I could take the train in on Monday. Take the other bus that’ll still go to the same station that used to nicely wham into the senior centre around the half hour I’d be waiting on. Dive up rather than just soar through a sleeve of another neighbourhood spotting aquamarine bungalows sun bleached to always shine among incognito heritage housing and decreed million dollar black milk crate luxury shacks squatting in an unblemished by Billy Joel (and his vehicle at the time) album cover. The nearly-mythical non-denominational middle school spun out from the cotton kind of linoleum. That stupid Tuscan sublet leaning off a soft plate on the elbow of a harsher turn chasing west against the long standing argument it must be married to during briefer but less subtle snipes between more or less the two seasons of Lake Ontario lake effect headlining adolescent light rail construction and the weak haze of buttered tracks locking gold fish gravel. This pretty dumb idea went ahead anyway I could already figure out let alone guess to do three days into getting enough of a vacation to still go home in these too sensible intervals to tissue around the water and the river underneath these rapid knuckles of shade to dream of an Electronic Gaming Expo for movies as it’s seldomly spoken of awash in the buzz on the street for the message Glen Powell must’ve stole like fire from his trip to K-Pax that “The Movies are BACK!” after last night’s premiere of The Life of David Gale Again. Regularly crossing that Rubicon just knowing it would be very nice to be in an otherwise empty passenger car before lunch, calm about the push I really gave myself to do this again with who else I can also be more often while unable to tell the time when a wasp will go a-chewing through the wheat of my left sideburn.

A bite rather than a sting and a wasp rather than a bee an index finger mile ahead of the Exhibition grounds where I got dealt a stinger that went behind the curtain of my left cheek (a fish hook) right above a swish of apple juice when I was a kid. No bigger than a word able to mimic someone else’s whisper after this long pause that’ll be believed to be apart of the same prank still recording from this yard when it’s emptied for the fall and before and after the eight or five needles sticking through my arm to figure out how allergic I was or could’ve been to qualify within a certain frequency with another tick in the notes if this similar enough pain can be the one keeping me company through the math of these unnatural corners built up to suggest and already know these indiscreet journeys were getting more moused and less worth it to mention without letting this creep, hiding behind being just an animal, have a go at a punchline. A pick-at old wound hit near genuine carousels gating these very limiting perimeters maybe deciding I should always be further out from the property of the laugh or “aww” I might never really hear or still shy away from disappointing myself with my own promise instead of choosing to be on the bus with the offside chance of maybe finding Steven from Humberside again like I did on my way to watch La Bete watching him helping out a day-walker in a daze with directions, more at ease than when someone asked “What’s your name?” (which he did answer), where we’d both be in a better place exiting the Gardiner together than what’ll feel like a pressure treated staple stuck to the side of my head genuinely saving time beside and passing traffic unchallenging a schmucked horizon from the bog of a very pleasant opinion you could take along into the city. 

Maybe in the melancholic whisk of just attendance to always feeling like I’m meant to be a William Blake print intact from what'll spittle out of a Dolarhyde hairball when I should be a little bit more like Shinya Tsukamoto. The second time seeing him here the last Thursday night a couple of years ago waiting by the valleyed exit looking like Vacation Jason. Turtle Hermit floral shirt, tiny khakis, maybe walking in with a Shanks straw hat after the other directors really lacking all the cool island time signatures escape the random room without electricity they’re kept in (their proof of life polaroids used for off-season advertising) voluntarily by at least the fourth day and all the New York Critics go home to their other families they really have to “miss” (they rank them whenever a new baby comes out) after dutifully reporting how Adèle Exarchopoulos eating dry ramen as an on the ropes single mother with a Gil-Man kid made them “really want to finally pick up a hard hat and start white-walling all over Roy Thompson Hall.” Unlike everyone else here being The Guy (and The Guy who dropped A Snake of June so what’s the excuse against being cool here) clearly resting transparently in the spirit to travel in much the same style as my mom devising these spin-off trips we were nice stowaways for getting away from this one street or other hallway or too elderly church group easily imagining how I could switch out the figment of myself taking a day off with the guy who made Hiruko the Goblin going through the Bat Cave at the ROM separated in understanding how it had to nerf itself every year or was more potent and intense going through it the first time as the dumb abscess in front of the museum grew in a way even Mr. Body Hammer probably thought was an eyesore. Letting himself be an ice cream detective. Brave enough to find out what’s now considered the good Toronto pizza. Better than just handing out the anxiety of graduation again and taking our pick and choosing Connell from Normal People going “OH yaknow [he’d make his accent cuter, also all these ladies saw that homely dingus already] Toronto is so nice [from my hotel]” so he can immediately hop on a plane to go back to consensually ditching women (very allegedly) in his own neck of the woods unawares of The Christie Pits or when Trinity Bellwoods turns into a gorge near public transit after knowing these Molly Blooms just enough to run away like a Blazes Boylan with apparently less chill than a really not ready for prime time player from the cast of Ichi The Killer. Instead seeing someone here making themselves comfortable through opposition. The only heir apparent to Sam Fuller this getaway aficionado already getting googy but dropping in to show off Shadow of Fire so his very bereft translator can flag down the “uh HI…uhwhen are you getting back to regular body horror?” question he already answered the first time I saw him by statistically the same dork after Killing and another story he had to tell to an audience, passing the dead pan back and forth to the same translator, about how he almost spun into Niagara Falls during a helicopter ride acting out the way we’d both mime “OH boy.”

That friendlier contrast transmigrating across all these little borders in still rhythmic spaces on the way to watch a movie or try another Bánh mì place than just conjuring the mise-en-scenic sorrow of the landlocked Saint Lawrence you’ll find more than meet in between exhibits, always awaiting to ask when he’ll flip over in this picture recently donated by the burglars, wondering why it is that he’s still doing this if he’s more or less afforded the comfort of being this stranger. My idea of time off I’ll actually put on the schedule for the same strained curiosity that was never really valuable if I didn’t start out as a little Mike Francesa dipshit fretting about the box office. Of a tone however hereditary and xeroxed I’d think I’ve dodged or could eventually exorcise wearing this Detective Conan t-shirt starring someone seven hundred episodes away from where I’ll be holding the door for youtubers choking press badges they got by plagiarizing off-duty babies. In the company of these really nicer twenty year olds without harsher affectations that must’ve been always cruel growing up having an evening lunch at the A&W across the street afloat to the hype that’ll really skip town surrounding Mike Flanagan’s Pierre Poilievre: We Hardly Knew Ye. Upon the scent of what they’ll pump out through the ducts for Richard Linklater’s So This is What a Good Job Looks Like to You? Poorly camouflage with the bird course film studies cum launde who look and act like either The Clowns from Akira or The Jokerz from Batman Beyond if that disjointed anthropological appropriation in our future’s past concept art were clogs in the key of Mike Loves wearing baseball caps indoors ritualizing the effect of someone else inviting a cousin over to band practice onto local businesses and cultural centres. That unending and very regular body horror in presence and homage I’m supposed to be trotting to especially away from here as the idea and product more so imagined in a member of a crowd than anything else aspiring on the opposite side of the last shore getting the same tide coming-in chill in air conditioning as an eighty five year old on a stage wearing duck hunting pants and wrinkled sleeves with a sat on puffy vest minding the Summer of Love within his Dubliner ellipsis for a Morning in America (before his Torgo period as a means to probably build a case to claim helping-out credit on Garbage Dump or Look at Your Game, Girl even though he was the one really trying to sonorously escape to the shower with Squeaky Fromme that one time he finally saw True Evil when it was Charles Manson this one time who had to walk in and see Mike Love nude doing God Only Knows without the rest of the band) getting the early winter forecast that Powders is definitely the frontrunner this award season. All in accordance to what the Auto-Bi-opic Asphyxiation dot CO dot UK BAFTAs almanac screams between rants about trans people on jet skis. The Parisian burden New York film Frasiers who haven’t seen the show will have to really lift trying to separate the artist from their delightful sit downs, wholesome weekend retrospective moderations, and at least the two afternoon dinners they’ll have to plan around the city to now accommodate a sum total Easter egg basket of ankle monitors. The space already before any screening and briefer ceremonies along the dominos of the words “fortunately Mr. Saliva could not be here tonight, if anyone wants to accept this award on his behalf, be advised everything here is a camera” I could leave behind and knock out entirely from my life to be nothing else but a private prank I must’ve pulled. 

Not sure why I keep doing this if there’s really no one else expecting me from the other side of a pantomime commute to also nicely vent or shrug off or laugh about the wasp that bit me on the fucking train manned by more cops especially if it’s just the two periodically performing a slight of hand in “safety” instead of actual employees for this public good that should’ve already been free making sure there aren’t hives under the seats. Volunteering the chords of a country song even when I know this would be too inconvenient for someone I’m not going on the trip with while being this indefinitely courteous and unable to sort out how I’m supposed to look if I don’t shave for three days walking around with clearly stolen Bette Davis eyes that might as well be an Ibad blue pair of Meg Fosters. Renting out this real failure even when I’ll still have my wits about me to know how to spell out the other obvious prongs between Tsukamoto and Mike Love when it’s really clear one of them actually went to the fucking beach before screening his movie (and it didn’t have to be that day) where a little kid pulls out a gun to protect his adoptive sister who is protecting him from seeing her radiated visage in a tampered closet against constant ten o’clock daylight (historically regular body horror that might have thematic links to his earlier films but will be the work in progress from our end until The Ringer or Blank Check produces the cheat sheet when we’re finally old enough to see these films) whereas the other is just some golf course asshole seeping dry in an gradually indistinguishable landscape somehow still having admirers accounted for even without them ever listening to Looking Back with Love. As a trinket when it’s not just him pretending around a location as an eternal tourist embarking in the bubbles of where you would think a soul should idle. Kitschy brutalists or natural experts you could line up against Niagara Falls occurring too easily as examples I could’ve been if I wasn’t always stumbling onto another scene to influence fragments of myself that’ll be grander than growing into the aesthetic decisions of how ugly do I want my kid to look next to an impersonal Jesus on my shoulder or how upsetting should I make that cross on my ankle when I’m in cargo shorts or whatever is up with those triangles that’ll be on my freakishly unvaccinated bicep underneath the dial of the dumbest baseball cap. What even I had to know as a kid when this inaccurate community surrounding movies could still be pretty dubious if it’s too easy on its own or for the sake of a lot more fellas I can’t see in the dream where I’d need help moving if they could agnostically believe Mike Love’s contributions to the group were probably unsung for their time like letting The Fat Boys do emotional labour for an interpolation of an instrumental that had nothing to do with The Beach Boys unless you’re rude or trying to figure out how to be funny on purpose all the while Smile had to be drawn out for fifty years and the act became a double negative novelty of golden oldies cultivating wrong answer trivia for Gen Xers and their Renfield run-offs making themselves very known when they rationalize the sea monkeys swimming in their circulatory system instead of a real red wagon’s worth in lead paint they got from siphoning cemetery water. 

The problems I have to still hopscotch giving myself a reason to be relatively elsewhere even as an inaudible force who should be telling on himself more if I deep down know I didn’t feel that sorry murdering a wasp if that’s the personable crime I can get away with in writing a confession that’ll misremember that 4DX auditorium (it was actually the theatre they’d use for press screenings) before Blue Heron really holding out on owning this supposed voice of a mountain with one little screw still turning slightly a little above my eye. From the looks of things being here ironically. No one’s fault but mine if I end up the practical audience for someone else’s very baroque intentions I didn’t need the bus, the train, the movie ticket to find at least with the sense to pick out the nice Evangelion shirt with the fruit punch dark sea and cut off phone lines in front of a blue and pink shaded sky swinging from a single cloud thinking a part of my skull should be gradually exiting from what could’ve been a sting. In the way of my own decision naturally feeling like this sudden hurdle that shouldn’t have shown up. The why arisen in the big room of my own heart knowing by a larger radius than assigned seating that I’m next to nothing. Some guy living to never survive outside the question of “why the fuck are you here?” even when that could still be pretty funny (Women Talking) and criticism under construction (maybe horror movies are none of your business) in isolating a body I’m getting less inclined to grasp as an item supposedly belonging to the world in which all these things have to be continuous. If this’ll always be more solitary than advertised able to tell himself here he should at least be a better Banquo if he easily comprehended the one image underneath the others commuting to that university in randomly watching Still Processing. From another town over to what was assumed at admission like everywhere else to be Toronto without transferring along the still rolling set of Cronenberg’s Crash rarely saved by a certain smile I probably couldn’t have ruined by talking too much about Alan Partridge and Philly Boy Roy (it maybe wasn’t ever my fault she wanted to see me) when I had the window seat escaping a school that’ll mostly actualize itself in memory as a transit terminal funding all the ways it could be more Ballardian with these newer tunnels beside Syn Mead dribbles of sunlight or Giraudian lines made out of infant evening shadows condensating what was once a quad. That same feeling like it was just found again in the fridge leaving the Criterion Channel after this day-less February still staging the way to be that productively isolated, cutting across a subterrain to disappear through work effacing a personal void from out of Martian cameras up earlier. This brazen eighteen minute dramatic document of unresolvable consequences frozen because of who had to mark themselves absent from the life he didn’t or couldn’t have known he had with everyone who still love him. Art-making never on its own this grander vocation if I really recognize this as genuinely contemporary where if I’m not exactly the audience then always fated to be at this remove making myself most of all feel less than the fallen tree representing what’s spouted by a movie podcaster who twice in one week have to prove to Fanduel sponsorships they’re about as curious as a punch to the back of the head they won’t feel when at my medium I could be moving a lot better than the forest sitting down to cry somewhere else if I’m easily able to still retrieve who I was or could be more often before the train ride over here as a certain pain has to lift paying attention to a better film where I once again find myself having to share a name with a little girl. 

-Sasha Makarewicz

(Next time TIFF Takedown and hopefully going back to actually talking about Blue Heron)