The hour and a half between 3:30 AM and 5:00 AM are perhaps the kindest minutes a city has to offer. It's a little after 5 AM now and I just got back from a short walkabout. Down on Pier Six is a 24-hour second cup… On the drive there I was passed a police car which immediately did a u-turn and then tailed me for about five minutes before giving up the chase. It's too bad, because I'd prepared myself to yell at him for pulling me over without provocation.
The only other patron at the coffee shop was a passed out and rather filth-encrusted hobo — if I'd arrived an hour earlier the place would have been teeming with Asian club kids. The attendant seemed half mad with boredom. He sang to himself and babbled incomprehensibly as he got me a jumbo mocca and an expresso bar (a concoction of white chocolate and coffee beans sure to wire even the most hardened coffee drinker). I left immediately and walked down the pier. It's chilly; probably about 50 degrees (10 celcius), and I even though I walked nearly naked the cold was refreshing.
I listened to the water against the boats — beastly floating restaurants gaudy with Christmas lights in every window, enough to reveal their sprawling low class dining chambers but not enough to transform them into anything beautiful. A gull broke the spell of the waves as it launched itself from the mooring line of the Empress of Canada, and I listened to a pair of birds in their early morning chatter. Soon the concrete turned to wood and I reached the end of the pier where I sat on a bench overlooking Lake Ontario. I watched some ducks feeding under an immense hollow spherical sculpture — I suspect it may have been some sort of giant sundial. Flowing through the sculpture was a terraced waterful — within this I became mesmerised by a field of undulating seaweed which strangely seemed to prefer the shallow pumping water to the solice of the lake. For a moment I watched the sun begin to rise over the Toronto Islands, but it was too brief a moment before I had walked back through a well tended and empty park and found myself again inside a graveyard of silent glass towers…
Well, I have work to do now. No rest for the wicked, right?
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