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falling glass cripples city

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.11.14

Tonight I stepped out of the office building to discover that downtown was once again in complete gridlock.

As is usually the case, the streetcars on King and Queen—which in my opinion belong underground from Spadina in the west to at least Church in the east—had stacked up to the point where it was just laughable. There were six of them drifting slowly westward between University and Spadina, and I lost count of how many were allegedly heading east, but I lost count at around nine or ten and it looked like there might have been fifteen or more (many more). Let's say it was "all of them".

This was more than two hours after the problem started when two sheets of glass fell to the street from the Trump Tower. The police responded by blocking off the intersection at Bay and Adelaide, which I suppose once again put all of the eastbound traffic on Adelaide onto King, Queen, and possibly Wellington.

It took me ninety minutes to get home. An 11 kilometer trip.

rand()m quote

It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row