July 12, 2004

I sat on my deck in my underwear while my friend gave me a buzz cut, the afternoon sun warming my back. It’s important to have no hair when leaving on a 2000 km bike trip around Southern Ontario. My neighbours watched our ritual with apprehension, as though a doomsday cult moved in next to them.

“Next thing you know these kids will chop off each other’s testicles,” they seemed to say.

But we didn’t. Instead I put on a collar and sunglasses and we went to Canadian Tire to get a seat for my bike.

And we dully tested the seat early next morning on our ride to Stratford. On Sundays the roads are blissful, and my buttocks felt so good on the new seat I felt like biking to Sarnia and beyond in one sudden flash of energy.

Stratford too is good on Sundays. When I went there in May, the city was full of old people and boredom, but yesterday the place was swarming with tourists and we sat on a patio watching life unfold for hours. People are marvellous things.

And so are Stratford’s cherry trees which are laden with fruits in July. We climbed and ate, and when we finally got down our pockets were full of sweetness and our fingers purple.

The only thing better than the cherries was the abandoned factory down the road, a pillaged and rusty cathedral of industrialism. The space was fantastic — before us we had miles of ash and rust and ceilings of light! My hands shook with feverish excitement and my pictures came out blurry, but for an hour we ran through the abandoned industrial landscape overwhelmed by its beauty.

Spaces like that make me feel revolutionary: Let’s all shave our heads and burn down factories so we can make art and fuck on the production floors! Stratford is the new Mecca!