what I do know is that I’m grateful that the city left this intricate network of creeks and woodlands undeveloped. After Hurricane Hazel hit the city in the 1950s, the government decided to protect these areas to help relieve future flooding. Like anyone who’s grown up in Toronto, I’ve fallen in love with our ravines which have now matured into a great forest. The valley has always provided me a place of shelter whenever things get too stressful at home.

The feeling of a glamorously invincible youth. I was lucky to spend the long Canadian winters hustled up in slam poetry bars behind the now demolished Honest Eds store, to scorching hot summers going to outdoor beach parties by the lifeguard station at Ashbridges Bay. The punk shows kept on going, and the weird adults kept on gifting us cocaine. Sometimes we would end the nights in the emergency room with alcohol poisoning, but somehow, we always managed to find our way back home to our parents.

That’s the thing about growing up in a city, you have to learn how to deal with a lot of creepy adults always trying to get into your space. Most of the time, it wasn’t even a sex thing, just lonely adults trying to connect with the teens in a desperate attempt to feel youthful again. It’s just plain sad. We tolerated them because they supplied us with every substance under the sun, but those of us who weren’t so impulsive always managed to draw the line and set firm boundaries. This generation wasn’t for the pleasure of the old male gaze. This was the generation of revolutionaries.

Maybe it’s all nostalgia. Maybe I yearn for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe I’m just growing up and realizing that somehow I’m both complicit in gentrification, and I’m also a victim of gentrification. It’s a real contradiction.

What I do know is that I like to look back at the past fondly. I enjoy thinking about drinking at the beach with friends. I remember that one weekend trip where we went to Montreal to check out the universities, only to spend the whole trip high out of our minds on shrooms. A group of us managed to save just enough money from babysitting and lifeguarding to afford a small vacation rental in the ‘Plateau’, neighbourhood. We stayed at this old building built with iconic limestone, which is classic for Montreal’s architectural character. To our disappointment, the apartment did not have a functional toilet, and we had to rely on the French café that was downstairs during our stay. Still, it was nice to spend a weekend being so unapologetically hedonistic.

I even remember this March breach trip where I was vacationing with my family. I was around fifteen visiting New Hampshire in rural America. I went to a hunting clothing store that was closing down and got a great deal on six different high-quality vintage flannel shirts. I was going to be rocking plaid for my classmates. Those shirts help get me through the rest of my senior year.

Maybe I just have to look back at the past with rose-coloured glasses because right now everything feels so awful. So many people I know are struggling with meth and monkeypox, it’s a real crisis in the gay scene. I guess I want that hipster dance party to come back, even if I know it wasn’t as good as I remember it being. I just yearn for a time when they blasted Lady Gaga unironically on the radio. Maybe I just want to remember the time before I ended up in the hospital, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, to be mythically great. I want my experience of growing up in a big Canadian city to mean something.

The funny thing about growing up in a city, is you don’t become an adult when you get your driver’s license, you become an adult when you discover just how common cocaine is. Mine, was during my first summer job working as a bust boy at a family- owned Greek restaurant. Boy, so many of the serves there were as high as a kite. They were always sneaking off for little breaks to snort ‘god knows what’ in the employee washroom, or to hack a whole pack of cigarettes in the musky alleyway behind the restaurant. That shocked my teenage self to my core. To this day, the realities of being employed in the service industry still confuse me.