Blowing Toronto To Timbits In My Own Way
It's entirely possible I'm taking the "Blame Canada" city v. city challenge too seriously. But it's much more fun battling Toronto this year because I think they smack talk more than even we do in Chicago. They're pretty scary since they already have a handful of writers over 10k and we're struggling to get off the ground.
But I did my part this afternoon by writing an entire portion of a chapter doing nothing but bashing Toronto.
---
This afternoon I had a bit of writers block as to what to do with one of my characters and so I had them go off on an anti-Toronto screed. The character, named William, is basically a really proud New Yorker. Not just proud but downright disdainful of other cities (in the first chapter he compains that Washington D.C. will probably be helped in evacuation before his New York City). Well who else would be more natural to just go off on Toronto than that character?
The scene is that he's come to the conclusion that New York City is going to be isolated for a long time from the flood that was caused by a storm surge from a hurricane that hit New Jersey. After he concludes that there are no sirens, no noise, no anything that would give him and others trapped in various midrises around the city hope, he examines his situation (I'm a lit fic writer, right?) in the following way:
---
"Maybe they weren’t coming after all, William thought. He figured there had to be support services all over the city still up and running but he hadn’t heard any sirens. He looked out his window and felt a slight feeling of vertigo looking down toward the street. All he could see was a strip of blue running down the middle of the street where it used to be a strip of black with a white broken stripe down the middle.
The street was so desolate and so, he hated to think it, dead that he figured he had been transported from New York City to somewhere small and insignificant like Toronto. One of those cities that pretended to be a real city but was somehow lacking anything that could make it worthwhile except for some Indian restaurants downtown. He thought, "you could pretty much burn that whole city except for a few blocks of Yonge Street to the ground and the world might actually be a better place."
He had never seen such a boring city with so little to offer in the way of architecture or nightlife or attractions. He only wished he had a northern view out of his apartment so he could stare up toward Midtown Manhattan and see the gleaming skyscrapers to get the dirty, dirty thought of Toronto out of his head.
His thoughts turned back to the police and then by the obvious logical chain, to donuts.
"And screw timbits," he said aloud to no one in particular, "why would anyone want to eat something that sounded like some guy’s unmentionables."
For William, it was all about the Krispy Kreme deep fried donut holes.
"Oh Krispy Kreme," he said hoping that there was one left standing in the area when New York City recovered from the flood. "Hell," he said again out loud, "I would fly to Chicago for some Krispy Kreme right now." A city with no Krispy Kremes, that was a joke to William. There were more good donut places in Syracuse than there were in Toronto.
Now depressed he navigated his way back to his apartment in darkness as deep as the blue of Lake Ontario that he wished had washed over Toronto instead. He wondered why his beloved city had been the one washed away and not that craphole to the northwest.
How he wished the city had been burned to the ground during the War Of 1812 while it was still a fort and they had chose not to rebuild it abandoning the land to packs of wild dogs.
"Go Rangers," he said to himself angrily under his breath. Sure Madison Square Garden might be gone but it would still have a better hockey team than the Maple Leafs. Even the Chicago Blackhawks are better than the Maple Leafs and they were terrible.
And it disgusted him that they didn't know how to pluralize leaf. It was one thing that Boston, he thought, another waste of civic planning time and energy couldn’t pluralize sock (and neither could Chicago he thought but he couldn’t blame the whole city for the south side) but leaf, come on, that was one of the first words a kid could learn.
The only thing that bothered him more than this grammatical error in judgment was that they spelled colors with a "u." While part of him could admit that was the more classic spelling, he appreciated that the United States had dropped the "u" long ago. It’s "ko-lor" he said aloud, not "col-o-ur."
And he didn’t even want to get started on a mental path about the Blue Jays or Raptors. Why did Toronto even bother?
All these thoughts about Toronto were making him want to throw himself out the window onto the flooded patch of West Sixth Street that ran below his window.
Death would be better than living in Toronto, he concluded."
---
Of course that won't make any post-NANOWRIMO edits but it was really fun to write. And, hey, it was almost 1k. ;)
But I did my part this afternoon by writing an entire portion of a chapter doing nothing but bashing Toronto.
---
This afternoon I had a bit of writers block as to what to do with one of my characters and so I had them go off on an anti-Toronto screed. The character, named William, is basically a really proud New Yorker. Not just proud but downright disdainful of other cities (in the first chapter he compains that Washington D.C. will probably be helped in evacuation before his New York City). Well who else would be more natural to just go off on Toronto than that character?
The scene is that he's come to the conclusion that New York City is going to be isolated for a long time from the flood that was caused by a storm surge from a hurricane that hit New Jersey. After he concludes that there are no sirens, no noise, no anything that would give him and others trapped in various midrises around the city hope, he examines his situation (I'm a lit fic writer, right?) in the following way:
---
"Maybe they weren’t coming after all, William thought. He figured there had to be support services all over the city still up and running but he hadn’t heard any sirens. He looked out his window and felt a slight feeling of vertigo looking down toward the street. All he could see was a strip of blue running down the middle of the street where it used to be a strip of black with a white broken stripe down the middle.
The street was so desolate and so, he hated to think it, dead that he figured he had been transported from New York City to somewhere small and insignificant like Toronto. One of those cities that pretended to be a real city but was somehow lacking anything that could make it worthwhile except for some Indian restaurants downtown. He thought, "you could pretty much burn that whole city except for a few blocks of Yonge Street to the ground and the world might actually be a better place."
He had never seen such a boring city with so little to offer in the way of architecture or nightlife or attractions. He only wished he had a northern view out of his apartment so he could stare up toward Midtown Manhattan and see the gleaming skyscrapers to get the dirty, dirty thought of Toronto out of his head.
His thoughts turned back to the police and then by the obvious logical chain, to donuts.
"And screw timbits," he said aloud to no one in particular, "why would anyone want to eat something that sounded like some guy’s unmentionables."
For William, it was all about the Krispy Kreme deep fried donut holes.
"Oh Krispy Kreme," he said hoping that there was one left standing in the area when New York City recovered from the flood. "Hell," he said again out loud, "I would fly to Chicago for some Krispy Kreme right now." A city with no Krispy Kremes, that was a joke to William. There were more good donut places in Syracuse than there were in Toronto.
Now depressed he navigated his way back to his apartment in darkness as deep as the blue of Lake Ontario that he wished had washed over Toronto instead. He wondered why his beloved city had been the one washed away and not that craphole to the northwest.
How he wished the city had been burned to the ground during the War Of 1812 while it was still a fort and they had chose not to rebuild it abandoning the land to packs of wild dogs.
"Go Rangers," he said to himself angrily under his breath. Sure Madison Square Garden might be gone but it would still have a better hockey team than the Maple Leafs. Even the Chicago Blackhawks are better than the Maple Leafs and they were terrible.
And it disgusted him that they didn't know how to pluralize leaf. It was one thing that Boston, he thought, another waste of civic planning time and energy couldn’t pluralize sock (and neither could Chicago he thought but he couldn’t blame the whole city for the south side) but leaf, come on, that was one of the first words a kid could learn.
The only thing that bothered him more than this grammatical error in judgment was that they spelled colors with a "u." While part of him could admit that was the more classic spelling, he appreciated that the United States had dropped the "u" long ago. It’s "ko-lor" he said aloud, not "col-o-ur."
And he didn’t even want to get started on a mental path about the Blue Jays or Raptors. Why did Toronto even bother?
All these thoughts about Toronto were making him want to throw himself out the window onto the flooded patch of West Sixth Street that ran below his window.
Death would be better than living in Toronto, he concluded."
---
Of course that won't make any post-NANOWRIMO edits but it was really fun to write. And, hey, it was almost 1k. ;)
posted by incendiarymind at 2:04 PM
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