Laura is in Italy. For work. She is in Rome. Her first time in Europe. I can only assume she is following Christian Bök’s advice: When in Rome, do as the Ramones do.

While she is away, earlier today I go to Toronto and conquer the Art Gallery of Ontario. I do the whole thing. I get there at 11am, break for lunch at I think 3pm, then go back around 4-ish and leave sometime in the 5pm hour, shortly before closing. Lunch is a large, cheap, excellent chicken-and-rice dish at a Vietnamese dive on Queen Street West. The weather is beautifully warm and summerish and sunny. I take no photos. I encounter no man eating catapilers. I hotfoot it back to the car just in time to avoid getting drenched and/or lightning-fried by the apocalyptic ass-kicker of a thunderstorm that cracks opens the heavens as I drive down Bay to Queen West to Spadina and to the Gardiner to split for home. Apparently I may have driven past Douglas Coupland, who around this time tweets about the storm from Queen West.

The thunderstorm follows me home to Hamilton and has been persisting with some stamina for a few hours now. My legs ache. They ache probably not so much from all that walking, but more from all those slow-motion art-museum steps one takes while creeping contemplatively from painting to painting. My eyes ache from beholding such volumes of art, so many stirring landscapes and bewigged portraits and sexy figuratives and sexier abstracts and staggering Henry Moore sculptures and various unwatchable video-art installations (I apologize to any video artists who may be reading, I can never get into anything done in this form, I am sure the fault is mine). Also a great number of old and immense and elaborately scary Jesus pictures, as all art museums must have. My throat is still parched from hours of breathing four vast floors’ worth of severely climate-controlled gallery oxygen. My tongue is still tingling from having surreptitiously licked so many delicious priceless contemporary canvases. (Don’t worry, just the corners. Tasty impasto!) The lightning flashes outside are getting more intense so I am just going to stop here before the power goes out.