Above: Laura and Lightbox, in Toronto. On this visit, a few weekends ago:

1. We are at the Lightbox to catch a matinee of T. Malick’s The Tree of Life (aka The Big Lubezki), in which we see B. Pitt being a bad dad whose chin never un-juts, S. Penn staggering through antiseptic skyscrapers and salty dream-deserts, the newborn universe sobbing out endless nebulae of cosmic chemical tears beneath the screaming melodies of Z. Preisner’s “Lacrimosa”, and a dinosaur stepping on another dinosaur’s face.
2. We go to Mjölk and stare in reverential silence at their inventory of moon-man housewares, diaphanous furniture, minimalist hand-diddled tree bark, and soothing fragments of metal. (I am sort of forbidden from buying anything there because last time we went there we bought some intimidatingly featureless wine glasses and very soon thereafter I broke one of them. It’s what I do. I break wine glasses. This one was in my hand when it interfaced with our granite countertop and shattered into wabi-sabi smithereens. Possible suicide.)
3. We have dinner at a restaurant for wannabe beer snobs, where we consume a parade of craft brews concocted in countries that do not appear on maps, along with beer-baked bread and a bowl of beer-murdered mussels evidently too small to wrench themselves off the cultivation ropes. Laura eats cider-cured rainbow trout that has been converted to greyscale and then exploded all over a plate of drunken lettuce. I eat applewood-smoked suckling pig from Guelph, presented on the plate as a sprawling mound of dark, greasy, shredded baby mammal-meat atop a foundation of meat-colored root vegetables, accompanied by a clutch of oversauced mushrooms also resembling meat. Oh that poor piglet! Poor tiny, tender, delicious Guelph piglet.
4. We encounter a street-Shakespeare troupe performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Dundee Place Courtyard for a smallish crowd. It’s maybe ten actors playing multiple roles, allowing for maximum ham. This is minutes after we leave the restaurant, still woozy from our substantial intake of fancy-pants beers and annihilated fauna. We stand and watch the play for a while, and I must confess that I join some of the other spectators in being guilty of the obnoxious Shakespeare Snicker: laughing slightly too hard at a play’s laugh-lines to show that you know the text and supposedly understand it, even though the lines aren’t that funny. Several fine scenes later we donate some cash to the troupe hat and then leave in search of a Starbucks washroom, bowing out after Bottom’s translation into rude-mechanical ass-face.