Sillies (Not a Marxist Post)

My lovely friend Tori wrote me THE BEST letter not long ago. Its arrival to my flat in London was horribly and inexplicably delayed so the anticipation was THE WORST. Here is an excerpt:

“Your blog has too many adjectives, metaphors, and political ponderings. How about you send me more mail with your blog entries tailored to my specifications? In these entries you shall: Tell me about the best and the worst days, about British ladies, and silly foreign observations. I want the dumbed-down sillies—that’s what summer’s all about!”

So, I will get the political ponderings out of the way. These ones are kind of important. (Don’t worry Tori, it all leads to sillies!)

London experienced its worst case of mass urban violence in decades with the recent riots that ignited in North London and spread not only to the rest of the city but to all of England as well. People died, people lost their homes and businesses, buildings were burnt down, millions of pounds of damages were reported, and England’s jails and justice system are clogged up at unprecedented levels after mass arrests and laid charges.

And this shit came out of fucking nowhere. Eat your heart out Toronto G20.

I won’t be taking sides on the ongoing argument trying to pinpoint the ambiguous, underlying catalysts to these riots that are undoubtedly symptomatic of deeper issues. Right-wingers argue that young people’s moral compasses are decaying, and that the violence is “meaningless.” Left-wingers say the blame should be directed at the lack of a “culture of responsibility” because of increasing privatisation or elimination of public-sector services and the subsequent destruction to community. One is more right than the other, but they’re both flawed. Without suggesting the violence was legitimate, because it clearly wasn’t, the former analysis neglects the bigger, hidden problems and trivializes rioters’ experiences, while the latter argument objectifies those experiences.

It was revolt without rebellion, seemingly meaningless but why? Because the rioters live in a world in which no meaning is defined for them—and that in itself is meaningful. Disenfranchised, alienated, and subconsciously at the breaking point, the rioters could either be British Tory capitalism’s casualties, or spontaneously take the opportunity for irresponsible violence to express their dissatisfaction. The City and Canary Wharf, London’s financial districts, remained unscathed. It was local, beat-down neighbourhoods, the rioters’ very own communities, that got it bad. Tube stations closed because of fires, local businesses destroyed and windows smashed, flats and shops burned to the ground. People beaten, mugged, and some even killed—murdered. Why did they attack their own communities? Because that choice they were given only had two options, not a third one. I saw it happen: The rioters hit my street, the very place where I lived. I saw them gather, throw rocks through windows, destroy all the stores I frequent, and run from the police. These riots are as such more meaningful to me than had I merely heard about them second hand on the other side of the Atlantic. Those fuckers even got my library. They saw “Books” and thought, “No, we don’t like those.”


The bankers and the politicians stayed out of the mess. It became a fight between minorities: Muslims and blacks either on one side or the other, and middle-class shop owners struggling to stay afloat versus teens living paycheque to paycheque in council homes (government-owned flats subsidized to low-income residents). I stood within 20 feet or so of about a dozen men, all dressed in black, none of them Caucasian, all of them young, and most of them wearing bandanas and holding weapons, such as bats, throwing rocks at a store-front window just around the corner from where I lived. They saw riot police approaching from the distance, dressed head to toe in armour, holding shields and batons, and ran across the street behind the area’s local council house, the building where they had previously been congregating in front of earlier. We walked by the riot police as they went to chase the men.

It was night, and there were only three riot police; resources, no matter how abundant, were simply spread too thin, mostly because the police had so little time to prepare. There was no crowd of people taking photos or videotaping the event, no nearby media or journalists, no feeling of “security” as long as you stayed off to the side and didn’t partake, a feeling that is usually prevalent in most traditional riots, which amount to nothing more than standoffs between upper-middle-class kids and hundreds of riot police. Fuck I’ll say it: I was legitimately afraid. I snapped less than five photos of nothing more than a collection of broken windows before my flatmates and I quickly headed inside following our encounter with the masked troublemakers. They weren’t fighting police and they weren’t attacking big businesses; they were attacking each other and their own. Fucking chaos. Reports of random beatings were popping up all over the city. Nothing was stopping the ones my flatmates and I encountered from beating our asses if they bothered to turn and see us—we were potential victims as much as anyone else.

Pointing the finger at “meaningless violence” and toughening up law and order, or making accusations at neoliberal-style politics, doesn’t change anything. What is needed is reflection. Look back and create a third option for the disenfranchised to turn illegitimate violence into legitimate action. Here we find a silver lining: What can the riots teach us about ourselves?

Ultimately none of us have walked in the shoes of the rioters, many of whom are struggling to navigate through an often already violent culture clash—and within hugely unfavourable economic circumstances. Although it’s probably too dismissive, it’s also probably not incorrect, as a generalization at least, that they attacked their own communities because they didn’t feel they were getting anything back. They couldn’t pursue that third option: hope.

This post isn’t meant to be a political essay on the riots. Instead, I want the preliminary analysis above to prelude my thoughts on “sillies.” If summer’s all about ’em, I want to explore why (besides the obvious reasons).

Throw around as much rhetoric as you want about a lack of a “culture of responsibility”—as much as we are all just mirror images of the environment around us, when that environment throws you in the trash, you can’t give in the towel. After all, you’ll need it to clean off your newfound shit jacket.

I spent the week prior to the riots in Paris, with my friends Andrew Basso and Connor Low, who I know from back home. For Basso and C. Low, travelling through continental Europe on a two-month bicycling trip, Paris was their last stop, and I was invited to join them for a week of hanging out before they headed back to Canada. We sublet a one-bedroom apartment in North Central Paris, biked everywhere in and around the city, including a 50-k.m. trek back and forth between Paris and Versailles, got awesome and matching friendship tattoos, that we’ll probably regret, to mark the experience, and would then spend our nights drinking wine while watching every episode of the first few seasons of Sex and the City. Intimate, eh?


This intimacy inevitably caused friction. One heated encounter between Basso and I had him accusing me of being too overbearing at times with my outgoing personality, while I fired back that such an accusation was both overcritical and unfair, the former because he has a judgemental tendency and the latter because I accept him despite his flaws. In the end, Basso was being reasonable to ask for compromise instead of perfection, and I was probably right in my assumption that he was being overcritical. We both had merits to our arguments, and we eventually reconciled, but I couldn’t help but wonder about my place amongst others. Even when we feel we belong, do we ever actually do? How secure is our place not only within friends, but within whole networks and communities? Are we more vulnerable than we ever think we are?

I don’t have it nearly as bad as the London rioters—nor am I pretending to—but the overarching principle is the same: Sometimes you think you belong, and then a backlash happens. Some days you find out you’re in a world without meaning, a nowhere land, a Beckett end game. Sartre said hell is other people. Well, I don’t want to live a life in which it’s fruitless to chase my other self. The truth is I’ll probably never properly fit into my group of friends the way I think I do in my head (the way we all think we do), but I’m okay with that because I’ll stick it out if only because I have hope for the impossible: Full inclusivity.

I hold onto this hope because of sillies. It’s the sillies that teach us how to live, how to chase our other selves. They are usually poetic, almost certainly fleeting; sillies are the unreality of the world we live in that keep us sane and provide us with the possibilities for our dreams. Without sillies we cannot learn how to live. That sounds so odd: learning how to live. Isn't living something one does already? Not without sillies.

Get ready for 'em:

They started off with bad Ray Romano impressions in front of Parisian beauties from whom I ordered baguettes. From there the three of us had our caricatures done in front of the Louvre. We looked funny. Where the Mona Lisa was robbed exactly a century ago yesterday, the thief returned to steal our aesthetic dignity. That silly man. We biked to Versailles and my lungs hurt because it was a lot of breathing. But it paid off in the end so that was nice. The French suburbs in between the cities were neat to bike through. Very pretty. We had Bordeaux, shiraz, and pastis every night while we watched Carrie oscillate between Big and Aidan, Charlotte try to have sex with a man who can’t have sex very well, Samantha have sex with lots of men who have sex very well, and booed Miranda for the times she didn’t give Steve a chance. I like Steve! The others say I was more of a Skipper, but they’re fools. I returned to England and British girls weren’t fooled by my fake British accent nor were they impressed by my real Canadian accent. Of course I try to charm them with my voice sounding like a defective dog whistle which Basso and C. Low had told me in Paris is only funny in small doses. Whatever, those boys didn’t even know when they had shit on their jackets. Some of those Brits are cute but they all think they’re smart. Most of them are because they avoided me. It was a beautiful Australian girl, however, that caught my attention on a dance floor in Oxford Circus. She was a model. She's from Babe City, Australia, which was nice because usually I have to settle for girls from Babe City’s suburbs. Anyways, “You have no idea what I’m going to do to you tonight,” she whispered in my ear. “OOhhh that’sss iinteeressting,” I responded like a puzzled puppy. Whatever, I was too drunk to pursue her and just grabbed her number instead. I then went to graveyards and visited some guy.


Had a time at Greenwich. I saw a clock and some line on the ground. I started talking to a beautiful English girl on a bench next to the clock but the lack of time zones must have done something to her internal clock. She was really cute and good conversation but had a boyfriend. No good.



I had an even better view at Hampstead Heath. I saw it all: Arsenal's stadium, the Gherkin, Canada Way, the Shard, the Eye. Woah.


Got together with a few friends from work during my last week on the job. We went to Millers, the local pub where we went after work at least three or four times a week. Rob was kind enough to buy me a really nice cocktail shaker as a going-away present. It was fun, although I don't think anything can top the night Rob, Ben, Simona, and I proceeded from Millers after work to go dancing at The Lexington, near Angel. I think Ellie was there too, and maybe Valeria and Kinza. In any event it was just the four of us that made it to Ben's apartment just south of Whitechapel at around 3 a.m., where we drank more and debated about whether the drugs we found in the cab were coke or heroin. Drunk and high, the only other thing I remembered was nearly passing out on the patio with Simona, while she was complaining I was too much of a romantic. That's okay, I ruled her out long ago after she refused to indulge me in a debate of the most awesome-est Disney movie. It worked on Australian girl so I was content enough.

I went to a museum and met a funny-looking Japanese man dressed in torn clothes and was a few thousand-years-old. He didn't talk much. Then an exotic Latvian girl I started talking to at the National Gallery agreed to get drinks with me the next night, which was my last night in London. We went to a pub in Camden and we both ordered Lolitas, premium vodka cocktails. I know, right? Lolita: it was a sign. This girl was lyrical, after all. Then it was off to more drinks with Jackie, a uni friend, and her friends. Friend village. A bottle of wine at another Camden pub then I was back in Whitechapel. Georgie boy, flatmate extraordinaire, got me discounted drinks, along with good flat buddy Chicky (Mike!) and George’s mate Sam, at the pub Georgie works at near the Liverpool Tube. I had a lot of whiskey shoved in front of me. Too much. Back at the place, where engines roared, Georgie boy, his girl Georgia, Chicky, and I were joined by our flat besties Alice and Henry for an all-night session of drunk board games. I stumbled out of the toilet, struggling to hold it all in, passing in and out, and my packing became a group game of who can stuff my stuff in bags the fastest at 4 a.m. Easiest packing ever! Except for the next morning when my shit was being searched as the result of one of those chavs stuffing my corkscrew in my carry-on. Security had a laugh! And that was London.

See? Sillies. You have a smile on your face already. That’s how I navigate through my life. People, friends, times, alcohol, and loud, compensating behaviour with which I carry on because, well, it’s just how I do. It's probably also the reason I have committed to grad school as the next stage in my life. Absolutely poor decision making right there.

The rioters don’t have it easy, and their victims didn’t deserve the destruction and the agony they were given. Everybody lost something that night. People’s lives became destroyed because the rioters attacked their own communities—they were attacking a part of themselves. To reflect critically of the situation, both us and themselves need to present them with a third option, the choice that is neither sublimation or reckless revolt, but chasing hope, the impossible. Tomorrow.

Until then, sillies.

I had a time London. Russia, 2013, here I come! (I am determined to continue my tradition of visiting Olympic cities the summer before they host the Olympics because I go for the pre-party!)

Journey Rock

“Leap of faith, bro!” exclaimed the sarcastic, young hip boy, in mocking Søren Kierkegaard, in a drawn-out, high-toned voice. Everyone laughed, and I exerted a placating chuckle (although his delivery I found legitimately funny). Is this to what ethics has been reduced?

There is a spectre haunting England at the moment, and yes, it has to do with ethics. Even before the exposure of the News of the World scandal, I felt it every time I went into work, as the restaurant “office gossip” heated up recently ever since a pair of beautiful girls filled employment vacancies (the one pictured below with me stole my shades; see, these girls are trouble). A subsequent series of drunken, drug-filled escapades, some of which I was involved in, sparked jealousy and rumours of “who fucked whom?” Subsequent battle lines were drawn: nice guys vs. assholes. Shhiiitttt.


My own internal battle lines were inevitably created, leading to many (drunken) introspective evenings. Why am I always the nice guy? It never does anything but fuck me over.

I get reminded daily of the importance of ethics every time I go to work. A British film entitled Brighton Rock, starring Helen Mirren, created a large buzz in the U.K., especially, as I have been told, when it was released theatrically earlier this year. To advertise its more recent DVD release, a large promotional poster for the film is plastered in several Tube stations, including the Bethnal Green station, where I catch the Central line to go to work before transferring onto the Northern line at Bank. Five days a week I encounter the murderous glare of anti-hero Pinkie Brown—a chilling reminder to us of the inner conflicts we all share. Pinkie’s gaze is a haunting assurance that he knows my secrets, the inner ethical conflicts we all think are unique to us, but Pinkie knows better. His look tells me he can see into my soul, and that I am really he. It’s the scariest thought in the world: What if I turn into Pinkie Brown? What’s scary is that it’s not only plausible, but it is something I am actively struggling against at the very moment.

I have yet to see Brighton Rock, nor its original 1947 version. However, Pinkie’s glare does strike a chord with me, as I have read the book of the same name on which both films were based, written by the eminent Graham Greene. A household name here in Britain, Greene is one of the best-known British writers of the 20th century, notably for his ability to mutually receive critical and popular acclaim. Most writers who even manage to become successful only do so by getting one; he got both.

Brighton Rock is ostensibly a crime thriller, but its “bread and butter” is ethics. At the apex of the novel are its religious theme and a seeming contradiction, at least by traditional standards. The secular character stands up for what’s right, while the two die-hard Catholics (one of whom takes “die hard” too literally) consistently transgress (one more so than the other, but you can guess which one). Pinkie has all the fun and gets the best of both worlds. Why am I always the nice guy?


Ethics does of course have more far-reaching implications, as was demonstrated to me by a fantastic event I recently attended in London. Marxism 2011 was this year’s weekend-long annual instalment of the Marxist-inspired political and cultural festival at the University of London campus. Using the term “Marxism” in its broadest sense, presumably to be inclusive and appeal to anyone who considers them self to be at least marginally left of centre, this year’s theme was “Austerity, Resistance, Alternatives.” It featured public forums, lectures, readings, performances, bookshops, information kiosks, you name it, all organized under several sub-themes, such as the Arab revolutions; anti-racism and anti-sexism; austerity and the economic crisis, particularly as they pertain to Britain; contemporary British politics; the Israel-Palestine conflict; environmentalism; the role of anarchy; and Marxist philosophy.


A few days earlier, I also attended a debate and forum I was invited to at the University of London’s Birkbeck College about the role of critical theory in contemporary society, featuring internationally recognized professors Drucilla Cornell, Costas Douzinas, and Slavoj Žižek. Being in the same room with Žižek and hearing him speak in person was for me like having sex for the first time. There was a lot of anticipation and ignorance about what to expect, a lot of confusion and bewilderment, and many awkward moments, but it was also incredibly stimulating. I was going to ask him a question, but I got too intimated after Žižek roared at a poor young bloke asking him about praxis: “YOU ARE WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE LEFT!” I never heard a professor swear so much to his audience, nor treat them—or his colleagues—with such hostility. Meanwhile, people were going up to him asking for his autograph, and he smiled and flirted with two young pretty girls in particular, before making an offhand joke to the audience in reference to recent mainstream gossip about him having a romantic fling with Lady Gaga. He was a god to them. Why am I always the nice guy?

As much as Cornell held her own with her intriguing argument that the spirit of resilience and community in many politically and socially tattered South American countries is exemplary of what she calls “living communism,” the stars of the show became Douzinas and Žižek. They engaged in a heated, at times personal, debate about praxis in the current crises in Greece and Libya. Douzinas argued that they are at least symbolically significant because of the emancipatory results represented by abstract aesthetics. Žižek’s response was, “So fucking what? Getting together in the town square to hug it out ain’t going to change shit here in the real world.” Douzinas became the man who likes to hold hands. Žižek became the man who thinks holding hands is for naïve suckers. Nice guy vs. asshole.


In the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, “The Binding of Isaac,” God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, and Abraham keeps his anxiety hidden as he proceeds with the sacrifice, achieving infinite resignation, having faith in the impossible, that everything will be alright, even and especially against God’s seeming will. Sure enough, God intervenes at the last moment, revealing to Abraham that the sacrifice was only a test of Abraham’s fear of God. Although, in the final instance, and regardless of the context (i.e., secular or religious), I find this kind of transgression of the universal, at least symbolically, to be a problematic catalyst for violence, Kierkegaard explored Abraham's anxiety in his Fear and Trembling, and the principle of Kierkegaard’s thought here is worth considering. The man of faith believes in the impossible. As Kierkegaard says, “One became great through expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became greater than all.”


What was I and everyone else who attended that Marxism festival really thinking? Were we really naïve enough to think we would make a substantial dent in the current political and social climate, or was it just one giant, weekend-long circle jerk? In truth it was neither (although I have no doubt there were some attendees who legitimately believed in the former and consequently ended up belonging to the latter). For me at least, I didn’t go there expecting, nor wanting, a revolution—whatever that is. I also felt incredibly humbled to be in the presence of so many great individuals who had such passion for what they believed in. I felt inferior, not only as a supposed intellectual or activist, but as a human being too. Why can’t I be as passionate as the modest PhD candidates who took the time out of their day to lead group discussions on Marxist philosophy, showing incredible patience and understanding towards those who weren’t on the same level of knowledge and intelligence as they were? Why can’t I be as passionate as the DYI publishers providing journals and literature on the University of London’s main courtyard? Why can’t I be as passionate as the political and feminist activists who just didn’t show up to dress the statues of men outside the university’s main building in subversive clothing, but would actually go out and continue their activism on the next day and the day after that, going to rallies and demonstrations I otherwise wouldn’t be bothered to attend?


These people (well, most of them) know they’re not going to change the world into a utopia, but they fight on regardless, while I stay in most afternoons watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond, eating cereal. Going to that festival was the best thing I could’ve done for myself. Yeah Žižek, we may all be holding hands in the town square, but that’s how people learn how to live, how to change things in the first place. Žižek, elsewhere, recontextualized Alain Badiou’s abstract concept of “the act” to encourage social activists to do the impossible to get real change. Simply put, “the act,” to Žižek, is to proceed with the third option when you’re only given two. You know, like Keanu Reeves in Speed when he has to choose to either let Dennis Hopper escape or let Jeff Daniels die. So what does Reeves do? He shoots the hostage, obviously. It’s the impossible third choice.


Žižek thinks that we must move beyond the choice of holding hands with a girl and not holding hands with a girl—instead, just be an asshole and fuck the girl. Žižek wants to enact the impossible; I just want to believe in it. Social change doesn’t come from doing the impossible, but in striving towards doing the impossible.

I met a girl at the Marxism festival, who needless to say by all standards is vastly out of my league. She’s a beautifully beautiful girl. She’s impossible.

She studied English literature and is now a journalist. Wanting to get more involved in politics and philosophy, and without really knowing the basics, she attended the festival at the urging of a friend. As I walked into a classroom to attend one of the lectures, I noticed her instantly—she stood out like a white boy in Whitechapel. A room full of unattractive hippies, she was a cover girl dressed in all black. The Veronica to everyone else’s Betty.

Eye contact and flirtatious smiles were exchanged. I inexplicably had the guts to engage her in conversation as we were leaving the room at the end of the forum. It led to a wonderful all-day first date. She wanted to learn more about Marxist philosophy so I gave her the 101, undoubtedly coming off as pretentious but with enough charm, humour, and intelligence to compensate. I’m sure my consistent insistence that I was the least qualified person in the world to be teaching her these concepts in spite of her impression of me to the contrary also helped my cause. She was hanging onto my every word.

At the end of the day, two figures appeared, one on each of my shoulders. On my one side materialized Douzinas, calmly recommending to me, “Play it cool dude, no rush. No need to screw it up.” On the other is Žižek, yelling ferociously with his Eastern European accent, “HEAD, HEAD! ASK FOR HEAD!”

We all know what happens when you do the impossible, whether that be a nerd like me sleeping with a drop-dead gorgeous girl on the first date, or a socialist revolution fulfilling and actualizing itself: things get awkward, and shit gets fucked up. Just like sometimes you have to hold hands in the town square as opposed to prematurely jumping into revolutionary battle, you also have to just ask for a girl’s number as opposed to asking her to come back to your place.

The battle lines at work may have been drawn, but at least I can say with pride that I know where I stand. There’s a lesson here, and it’s that despite everything, everything possible and rational, I ain’t going to sink to some asshole’s level just to impress a girl (or, in the bigger picture, to change the world). Perhaps Pinkie’s stare is my reminder to strive for the impossible: resigning to sacrifice Isaac is like actively endeavouring to avoid becoming Pinkie Brown. So go for it, big-city boy and small-town girl, just like Steve Perry says. Don’t stop believin'.

The Belgian Optimist, Starring Colin Firth and a Beautiful Girl

Colin Firth and Gary Oldman had lunch together in the restaurant I work at in London. It was on one of my days off—I didn’t find out about it until the next day. It was probably for the best. Can you imagine how gitty I would’ve been around Colin Firth? I would have kept on calling him Darcy the whole time, to begin with. Secondly I would have, no doubt awkwardly, tried to lead him into a conversation in which I present my theory that his acting career is such an appropriate metaphor of my life in London, that I’m his doppelgänger (conceptually speaking, not vernacularly). What kind of ghostly coincidence is it that I thought of the haunting spirit of Firth’s character archetype as providing the framework for my London life—only to have this ghost escape into the ether, me arriving a day late?

So poetic! Horatio tried to capture the ghost of King Hamlet in speech but was late. Life is always late because you’re always chasing. Love and work and politics and art—it’s always deferred. Had I been at work that day, the chase would’ve been over. Killing the metaphor, killing the dream.


I was in Belgium for a few days with some friends. My mate Jon is a good bloke—he’s got one hell of a blunt sense of humour. Rough around the edges but with a big heart, few people like Jon demonstrate such a high degree of legitimate concern for others around him and the ones he cares about. I met him through working together at the campus newspaper at McMaster. I was a regular columnist and Jon was the assistant photography editor.


Jon is spending a couple of months in the city of Ghent, northwest of Brussels, before heading off for the latter half of summer to work as a tour guide throughout Europe for sightseers. He invited me to stay with him for a couple of days; coincidentally and fortunately, the weekend that was most convenient for me to visit was the same weekend a mutual friend of ours, a lovely girl named Medina, was also visiting Jon. Jon and I also met Medina through the school newspaper, and she’s spending her summer couch surfing across Europe. Medina could easily be a female version of Darcy, in a certain context of course. Beautifully beautiful but with an ostensible and peculiar, almost cynic, character, if you act prideful around her you won’t get to know the real girl, which would be an unjustifiable shame.



Getting incredibly drunk off Belgian beer Rochefort 10 in the very traditional European city of Ghent with these great people helped me to realize that chasing what can’t be understood, the unattainable, is what is worth doing in life. Somebody who doesn’t understand this notion is Chuck Klosterman.

I’ll tell you why I don’t like Chuck Klosterman. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. By that I mean I don’t particularly dislike Chuck Klosterman. Sure, he’s a better writer than most people. Yes, he’s funnier and wittier than the run of the mill. And yes, I’ll admit he’s a more acute observer of pop culture’s subtext than your average bear. Actually, I don’t know if that’s much of a large accomplishment; but at least Klosterman can analyze the subtext without sounding contrived.

Is he better than Nick Hornby though, as some commentators have argued? Hornby, regarded by many as one of Britain’s most celebrated living writers, and seen by some as Klosterman’s British counterpart, doesn’t piss me off the way Klosterman does, that’s for sure. I think GQ (in praising Klosterman) said it best: he is “sometimes exasperating but almost always engaging.” I have no beef with the principle that the best writers, thinkers, artists, what have you, are the ones with whom you disagree to the point of sheer frustration; but from a personal perspective I don’t apply that principle to Klosterman. I find Klosterman the most engaging when I do agree with him and when he’s not angering me. His analyses of Billy Joel or Morrissey, or Val Kilmer, or Saturday morning cartoons, or MTV, or whatever, or his awesome hypothetical questions, are fascinating because they are well written, nuanced, and clever. That’s the Chuck Klosterman I enjoy. He mostly sticks to these guns in Chuck Klosterman IV, which is why it’s a half-decent book.

The Chuck Klosterman that I can’t stand is the one who tries to blame pop culture, specifically romantic comedy movies, and even more specifically John Cusack, for why normal human beings will never be able to have meaningful romantic relationships.

Put your hand up if you’ve seen Fever Pitch. I’m not talking about the American film adaptation starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore (which actually isn’t bad). No, no, I mean the British romantic comedy Fever Pitch starring Colin Firth, based on a Nick Hornby book, no less.

It’s great—probably one of the best movies out there. Low budget and character-driven, it has all the makings of a classic. Colin Firth plays a teacher with a long-standing love affair for the Arsenal Football Club. His Arsenal fandom borders on obsession, and it deeply complicates a blooming but ambiguous sexual and romantic tension with a new teacher at the school he works at, who herself is puzzled by his laissez-faire teaching methods, yet alone by his fascination with Arsenal. Oh yeah, she’s a beautiful girl.

What makes the film great is that Firth’s character’s relationship with Arsenal and football is in the foreground and not the background. Of course Hornby’s book, the source material, is an autobiographical collection of essays about Hornby’s love for football, and not a romance novel. In both book and film, we get a glimpse of the real conditions of British life, empathizing for why football is so integral to one’s upbringing and consciousness—and it doesn’t always make meeting girls so perfect-going.

Klosterman thinks “every woman born between 1965 and 1978” (my emphasis), is so fixated by John Cusack in Say Anything, the go-to teen romance movie of the late 1980s, that it clouds their ability to focus on real-life relationships and more realistic romantic encounters and situations. Klosterman extends the vitriol to When Harry Met Sally, accusing the film of giving infinite false hope to every optimist in love with their opposite-sex platonic best friend. Basically Klosterman thinks pop culture is ruining society, specifically our ability to love. Bummer, dude.

In another essay, Klosterman argues soccer will never live up to its potential in the U.S. It is a sport not worthy of North America’s attention because it is not competitive enough, and more significantly, it is inherently too inclusive, the one sport that allows America’s “outcast” culture to float by elementary school extracurriculars before they are old enough to realize they can shop at Hot Topic and American Apparel. It’s the sport kids bullshit their way through before discovering hipsterdom, according to Klosterman. And although he never explicitly mentions him in the essay, Klosterman put the following name in the essay title as an implicit attack on the Fever Pitch-culture: Nick Hornby.

Outside of sports, Klosterman claims to be “apolitical” but his interrelated analyses on Cusack and soccer make one fact, to me at least, abundantly clear: Klosterman is an unironic Platonist and a closet ideological Republican who refuses to accept the world we live in is one of mutual vulnerabilities. Football’s inclusiveness is what makes it so economically and culturally significant to everywhere in the world except North America, especially Africa. The flip-side of Klosterman’s narcissistic, Westernized hatred for soccer is what keeps a poor, starving 10-year-old in Kenya from utter and absolute despair, possibly even death. Klosterman cynically whines that it’s too inclusive without realizing that inclusivity is all we have in this world keeping us from going over the edge.

Just as football gives the possibility of hope to every child in the developing world who has no reason to hope, no viable reason to have hope for anything, Colin Firth goes for the impossible scenario, something Klosterman fails to realize in his jaded Say Anything attack. Is my argument flawed because Mr. Darcy does eventually get Elizabeth Bennet, or that Mark Darcy wins Bridget Jones’s heart in the end? No, because like I said earlier, it’s all about the chase—and I don’t mean that in the romantic, courting sense; I mean it in the abstract metaphorical sense about chasing ourselves, but our deferred selves, just as I was a day late meeting Colin Firth. (Also, how fucked up is it that Helen Fielding named the character Darcy?) You can’t dismiss romantic comedy movies as unrealistic about love because a guy and a girl fall for each other in the end. That’s like dismissing action movies because they have explosions. Call me crazy, but the typical scenario of two characters falling in love after hating each other is far from clichéd, it’s actually wonderfully brilliant. It turns the impossible into the possible—the kind of hope upon which inclusivity, whether political, social, or cultural, relies. Football does the same thing, and so does Colin Firth. It should go without saying that between Aidan and Big in Sex and the City, Colin Firth would undoubtedly be Aidan, yet Big gets the girl. Aidan’s experiences with Carrie are still just as valuable as they would have been had he and Carrie married. Had they not even occurred in the first place, in other words, if Carrie hypothetically knew she would be choosing Big in the end, thus prompting her to bypass dating Aidan in the first place—well fuck, hope and inclusivity can go right out the window. It’s the hope from romance and football that allows us to learn about ourselves, which is to say each other. But we’re always late, we are always a day behind; otherwise we would reach full self-actualization, which sounds like the most boring and dangerous neo-Nietzschean death to political free will of which I can think.

Rochefort 10 and many other Belgian beers have a high alcohol content of ten percent or more. Many of the beers are brewed by monks in a Belgian monastery. Drinking these beers is like doing cocaine or riding a bike for the first time. They bring out the best and the worst of you, simultaneously.


Belgium is the country where Jon met his last love, a girl who eventually tore his heart out of his body, like in that scene in Temple of Doom. Yet Jon took us to his favourite pub, mostly because there’s a girl working there on whom he has a crush. He didn’t let the past hamper his hope for the future, no matter how dim. I say dim both metaphorically and literally—the whole pub was lit only by candlelight. Outside, almost all of Ghent is built on brick streets, with old buildings dating back many centuries. The history and the architecture are indescribable. Earlier Jon had introduced Medina and I to a local friend of his, a blind guy named Didier, whose amazingly expansive knowledge about music gives credence to the “heightened other senses” myth. Didier showed us a time—and we let the culture of Ghent consume us. Canals run through the city rampantly, and the centre of Ghent consists of countless pub patios and vendors selling chips with mayonnaise (fries are Belgium’s national dish, so naturally, they tasted amazing), all overlooking the canals and surrounded by many ancient buildings, one of which was a very splendid-looking castle.


Returning to the dim pub over candlelight and Belgian beer in a very old building, in the place where Jon remained upbeat in spite of, well, Mola Ram; the place where Medina wondered why all of her relationships have expiry dates; and the place where I wondered why all of my relationships have starter-ignition problems (and where I bordered on melancholy for having left a girl behind back home), all three of us had reasons to be cynical and pessimistic. It’s what Klosterman can’t escape: the girl who left him for a John Cusack movie. What he didn’t realize is what the night in Ghent all helped us to realize, while we happily continued drinking outside near the canal and the magically-lit buildings reflected in both the night sky and the still water: bonding together meaningfully and learning that there’s more to life than blaming others, whether it be in Ghent or elsewhere. As we learned from each other that night, sharing stories and experiences, that just because love is deferred, or something we have never, and will never, experience, doesn’t mean we don’t deserve it—doesn’t mean we have to give up hope. That is ultimately what I think Colin Firth would’ve said to me. That or, “Look, can you just get me a napkin?”

Welcome to Madchester

I swung by Manchester recently to visit a friend. Ben Small, a chap I had met back in Hamilton over a year ago, lives in Leeds, a short distance from the ‘Chester. I met Ben at McMaster, where he had been attending for a year on a student exchange, but he’s back in England now, being a guy.

Ben plans on spending his summer in Chicago, and he’s already got a couple of writing internships lined up in the city. One of them is for a music publication, if I recall correctly. During the job interview over Skype, Ben and the employer bonded over a mutual love for the band American Football. Yeah boi. Neither of the internships pay, so to finance his trip he is going to have to either find a pub job on the side in the Windy City, or hope the wind blows his mouth right onto some guy’s cock as a means of income. We’ve all been there.

Until he leaves for Chicago, however, Ben is trying to maximize his time back home. Naturally, that means getting drunk and playing as many punk shows with his band as possible. He invited me to see his band play in Manchester one night. “We’ll show you a time,” he assured me. “Us punks are an inclusive bunch, don’t worry.”

Little more encapsulates the punk ethos than that: community. I knew I would be in good hands, welcomed, befriended, and with the knowledge that I would be in the company of hospitable people. A common thread runs through every punk scene from one side of the Atlantic to the other: a space its peoples create to lose yourself in the moment. An emancipatory escapism rooted in the history of the genre; there are many things wrong and unjust with the world, but for 120 fast-paced, head-spinning seconds, a new world is born, and everyone is welcomed as a citizen. It’s the environment of a punk venue, the spatiality of the mosh pit.

Manchester has a rich history regarding the interconnected relationship between spatiality and subversiveness. Guy Debord famously recontextualized the French word dérive (literal English translation: “drift” or “drifting”) as a term to convey subversive acts that incorporate psychogeography. It’s more than just getting lost in a city, intentionally wandering adrift as a way to subvert the mapped and structured architecture of an urban landscape. A dérive denotes a contradictory interaction with one’s environment: on the one hand, it requires a conscious awareness of how one’s space is indeed a reflection of themselves, in other words, having a knowledge of the possibilities and utilizations of the space around us and thus how we can shape it; on the other hand, it requires us to drop all of our regular activities and usual motives for movement and action—as Debord would say, to simply let ourselves “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters” to be found there.

Subversion is a key factor here, and certainly Manchester’s anti-establishment history is impressive. The city provided a healthy contribution to the birth of 19th-century communism as we know it. It was Manchester that inspired Engels’s groundbreaking book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Marx visited his friend in Manchester often, where the two collaborated on their theories. To this day, Manchester’s Chetham’s Library preserves Marx and Engels’s frequent study desk as well as the shelf holding the very economics books Marx read at the time.

Some of the U.K.’s largest worker trade and labour unions, most notably, the Trades Union Congress, got their starts in the hush-hush, hustle and rush of basement gatherings in Manchester pubs. In North America, the term “working class” is treated as a beat-up opportunistic release for the other 80% of the population to have their cake and eat it too; “working class” is CNN’s dried-up hooker. In a smooth continuation from the Industrial Revolution, Manchester adopted the romanticized 20th-century English image of a rainy working-class city and ran with it. The city’s beauty is in what the bricks of its antiquated buildings don’t say. They have stories to tell but they remain silent because it’s raining outside, too many people are scurrying by with no time to listen, and there’s too much melancholy for the bricks not to hold back. Mothers working crowds at Piccadilly Gardens; babies crying past the distant street-lamp glow; kids falling over before the pub and tram rush; a hurried girl has to smoke nice and slow. That’s entertainment!

Punk music was one of the many torchbearers to grab the mantle of social justice and social activism and run with it in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite originating from London, it was in Manchester where The Sex Pistols really started to bloom. Many consider their June 1976 Manchester concert to be the band’s springboard to international recognition—indeed, it helped introduce the genre of punk itself to the world. Both Morrissey and members of Joy Division/New Order had attended that concert, well before The Smiths or Joy Division ever had a name for themselves. The concert served as a major catalyst for the birth of punk rock and future subgenres that came out of Manchester in later years, such as “Madchester”—of which early New Order was a feature player.

Madchester proceeded England’s mod revival movement and is commonly regarded as a main precursor to grunge. Its defining characteristic was its combination of punk rock with more rhythmic sounds. Punk provides the space, and rhythm provides the catalyst for movement. Madchester didn’t aim to corporatize punk or to incorporate it into the mainstream (although that’s what ended up happening). It was just a bunch of punk kids who wanted to dance more. Sex Pistols songs have melody, yes, but they are warped under too much bullshit noise and distortion. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten are in the history books for good reasons, but none of which include their songwriting prowess.

All punk bands in Manchester from the past couple of decades and up to today live and die under the shadow of Madchester. Stay punk and give us a space to dance that we create with you. Turn the mosh pit into a metaphorical image of our other selves that we never see, the other world that we simultaneously and contradictorily create but consciously let ourselves be drawn and lost into. I walked right into a dérive in Manchester, and my glasses broke as a result. It was the time of my life.

I met up with Ben in the early evening at the venue, on the second floor of a pub in central Manchester. Outside, the establishment had a chalkboard on which was written “PUNK/SKA BANDS ALL DAY, 3-11 P.M.” in block letters. Welcome to Manchester.



I arrived a couple of hours late and missed the first few bands. Ben’s band wasn’t on for another hour or so, so we grabbed a beer and went back upstairs to watch a metal band shred some Wheaties. As is expected with the genre, they were all wonderfully talented musicians, but their melodies were boring and they lacked stage presence. There was probably close to 200 or so people in attendance, but none of them were responding to the music and I didn’t know anybody. I was starting to wonder into what I had gotten myself—it certainly wasn’t punk, yet alone ska, but my bigger worry was the lack of movement from the crowd and interaction between them. No community, no dérives. Ben, upon noticing my malaise, told me not to worry. “This is the only metal band on the bill,” he yelled in my ear over the pulsing noise. “C’mon, let’s go meet some people.”

Outside having a cigarette we got talking to others. It was overcast outside but not raining. They were all happy—they were all dry. A lot of people scattered around different areas outside the pub ended up knowing each other. They were all friends, they all played in each other’s bands, they all partied and got drunk with each other, and they were all ecstatic to meet me.

Some guys I bonded with especially well. It wasn’t long before we would go out exploring the city in between bands’ sets. No awkwardness arose; Ben’s presence wasn’t even needed. The next few hours brought forth a barrage of punk and pop-punk bands (and a ska band, of course). I was expecting mediocre three- and four-chord patterned, high school-esque pop-punk music. My presumption was fortunately short-sighted. These bands were good—real good. These kids knew how to write catchy punk and pop-punk songs: invest properly in decent equipment, balance out the distortion, add in a sing-along, have more nuanced parts than just power chords, and dance, dance. Ben came on stage with his band Throwing Stuff, dedicated a song to me, and then the next thing I know people were Throwing Ben. His friends' band, Leagues Apart, pleasantly brought back nostalgic times reminiscent of 1990's styled thrash punk.



A drummer from one punk band would get on stage and front a ska band, playing trombone. Another drummer hopped on stage randomly and subbed for a heavy punk band that worked the crowd well. All the while I photographed the kids getting lost in the space, but having an awareness nonetheless of what was going on around them. Bonding was happening in the movement; everybody subverted the structure of their lives by getting closer with each other while contradictorily getting further apart, from themselves, from what exactly was going on. I put the camera down and joined in the fun—my glasses fell off and were trampled on quickly.



The frame was bent horribly and the lens missing; I could barely see a thing. It didn’t matter though, because the world I was viewing with my glasses through the camera was upside down—it’s the very principle of a camera obscura. I was trying to trivialize the Manchester dérive by freezing it in time. Debord contextualized his whole concept of the dérive on Marx’s thesis that everywhere around man the spaces surrounding him are images of himself—of his own creation. The landscape is alive, and seeing it upside down treats the space and the people around you as comatose. My glasses bring the world into focus. The dérive I thrusted myself into was a statement and a half: we create the world around us in our own image, but trying to focus it inclines us to merely stare. Passive spectators are voyeurs of themselves without realizing it. The punk show in Manchester was a response, a passionate subversion to the cultural systematization of the conditions of the downtrodden mother, the crying baby, the lost kids, and the browbeaten teen girl. Manchester is a living organism of its own. Dance, dance. Live it, live it.

Dancing in the Fog

I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh, London! My sin! I promised to many of you I would write regularly. London has consumed my soul. I cannot be expected to write to you consistently. How could I? To write, love—I know: It is a promise to myself as much as it is to any of you. What do I as a writer owe after making an oath to share and express the poetics of my experience?

This journal entry is about my employment at Rotunda Bar and Restaurant in London. Work, yes, I know; such a topic risks dreadful boredom. However, it seems all I do is work. Rotunda is my poetics. Its place and its people help me glide through the fog of London. If you have never walked through London fog then you don’t really know what life is all about. I hope that came off as more honest than it did judgemental—after all, life is never fully lucid, and nothing is as blurry as the haze of London.

Some maintain that art deludes. Young Marx, an avid scholar of pre-Socratic Greek philosophy and a lover of Italian Renaissance literature, grew into a man who mocked the arts with his metaphor of dancing tables.

Others insist “the play’s the thing.” Just ask Hamlet.

Of course, Voltaire and Flaubert did not see eye to eye about London. Both Frenchmen, London took the exiled Volatire in, much to the writer’s delight. The constant fog of London, its dreary sense of constitutionalism, commerce, and civility warmed his spirits. Flaubert detested the fog. What good are constitutionalism, commerce, and civility if everything is so fucking dreary? Voltaire tried to romanticize the fog; Flaubert saw it for what it was—yet he still wrote. Fog is hazy, yes, but walking through it is how life happens.

I think writing is like sailing a ship through a patch of fog. We’re constantly trying to look through the telescope towards the coastline, the past, but the image is always out of focus. The ship, however, keeps sailing. Voltaire wasn’t smart enough to realize what the fog was; Marx did but foolishly wished for only sunny days. Flaubert…well, he just wrote incessantly.

The restaurant, Rotunda, is on the main floor of a building called Kings Place, about a two-minute walk from the famous King’s Cross St. Pancras station. One morning, some years ago, a very wealthy and artistically inclined individual, Peter Millican, woke out of his bed and decided that he wanted to build his own concert venue. A performance space for classical, folk, and jazz musicians to gather, pontificate, and, of course, play their music for the public. Throw in an art gallery outside the concert halls, add tasteful comedy and theatre to the mix, a fine-dining restaurant, and lease the upper-floor offices to companies of significant cultural importance, and you’ve got a deal, Peter Millican said, speaking to himself while brewing his morning coffee.

In the past couple weeks alone, I have served entrée meals of fancy French names I embarrassingly mispronounce to everyone from the director of communications for Nick Clegg, U.K.’s deputy prime minister, to the editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. The former was delightfully outgoing; the latter a little bit more reserved yet still polite, the kind of quiet dignity you get for having your own Wikipedia page because you are in charge of the U.K.’s most respected newspaper, I suppose. I served him for a second time tonight actually, and despite my charming best he still didn’t give me a job. I served two other senior reporters from The Guardian tonight as well. I see a lot of Guardian employees actually, because they lease the majority of the upper-floor office spaces in Kings Place. The hub of U.K. and international media is at my fingertips. I serve at least two or three VIP tables a night, mostly CEOs of large companies and shit like that. Kings Place is currently preparing for an upcoming visit from Princess Anne, the older sister of Prince Charles. All the while, gondolas float by the Regent’s Canal that borders the restaurant’s terrace.

The building hosts public lectures and discussions every Monday night on art, culture, politics, and science, and there is a forthcoming themed tribute to Mozart in regards to some of the classical performances. “I only have to think about music and Mozart comes to mind,” writes Peter in the brochure scattered around the lobby. (Would you be surprised to find out Kings Place publishes their own magazine too?) Whenever I think of music I think of melody. If he wants to be specific with just one guy…I don’t know, go for it I guess. That’s like saying “Whenever I think of movies, I think of Cary Grant.” Okay, sure.

I experience the meanderings daily of London’s rich and famous. They are the people who run the city and Western Europe; some of them have a hand in running the world. I provide the fuel, the distraction—the guilt-killing subconsciously narcissistic good deed of their bland courtesy. Everything is beautiful…too beautiful. Did I mention the fucking gondolas? Fifty hours a week they dock within an arm’s reach of where I’m trying to take an order for a red wine I would never be able to afford with my own money. My daily fear is falling in as I stand on the edge, trying to recommend the Australian shiraz only to get a pompous “hmm…I feel as if the Chilean would better suit the palate of the afternoon—do haste please because we are quite eager for our wine”; then they talk about why the Middle East and North Africa are so fucked up. Beautiful people, eating beautiful food in a beautiful environment, talking about art, politics, and history to such a degree that I feel worthless. I wonder if any of them have ever set foot in Whitechapel.

It must be a fog, all of it. But then they leave, and when the lights go out strangers fall in love and we make life happen. I’ll tell you why I’ve never had a better job—despite many of these wankers. I’ve never had a job where the managers give you a beer to drink while you’re closing up shop—not just now and then but ritually—or a bottle of wine to take home with you or heck, in Europe, to drink on the street on your way to the Tube or bus station. Shit, I’ve never had a job where my bosses give me a beer while I’m still working and some fucking rich snob is complaining about his millefeuille, all the while I’m getting buzzed in the storage room. I’ve never had a job where I work with people from all walks of life. My French is laughable and I’m the only one who can’t speak at least two languages fluently. I’ve never had a job where after work we walk to the nearby club at least three or four times a week. Me, the Canadian, the sociable Swedish girl, the flamboyant Italian, the hilarious Pole, the suave Lithuanian, and the charmingly feuding New Zealander and Aussie, where we meet up with other employees already drunk and dancing. People here are much more gregarious, personal, and so much more willing to buy everyone else a round of drinks, and especially more liberal towards going out on an almost nightly basis, even if they are your boss.

I had promised to write more regularly but the truth is, fulfilling a promise is like a death sentence, killing the dancing—there’s nothing left to fulfil, nothing left to promise, nothing left to do. If we ever did get to the shoreline, past the fog to sunny days, we wouldn’t need the telescope, yet alone the ship.

I can only write sporadically but I fight on. It’s the best I can hope for, and it’s all I can do to navigate my way through the fog, to deal with the debilitating life of my too beautiful workplace for the hope of an aesthetic experience in which the play is the thing. The guests and the culture of Kings Place is a world of its own—the real art is what happens when the lights go out, where the conscience of the king is exposed on the dance floor somewhere in Angel in North London. When the lights go out and all we have is fog, I carry on, mostly too fleetingly to reflect adequately on the situation, but I write what I can to make sense of it nonetheless.

Now all that’s left to do is ponder the amusing coincidence that Marx’s daughter Eleanor was and continues to be Flaubert’s most celebrated translator. Are the tables winking at us when they dance? Marx, to raise such a girl, must have known that the tables dance, always dance in the fog, that life happens beyond the jejune. Oh, jejune, jejune, jejune…

Despite what some asshole may have told you, hell is not other people. It’s the fog I walk through daily. Only I deal with it.

Janus and Her Friends

I am experiencing a strange dichotomy while I sit on the balcony of my flat in East London writing this journal entry. I live in the inner-city district of Whitechapel, which is both the most multicultural and ethnically diverse region in London, and one of the poorest. The balcony of the apartment directly overlooks the slums of Whitechapel, second-rate housing projects built after the area was decimated and bombed during WWII—home to many of the inner-city’s Bangladeshi residents who represent over half of the district’s population, many of them in the low-income bracket. Go a little bit further west into East London and you get to the area known as The City (London proper), which features the old financial district mostly spared by the bombs, an area of Victorian-era buildings, gothic-like skyscrapers, and architecturally impressive corporate towers, not to mention the yet-to-be-completed Shard London Bridge, slated to be the tallest building in Western Europe once construction is finished. I can already see the half-erect tower creeping over the skyline as construction workers rush to keep pace with the Olympic countdown. (Yes, I am struggling to refrain from making a psychoanalytically inspired socioeconomic quirk here.)

On the other side of the flat is the district of Canary Warf, home to London’s new financial district. Its domineering towers and abundant office buildings (one of which is London’s current tallest building, at least until The Shard soon pierces the virgin sky), housing the head offices of most of the U.K.’s major banks, were all built in the last two decades or so, surrounded by upper-middle class suburbs and schools in the quaint, peninsula-like area that abruptly swings south to correspond to a sudden dip in the Thames River. Canary Warf is the result of government redevelopment after the West India Docks closed in 1980.

“What shall we do with the Docks?” they asked.

“Build a financial district?”

“We already have a financial district.”

“Well…another financial district. This time we’ll do it right: gentrification style.”

It is like a secluded area of clean, modern-day living, guarded by a Thames moat, if you will. Earn your living and pay your mortgage all in one gated-like community that doubles as the second slice of bread in the financial-district sandwich in which Whitechapel is tainted meat.

Nostalgic, antiquated big-city greed vs. modern-day suburban gentrification, and I’m lost and confused in between it all, right in the middle.

Whitechapel is both dirty and threatening on the one hand, and active and exciting on the other hand. The dichotomies exist within, too. Vibrant food and shopping markets are everywhere, including Brick Lane, which is more vivacious than anything I have encountered back home. But garbage and waste run these parts wild, and the threat of extreme Islamic activity looms over my head like an irresolute cloud. I love that the largest mosque in all of the U.K. is within a five-minute walking distance of my front door, but it's so unfortunate that the joie de vivre brought by such cultural heterogeneity is spoiled by a small minority of residents who give the Borough of Tower Hamlets (within which Whitechapel resides) the nickname of "Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets." As recent as only a week prior to my arrival in London, local media stories reported incidents of death threats to unveiled women, as well as public physical assaults on gay men.

The Janus-faced metaphor couldn’t be more appropriate. Some days I am lost, confused, and lonely as hell. Other days, well, I fall in love. I love falling in love. Can you blame me? London, lyrical, lovely, lilting. I fell in love on the bus the other day. I didn’t get her name, but it was love, real love. She was cute and sat next to me. My phone rang and there was no answer.

“Don’t you hate that? The ring of the cellphone, the anticipation of a conversation, knowing that somebody, someone out there, wants to talk to you. You’re important. And then…nothing. You think you find somebody to love, but it’s just a dial tone. Life is just a dial tone.”

I said something like that. Probably. She smiled and engaged me in small talk. I made a joke about how I struggle to navigate through the settings on my new phone: Normal, Loud, Vibrate, Orange Citrus, Morning Breeze. She laughed. Yeah…love. Then her phone rang, and she had a somebody on the other end. Her stop came when she was on the phone still so all I got was a quick “goodbye” and “nice to meet you.” It was all a dial tone, really; but that’s what love is, a dial tone: two harmonious noises that no one person could hum—it requires two voices in sync. Ironic that a dial tone can symbolize both white noise and love. Apparently Janus is poaching on Cupid and Venus's turf.

My flatmates are the best. George, Mike, Kat, and Alice. Seasoned vets to help me navigate through the financial-district sandwich and through the dial tones. They too are right in the middle of it all. George is a young Jake Gyllenhaal, although a little bit more abrasive and chatty, in a very British way. Everything he says is funny. He enjoys a good drink and chain smoking. Mike is quiet yet friendly. He plays video games, has a quirky taste in indie music, and a dry sense of humour. He looks like Phil Kessel, although he doesn’t know who that is. Kat is confident and approachable, but don’t fuck with her or she’ll make you drink a lot of alcohol. If you are ever unsure of anything, she’s right there with an answer, a strong voice, and a passionate opinion. All three of them study politics, and are currently working as student interns at Westminster that count towards their degrees. During the day they work as assistants to MPs, then at night they come home and write their corresponding reports to be submitted to professors. Weekends are fair game. Alice is smart and easy-going. A house full of politicos, she’s the artist of the bunch. She finished her degree in English literature and creative writing, and spends her time now as a freelance wedding photographer for mediocre money, an amateur photographer selling prints at outdoor street markets in London for even worse money, and a lowly caterer for better money. Perhaps her most interesting gig is her own card-design project that she recently started, Birds in Hats. Alice draws various birds posing with different headpieces, and will then transfer the designs onto greeting cards and sell them in bulk. I get along with her well, and it seems like she and I have a lot in common in order to be good friends.

Lost and confused in London, I have asked them all a million questions and sought their advice countless times. Not once have they been impatient or unhelpful. Caught in between two worlds, falling in and out of love, constantly torn and undecided if I should be happy or sad, valiant or afraid, these four wonderful people have taught me that Janus can get by just fine with a little help from his friends.

"Which Way to the Beach?"

Dante, in his journey to hell, was told that only those who abandoned all fear and cowardice would be allowed to enter. It was more of a warning, an advisory, actually, than a requirement—“Hey, shit’s about to get fucked up, just so you know”—but whatever. The point, I think in this particular context, is to go along with the shit, to think of it as a learning experience, and (maybe not so much in Dante’s case) have a little fun along the way.

London is not hell, unless you want to count the decrepit, impoverished slums that surround my flat. Flat and flatmate stories I will save for later. Suffice it to say that, after walking into my room at close to 4 a.m. local time early Sunday morning on my last night in a hostel before I moved into my flat, although I doubt I would have been afraid or cowardly, there were countless negative reactions I could have expressed upon what I had discovered, but thankfully did not. A rather attractive man who possessed an uncanny resemblance to Hugh Jackman was going through one of my bags I had left on my bed. We made eye contact and he was a deer frozen in headlights as I gave him a suspiciously lighthearted, “So, uh…hey guy, what you up to, eh buddy?”

“Is this your bag?” he asked nervously, pointing at my knapsack.

“Yeah man, it is. Is there something I can help you with?” All of my valuables were locked away elsewhere, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt he had a good-ass excuse coming my way (he did), so I kept the tone friendly.

“Oh shit man, I’m so sorry. I was looking for an iPhone charger and I thought it was one of my buddy’s bags.” He immediately sat down on his bed, his head in his hands out of self-disappointment and embarrassment, and proceeded to apologize for the next half hour. Like a sinner cathartically purging his guilt, paying for the wrongdoing with the humiliation of being caught in the act. To be fair, Dante saw much worse, but I am sticking with the metaphor nonetheless.

His name was Tom. He was charming and outgoing without being abrasive or loud. Short dark hair, chiselled features, and an unshaven, dirty face. Totally Hugh. Tom and his seven friends were from Essex and came into London for the weekend to attend a rugby tournament. The group had their bags scattered around the nine-bed room and Tom did not think that anyone else was staying there. Of his friends who had yet to return from the club, Tom began to go through all of their bags in the desperate search for a phone charger, getting to my bag as I walked in. The story was reasonable and his apology beyond sincere, so I let it slide. Soon the remaining friends returned to the room, and we stayed up close to 7 a.m. getting to know each other. I had little in common with any of them—they were an odd sort, a menagerie of country boys from rural England who were in town for alcohol, sport, and, as they put it, girls to fuck, although this last one seemed to evade them quite well, much to their dismay. I could have chose to ignore them or not befriend them, but then of what do I have to be afraid? Hell doesn’t literally await me, thankfully.

If there was a leader among them it was Tom. He spoke up at the right time and place without being too talkative, scolded his friends when appropriate, who were saddened to have gotten his disapproval; but he was heavily amiable at other times, and was funny without having to try. He was also the most attractive one, naturally speaking of course, in that unshaven, chiselled Hugh Jackman kind of way. Nick and Chris were both attractive too, but more so in an Abercrombie & Fitch kind of way. Then there was “Leggy,” appropriately named after his long legs. Leggy could have been attractive because of a small resemblance to Jack Davenport’s character from The Talented Mr. Ripley, a very British look, but his face always seemed bewildered, and he moved around very awkwardly. Perhaps he was just always lost in thought. Kelvin and “Brooksy” were the muscle of the group—both short and stocky men, ostensibly dim-witted but funny and clever underneath the surface.

There was also “Musket”—a nickname he garnered for supposedly being able to “fuck as hard as he shoots”—who was the quietest bloke in the bunch, and very thin, wearing a light denim jacket to disguise his frail body. I think he slept in that jacket, and he didn't take it off until the next morning after arriving at the Victoria train station, en route to Twickenham Stadium. The only one of his friends not in a bathing suit of some sort, Musket changed into a parrot costume to abide by the stadium's recommended sea- or beach-themed dress policy for the rugby tournament. I don’t think I heard him utter more than five words. Jerry was the exact opposite. Last—and least—Jerry was the only one whose company I did not find pleasurable. His name is not actually Jerry. I once mistakenly called him Jerry (I can’t remember why) and I forget his real name, mostly because I didn’t bother to remember it, so I will stick with Jerry. He was missing a front tooth, having had it knocked out a couple months ago in a brawl. Until he gets a permanent replacement, he had been gluing in a fake tooth but had lost it at the club. Annoying, rude, and immature, he randomly took his pants off while very drunk in the hostel and tried, forcefully yet unsuccessfully, to have sex with me and some of his friends. I maybe would have been flattered under other circumstances, but he was simply acting like a child. The next day, while we were all out for lunch, he attempted to smear some of us with his dipping sauce, no doubt, I am sure, to compensate for the fact that it would have been too taboo for him to use the sauce as a lubricant on himself right then and there in the restaurant. His actions met the disapproval of all of his friends, especially Tom. I later learned that the rest of them consider him more of an acquaintance than a friend, and that they brought him along to avoid feeling guilty and also because he has a reputation for always buying drinks (he had spent close to £500 at the club for them and others the night before to celebrate a large payout from Her Majesty's Armed Forces for a recently completed stint of military service). Fair enough.

Morning comes and the boys felt bad for having kept me up late that night, not to mention Tom, who was still red-faced for having inadvertently gone through my bag. They had an extra ticket for the London Sevens weekend-long rugby tournament for that afternoon—part of a group of events that form the World Series of rugby sevens. It is called sevens because there are only seven players on each side, instead of the usual 15, and the matches are shorter in length (you guessed it: seven-minute halves). Fast and furious, I say. I had to move into my flat that day, but not until the evening—it wasn’t really my idea of an afternoon out, but rugby sounded fun, and these Essex boys promised me a time. Fuck, eh? Any sporting event that explicitly recommends a costume theme, in this case, the beach, must be worth a look. Heck, Brits at a rugby tournament probably would have dressed up regardless. “Yeah…I will come, thanks.”

Chris, Leggy, and (thankfully) Jerry decided that morning that they were all still too hungover and tired from the night before, not to mention broke, and that they had seen enough rugby the day before when they all attended the first half of the tournament. We left them on the Tube on our way to Twittenham, where rugby was “invented,” Brooksy joked. Aside from Musket, dressed as a parrot, the rest of them either dressed as scuba divers or as swimmers with simply bathing suits and a tank top (I went in a pair of jeans and my black American Apparel hoodie, if you are curious). Kelvin and Brooksy, the two big guys, looked especially amusing (and cold) in their clothes. Tom used his oxygen tank from his scuba diving outfit as a beer container: he was able to pour about five pints of Guinness into it and adapted the breathing tube into a drinking tube.

The stadium was loud and full of thousands of drunk Englishmen, many of them dressed in bathing suits with face paint and noisemakers. The rugby was interesting enough, that is to say I was enjoying myself and was glad I made the leap to do something I had never done before: tag along with a bunch of rambunctious guys I had known for less than 24 hours to watch a big event I had never seen or experienced before. And then Canada, my homeland, came on the pitch to play England, a pure stroke of coincidence. It led to a lot of roughhousing between the boys and I; our prides were on the line. I foolishly made the decision to bet a beer on the game. Canada was winning at half-time too so at first I felt fairly good about making the bet. I should have known the lead would not have lasted.

I left early and said my goodbyes and gave my thanks, having only been there for a couple of hours. I needed to leave myself enough time to not only take the train back into Central London, but to get back to the hostel that was near Hyde Park and move my luggage into my flat in East London for around 6 p.m. It takes a very long time to get around London. By the time I got to the flat I was very exhausted and was kindly offered a glass of water from the chap whose room I was subletting for the summer. Collapsing on the couch, it felt like heaven. See? I told you hell didn't await me.