Brookfield Place: Architecture is Sculpture

I sit in a sculpture that is architecture. White-painted iron arches and ribs repeat over the walkway like a riot of infinite regressions in a mirror. Distorting glass windows over the archways bounce light and reflect the architectural columns in permutated ways. Looking at the rounded arch of white ribs through the glass which is divided into sections by frames it feels as if we’re in the skeleton of an old boat, itself a rendition of a ribcage lit from within the belly of a whale, a huge beast basking in the sun pouring through the glass sky as it rolls through the waves.

The sound of French café music, slightly jazz, sensual, romantic, and a fountain spraying, pouring add to the surreal experience.

Rich forkful by forkful I eat a Napoleon, vanilla cream custard, flake pastry, fresh strawberries, with a smooth yet bitter coffee. My dessert swims in its vanilla cream on a large platter on an outdoor iron table and I am seated in a wicker chair that rests on a floor of polished field stone tiles. Large planters holding Ficus trees and other foliage line the edge of the patio - like a street café in Valencia, or any cosmopolitan European city. There are green and red and yellow canvas umbrellas over some of the tables.

Is this decoration, or does it serve a purpose in the glass-filtered sun? The sun that makes my netbook screen almost impossible to clearly see. The same dancing light is on my lap. I take cell phone photographs.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, sculptor and engineer designed Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto. There are resemblances to the Eaton Centre, and I discover in an Internet search that a Canadian architectural firm, Bregman & Haman, constructed both.

An old bank building, in restored condition, is one of the buildings inside the glass structure and which you pass as if you were walking down a pedestrian-only street. Once it was whipped by winds and ice or baked in the hot Summer sun, now it dwells within a light-filled architectual sculpture. Is this a futuristic rendition of the bubbles that might contain our cities of the future? The old building stands without mourning the loss of rain or windborne air, as if realizing a dream of a protected and peaceful existence.

We walk past the building from another century over glass squares of radiating light.



Light resplendent above and below us.

Café Sketch

Two Chinese women, one eating French fries and the other a spinach omelette. One with a white hairband holding straight black hair back, navy blue trousers, a white top, 'business casual'; the other, older, in a flat-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon coloured in blacks and whites, large white pearl earings, a white cotton blouse edged with fine lace, soft black slacks. They are eating inside a café where the ceiling-mounted speakers play romantic French songs. I imagine they are mother and daughter. The younger woman perhaps working in the downtown corporate complex has been taken out to lunch by her older widowed mother. The older woman is dressed for the occasion; it is clear this is an outing. She sips white wine. Her daughter drinks water. The older woman eats slowly with an elegance that recalls times past; the younger appears stressed and looks at her watch from time to time. Simple complaints about living are aired, the cost of rice, or hydro, or plane fare to China, worries about relatives are discussed, lightly gossiped about, who's out of work, who's drinking too much, who works too hard. The missing man, the husband, the father, who perhaps died of a heart attack, or cancer, is ever-present as a shadow. The weight of the loss of him lies between them. Though it is carried lightly today, it never goes away. As they finish their meals, they sit back, one on either side of the marble café table, similar looks of contentment on their faces. It’s been pleasant. A lovely late lunch. Nothing too awkward arose in the conversation. Plans are made for family outings and dinners, perhaps taking the children to the zoo one Sunday, dinner at the daughter's afterward. The mother voices a distant wish that the children's grandfather could be with them. They recognize their mourning. There is a moment of the silence of remembering. It is a full silence that includes gratitude for the blessings of their lives, the children, the houses, the steady financial flow on which their lives rest. And then they rise and the older woman pays not the waiter but at checkout, for this is the way it is done to facilitate the diners who are largely business clientelle. Do they hug and kiss each other's cheek? I do not see before they wander off to their respective worlds.

My "Disappeared" Blog Posts

Perhaps I begin to understand why I am having difficulty writing in my blog, which has been a writerly home to me for some years now.

A man I had an involvement with a few years back, and wrote about in the poetical way I do, has 'blocked' some of my blog posts.

If I do a search on some of my posts, the page appears blank.

Yet I can get to these pages through direct links elsewhere and by pasting the url into the browser.

For instance, he has attacked my 'Bliss Queen' poem in this way. That he has chosen this poem to target particularly perturbs me. It is hidden but still accessible.

You can find it here: The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss.

Yet if you copy & paste these words- The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss -into the Blogger search bar on the upper left, all posts with aspects of the title appear, but not the post with the full poem itself. He's hacked into my Blogger blog somehow, or paid someone to do it, and suppressed my post. (When he reads this post of course he'll unblock it, but then you can run a Google cache search on this date and see what I am talking about.)

There are other posts too.

Until I gave up on men, which I feel I have nearly done, and it's been a few years now, I was intimately involved with a Rabbi (I didn't become Jewish), a swinger (I didn't 'try it out' but he was writing a book and so it was quite fascinating though I backed out after a mere 8 weeks without judgement), and, and I know it sounds silly and yet I couldn't be more serious, a 'non-violent' yet still textbook-case psychopath. It is the gentleman who is in the latter category who has been hacking into my Blogger account, or, more likely paid someone to do it for him, and made some of my posts "disappear."

Posts that he utterly approved of and had me email to him as well as read to him on the phone and enjoyed my discomfort at what I was describing. He is a man without conscience; an 'always happy' man; a man who lives by a code of outsmarting everyone by lying, and lying in a way that is so seamless you'd almost never know he wasn't telling the truth. I only got confirmation by an outside source that caused his stories to unravel. And I haven't yet even written about that! That's the juicy stuff that I dare not tell, and you would understand this if you knew me, though one day it'll make for an interesting autobiography. :-)

Tonight I realized that once again a man that I have been in some sort of intimate relationship with is deliberately suppressing my writing. I have a history of this sort of involvement - and the list is a long one, including and especially my ex - that, firstly, you'd think I'd have learned by now, and, secondly, there are millions of kind, caring, supportive, sensitive, intelligent, loving men in the world who would be much better match for me than the men I've so haplessly gotten involved with.

This whole episode of the 'disappeared posts,' as you can see, and which would delight him no end, seeing as he enjoys watching others suffer, and I know that sounds terrible, but I witnessed it again and again, never understanding his lack of empathy, of compassion, until I realized how closely he fits the 'psychological profile,' is quite serious, and troubling.

I'm being hacked into and I know who is doing it and I don't know what to do about it.

Other than contacting Blogger, and going public.

And making sure to maintain back-ups and copies of my blog. Not just in case of system failure - but because there are strange people out there who do strange things on the Internet.

Everyday I think about posting, I miss being at my blog. It's an important part of my life. But I have no access at work, and my day starts at 6am and I'm home by 6pm and evenings are busy with both of my children living with me, a dog and a cat, and volunteer tutoring my 18 yo student who can't read (which was tonight so I am particularly tired with getting home late) that I can't seem to get to writing. It's like it's on the other side of an ocean and I can't seem to reach ecriture with the girth of water increasing daily...

Health issues have quietened down, and other that being more tired than I can remember ever being, everything is fine.

Beautiful readers, I miss posting and being with you in the ways we are! I am considering how to squeeze stolen time out of my schedule to write secretly, something, anything, because I will go insane if I cannot write.

Well. Not quite. You understand how difficult it is to be somewhere where you may not compose anything of your own. Not even able to get online through my netbook at lunch because that requires 'special permission.' I've had access to my email and blog in all other jobs but I understand that security is tight and I accept the rigors of it all and I need the paycheck and I am not complaining but not being able to write in the poetic ways I do is perhaps the most fatiguing of all.

Anyway, I am so tired tonight that I must go and rest...

So, sweet beautiful blessings to you all, be back as soon as I figure out how to continue to be who I am in a more corporate world, and I will, I've done it before, just not under such a lot of other things that also require much energy and attention.

If you're curious and would like to know the general area I'm working in, check out Varonis. I'm working in the regulated private sector for a business that is implementing this incredible product.

And so on, onward, onwards ho! and so forth, and etcetera.

::SMILING:: hugs xo

An hour of bliss...

It's 9pm, and wilting in a heat wave - though I am in air conditioning all day at work. And then I remind myself that I love the sultry Summer heat and we've had so little of it this year. And so bask in it...

When I came home, my son had taken our dog downstairs, and for the first time in 10 years I came home to a quiet apartment. No happy, crazy doggy to greet me. It felt strange. My daughter's not back from her camping/bed & breakfast trip yet.


I came home. Where is everybody? An empty place? Oh wow.

I rested but also put JazzFM on and listened with ear buds... and had an hour of bliss! Every instrument, piano, trombone, snare drums, the sexy gravely voices of the men singing blues and jazz, emerged from the centre of my consciousness like magnificent flowers blooming... creativity blossoming in the world... fabulous hour of reverie.

Moments like these are enabling - encouraging, inspiring, uplifting, affirmative... an inner blossom of bliss runs everywhere in the molecules of the world like a Tao, and I tapped into it for an hour tonight newly, it's been a long time...

Perhaps the financial stress I've been under with being unemployed for so long is lifting just a little, just enough to feel an hour of bliss listening to jazz...

_
photos are stills from a short video I took back in June... a clip which you might see one day on these pages...

I haven't forgotten about you, dear blog readers. No! I'd never forget about you. I've started a new job that's taking me away from computer access each day, and dealing with some health issues. On the latter, tests & an ultrasound but no results back yet. On the former, the project (in an IT dept at a bank) looks like it's going to be a huge amount of work, and I'm glad to be involved in the process. Hopefully this weekend I can post something. *Big hugs* xo

Caught at a Starlight Burlesque Show at The Painted Lady!

Haha... Claire and I, caught at a Starlight Burlesque show at The Painted Lady last Friday night by Nonni! :) lol

Claire says she looks like her great aunt. Not sure who I look like. Nor why we look zonked - Claire only drank water, and I sipped one tiny glass of red wine the whole evening. Musta been the venue! Had to share - you'd appreciate (& it just came in).

Claire, who I love hanging out with, is a fabulous artist - huge canvases of jungle mythological motifs, Shamanic, archetypal, rich, colourful.