It in the latter half of the Prairies I read some entertainment listings that informed me Toots and the Maytals would be playing in Toronto’s Phoenix roughly around the time that I’d be there. It was somewhere on the way back up across the border from New York, maybe Niagara Falls, when I realized that the timing would work out. Using a notorious online ticket agent I purchased ticket to the show as something to look forward too when I got there.

I stayed in a downtown Toronto hostel that named the rooms after Canadian celebrities. There was a portrait photo on the door to help you find your way. On man’s dorm would be a strapping male athlete’s face and one a woman’s dorm would be a smiling Television actress. I was staying in a mixed gender room with a picture of handsome woman astronaut Roberta Bondar on the door. The next most interesting thing in the hostel was a girl in the laundry room who could twist her arms completely around so her hands were facing forward again much to everyone’s disgusted delight. This place offered a free breakfast if you got down to the kitchen by 10 in the morning. A strategy to lure budget weary travelers looking always to stretch out their alternative lifestyle by another day. But at these kinds of places, when the plates are on the table, there is a big difference between what the hostel staff perceives as breakfast and what I perceive as a meal. Between idea and reality falls the crappy pancakes. A hasty combination of flour, water, sugar, an egg if you’re lucky, heaved together and burnt into the bottom of a pan by a white person with dreadlocks. Good sir, I will not wake up early for that meal.

Downstairs was a questionably ventilated basement kitchen with a gas stove. Unfortunately both of the barbecue lighters there we out of fluid, perhaps a passive-aggressive tactic to keep the place from exploding from the ground up. An affable New Zealander named Michael intervened to demonstrate it was still possible to light the gas stove by wildly flicking both lighters at once in close proximity. He didn’t have dreadlocks, but he did have one of those huge earrings shaped like a horn hanging through the lobe. Our conversations were largely all hypothetical situations involving food; wondering how our lives would be different if it was socially acceptable to wear an apron all of the time to reduce random food spillage on your clothes? Of course if that was the case aprons themselves would become fashionable and unfortunate teenagers would get jacked in the streets for their Nike smocks. Michael was a young man of twenty who’d been living at the hostel for several months. He had traveled to Canada for the long term to follow a girl and an idealized version of the cowboy life he wasn’t sure ever existed. With these outdoorsy aspirations I was confused as to why he’d decided to live downtown Toronto of all places? He shrugged and admitted that his only research of Canada was one map that had coloured lower Ontario pine green. Now he was stuck at a job cleaning up a construction sites in the thick smoggy air until he’d saved up enough money to ramble on. But he didn’t seem all that down on himself about it and instead suggested dairy-free fruit smoothies instead of self pity. We walked to nearby Kensignton market. It’s an amazingly small few blocks where it is still possible to overhear half a conversation on the phone, “Meet me at the cheese place… No the other cheese place.” We however invested in fresh strawberries, bananas, almond milk, and ice cream to make refreshing beverages that gave most of the hungover people around us the shits.

I went down to pickup my Toots and the Maytals ticket at a Ticketmaster outlet at the Skydome. When my ticket printed off it said “Concert Canceled”.  Dejected, I went to Chinatown to by grapes instead. I drifted glumly through the aisles of a grocery store. There was nothing exotically entertaining about the place. Not like the market near the Stadium Skytrain terminal in Vancouver that has living Alaskan King crabs the size of dogs selling for $20 a pound. On my way to work I’d fantasize about getting rich one day, buying a crab, and hiding it inside the industrial dishwasher so it would really startle the next person who wanted to clean the cutlery. Of course the fantasy is flawed as I don’t know how I’d managed to become rich if I still worked as a fry cook in Gastown, or why I would bother to continue working there after I’d acquired my wealth. If I actually was rich I’d probably take a massive interest in tax shelters, where as this never once crossed my mind during a hard days deep fry.

The salable dead flora and fauna that lined the this grocery store were forgettable. But there was a sign suspended from the ceiling by fishing line was a sign that said “Destroys Oneself Compensates”. Never one to question the wisdom of Eastern cultures it was still a curious setting to reinforce such a mantra. A reminder that I must be willing to adapt when my plans are ruined. Although I could also read the word “Destroys” as an instruction to tear down the foundations of my comfort zone in order to learn lessons I couldn’t previously have conceived of. There’s a certain softness to the word “Compensates” as well. It doesn’t suggest that I should vigorously succeed like so many Westernized “Win-at-all-costs!” philosophies. It’s not some blanketed Oprah-like re-affirmation of my self-esteem, it simply says I’ll get through it. Adjust then compensate. Like an outdoorsy Kiwi trapped in a concrete cannon who makes fruity smoothies instead.

And then there is the third interpretation that I finally settled on which was it was a grandiose way of warning that if you smashed a jar of pickles you would be held financially responsible for it. But really the less fancy “You break it you bought it” is an equally solid mantra when primed by the right sub-text.

That night I went to see a metal band of some sort named the Cancer Bats. They were loud, unremarkable, but the bar itself was Brit Pop themed. The contrast of metal thrashers spilling beer on framed Andy Warhol Tomato cans and head banging against psychedelic candy-swirled tables shaped like Austin Minis made me wonder if this the first venue of choice for these guys? Yet compromise or not, during that song all was well in their ear-drum challenging kingdom.