chinese broccoli

Let me talk a little about how much I love Kensington Market. It is dirty. It smells bad. It is not super convenient for me to get to on transit, and it is generally covered in filth. I don’t like to shop much for vintage clothing, nor do I usually find myself in need of a wide selection of South American legumes.

That said, and it’s no controversial stance or great statement to say this, I find its total chaos and griminess so perfect sometimes I can hardly stand it. I tried to imagine, today, some kind of situation—city mandated or even grassroots—that would involve actually de-grossifying Kensington, and I just can’t ever see it flying. We love it in its cat-pee-smelling messy crowded annoying multicultural dirty glory.

(Or, as Carol said, “I find I need it as a contrast to the rest of Toronto.”)

Another thing that’s a good contrast to the rest of Toronto, besides the absolute squalour, is Kensington’s seeming obliviousness to statutory holidays. On Friday (that’s “Good Friday” to you xians) I wandered down to the market with Andrea to see if we could pick up a birthday present for our pal Linds. We didn’t, but we did enounter multiple fishmongers open for business—and grilling up free, intensely smoke-creating fish, and handing them out to passersby. How fucking cool is that?

There are spring days when you walk around your city and you run into people, or you see a beautiful plant, or you stumble into a gigantic cloud of billowing smoke and find someone just handing out fish on the street that you think, “My god. I really love my city.” (P.S. we also saw some girl walking around with her pet iguana.)

Today I participated—along with my lovely neighbours Dave, Carol and Laurel—in the second annual newmindspace Easter Egg Hunt. newmindspace aren’t cynical and tired like me or most of the people I spend my time with. They’re basically a two-person fueled citywide love-in run by people that simply want everyone to stop, observe and be struck awesome by the world around them, and celebrate that. They feel so much younger than me, but they rule.

newmindspace were planning to hide 5,000 plastic eggs filled with notes and candy in Kensington last night (starting at 4am!) By the time my friends and I finished our brunch, almost all of the eggs were gone. We didn’t run into many people searching—a happy family, a couple of disaffected hipsters—but we did find four eggs, and a lot of eggless and abandoned easter candies. My first egg had a note inside that urged me to “Start calling out for ‘Harold’ frantically”, and you had better believe that I did.

Inititally my pals were a little less completely excited by this game than I was (I did actually jump up and down several times when I spotted the first one wedged behind a panel of sheet metal), but by the end we were all hunting high and low and, occasionally, eating candy we found on the street. My god, I really love my city.