Four Seasons

I've been at Four Seasons Farm for nearly a month now. The family that runs it is the last remaining part of a community that moved here in the late 70's on the advice of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche as part of the Shambala Buddhism movement because this area has a good energy, cut and shaped by the ocean and the elements. The old record collections and bookshelves at these farms are always my favorite feature and so naturally I've been listening to Billy Joel and reading a bit on Shambala and trying it out: a little daily breathing exercises and trying to foster a tenderness in my heart. Sounds a bit hippy when I say it out loud.

Then I try to practice it during the day. Results vary. The daily schedule is meals and work. We eat three meals a day together around a big family dinner table, seven to nine of us, simple breakfasts and lunches, taking turns cooking dinner. Eleven hours a day minus the oatmeal break in the morning and a one-hour lunch break is spent working, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the fields, sometimes in the greenhouses. Sometimes we work together, conversations fluid and varying as people move in and out as their tasks dictate, each person changing the dynamic and topics ranging from ridiculous to self-righteous to romantic, comments coming in from someone cutting arugula in the corner who gets it to someone cutting magenta right next to me who doesn't. Sometimes I work alone, sitting in silence, regretting or smiling about incidences past present or future or with songs surfacing and receding, the Mississippi delta, shining like a national guitar...on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese...and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all...moon river wider than a mile...slow down you crazy child, you're so ambitious for a juvenile...she only comes out at night, lean and hungry type...choruses, little excerpts, ones that I just heard or hardly remember from deep recesses of my mind that I look up and try to memorise.

On Halloween we dressed up as the farm, I as a chicken made out of cardboard boxes and went to the firehall to squawk at the Maitland Halloween Dance. One night it went from cold during the day to warm rain at night and we named the weather Cuba and walked through the forest to a house abandoned for decades, whips of warm air rolling through the field with the moon out. Everything feels immediate. The ocean makes the weather. Normal is a setting on the washing machine. This Nova Scotia farm experience is exposing me.

Shouldered by a Giant Turtle

We cannot know anything. That's what both books that I am reading proclaim. Book number one is the Modern Mind by Peter Watson, an unbelievably expansive summary of the movements in thought in the 20th century, mainly detailing how scientific thinking dominated our minds these past 100 years, infiltrating every discipline from art to music to philosophy. Yet it is starting to show signs that we may be at an apex, a peak that may signal a dead-end in terms of our ability to understand the universe through deductive logic. Bear with me if you can, I know this is heavy. Here's a comic:

The other book is One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese scientist turned farmer who applies a Taoist philosophy to agriculture, advocating do-nothing farming consistent with his philosophy that nature cannot be improved upon by man and that we know nothing and the best way to think and act is with a non-discriminating knowledge which is not arrived at through critical analysis and deduction. That means accepting wood as wood and not examining it from it's most basic building blocks. The books are more nuanced but these two wise men are in agreement on at least one point, that deductive thinking has flaws and science cannot provide an answer to everything.

Watson's book goes further, summarising the ideas of John Maddox, a long-time editor of the academic journal Nature. No one can deny that science has brought technological advance. But the progress in pure science (mainly physics) and the search for a Unifying Theory of Everything while trying to dissect everything down to the smallest pieces is exposing limits to our understanding. Maddox, a lifetime scientist and editor of the most recognisable science journal says that at this stage, concepts like the big bang, string theory, quarks (and neutrinos and whatever we discover next that proves to be even smaller) and the multitude of other concepts that most of us laypeople don't understand, that even to scientists these are just extended metaphors for scientists to try to make sense of the universe.

http://www.xkcd.com

How can anyone picture what came before the universe or what is beyond space or what an electron is made of? These are unanswerable questions to which science attempts to answer with increasingly inexact theories. String theory is completely unsubstantiated. Merely the process of observing electrons in orbit around an atom introduces error making it only possible to know the probability that the electron is there. So the universe isn't being carried on the back of a giant turtle nor was it created in six days, but where does the big bang get me? I've been having this feeling lately that you can choose what you believe in regarding the big questions (like the existence God, what happens to you after you die, what's the point of it all, the inherent good or bad of people etc.) and you won't ever be proven wrong. Of course, it's not easy to choose to believe something so we look to the world around us to clue us in the right direction.

So what do you think happens after you die? My grandfather recently passed away, the first time I have experienced the death of a loved one and certainly not the last. I saw the life force slowly ebb from his body and though I didn't see the ultimate end, I knew where it was leading. It's funny that we have the intellect to contemplate our own deaths but no way to know anything about what happens after that last breath. And it's the biggest elephant in the room, the great unknown, the after life, the thing that few people can ever accept despite it's inevitability.

It's also fall here in farm country, a beautiful time and harvest time. Time is up for the annuals, plants whose life cycles last one season are returning to earth in decomposing stalks and dispersed seed. From dandelion to corn to beans, how do they feel about death?

Quoting Wikipedia, "precise medical definitions of death become more problematic as science and medicine advance." Is plant death like human death? Just because we're smart enough to think about it doesn't mean we experience it any different. A termination in function of the heart and the brain means you're dead but many of the cells of which you are constituted are still alive. A person can be revived by a defibrillator after being clinically dead for several minutes. A person can be brain dead while the rest of the body functions are kept alive. Where is your soul held? Where were you before you were born and where will you go after?

What I'm questioning is how much the acceptance of science as the only authority is helping us come to terms with the world. Consider death as the permanent cessation of of vital bodily functions vs. death as the soul leaving the body.

In the final chapters of One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka revels in the joy that is held in a grain of rice come winter though the rice plant has withered away. People can't prove most of the things they talk about today yet most would dismiss this without a second thought. And this is where scientific thinking fails us, telling us no evidence means no reason to believe. I think an exuberant grain of rice sounds nice, and if you want, you can see death as just a different expression of life. Science won't ever reassure us about death, resolve our queries of whether our spirits live on or if humans are inherently good. Science won't give us faith in karma or that someone is smiling down on you from above. But just because you have no evidence to believe in something doesn't mean there's nothing to believe in.

Urban Agriculture

It's the wave of the future.

How's this for a good idea?

Young Urban Farmers

Carbon Tabulating

Part of my decision to come out here was to see how hard or easy living with less impact would be. After all, the say that all you need is love...after you've got food, shelter and water of course.

Well, Kawartha Ecological Growers is the organisation I'm working for. We co-ordinate the produce of twenty different small family farms to be delivered daily to members in the city. Many of the farms we work with are Amish and well-versed at living self sufficiently. The Amish make a deliberate effort to live a slow and luddite lifestyle, forbidding use of electricity and fuel. The only phone the community uses is at their school house. Mark and Shannon take orders and communicate with them via handwritten notes or face-to-face communication. For refrigeration during summer months, they harvest huge blocks of ice from ponds they have dug during winter, then store it in an insulated trailer. Tractors and carriages are all horse-pulled. Their food and clothing is all self produced and their lifestyle is the definition of simple. If a community member is sick, everyone will donate to pay the hospital bills in cash since they do not use OHIP cards. They refuse to cash in government cheques and stockpile them as proof of staying independent of the government and "maintaining the importance of brotherhood."

Meanwhile, I've been trying to live on as little as I can, in a cabin with no running water or electricity. (Well not anymore, see footnote below). All my food is locally grown and travels an average of 15 food miles I would guess. Raw milk, yogurt and eggs have been consistently available since I came to the farm. My diet in those early weeks of April was a lot of non-perishable things like bread/pasta or stuff that would keep like potatoes, canned or frozen beans, tomatoes and zucchini from last year's harvest. Then as the season began, more variety was introduced like wild-harvested items (fiddleheads (pictured above) and nettle), leeks, as well as the early and frost tolerant lettuces, beets and rhubarb. Then came more variety like aspargus and strawberries. Now it's a feast of the harvest and also the canning and preserving for the winter months.

Abundant bounty of fresh corn and beans and peas and peppers and broccoli and melons and tomatoes and garlic and more. The occasional grass fed beef or free range chicken too. And I would say it was all produced in a manner that minimizes or eliminates use independent of fossil fuels and improves the soils. It has been a great season as most crops like wet, hot and sunny conditions.

Showers consist of well-water, rainwater or lakewater. Drinking water is store bought as are a few other items like cooking oil, bananas, dish soap, soya sauce, salt. I drive all over the place to deliver groceries to our members and to get to different farms for work and on weekends I go to Toronto for a vacation from the solitude of the simple life and revel in a frenzy of bright lights, noise and friends.

Sustainable living is a lifestyle designed for permanence. The difference between my lifestyle and the Amish lifestyle in some ways is a difference in degree and in some ways is fundamental. I can do my best to use little and produce what I can but I won't be able to shut out the rest of the world, the innovations in technology and the constant march of progress even in this dark and cosy cabin. I don't have the community to do so and I don't think it's realistic or progressive to hope to create a community that would eschew modernity. On a few levels there would be benefits to returning to only face-to-face interactions and leaving behind the distractions and comforts glowing from our digital displays. We could slow right down and be happy, happier even, but the brotherhood I know and have isn't about that and it won't ever be. You can't unring a bell.

So food, shelter and water matter but so does love. We all cry, laugh, lose loved ones and think that we're the only ones who have dealt with this before so don't forget that we're in it together, all of us in these modern times.

****

I wrote most of this before I left for Hong Kong in early July. I came back one month later to find that I'd been kicked out of my cabin due to a dispute between my boss and the owner of the cabin which is unfortunate but doesn't surprise me. So I'm working mainly on Les' farm now, the coolest of the farms. Les is a 60 year old man who manages a few hundred acres on his own, has animals and a tractor and a wetland on his property. We use the tractor and machinery much more.

My Other Speed is Slow and Doesn't Have Time to Care What You Think About My Shoes

I hand write by candle light onto pad now. I forgot how different it is writing just for yourself until I started doing it again.

I leave the farm most Fridays for the city and burn up the energy that comes from working hard all week. It's a whirlwind of cell phones, jazz bands, dance floors and cheap chinese food, until Sunday when it takes me an entire evening to slow back down to the pace of a different life.

It can get lonely at nights in an unconnected cabin. No music or radio, no TV or hot shower or internet to distract from the enveloping darkness. The sky darkens and the moon takes over, sending out beams of solitude and I swear to you the coyote's howl out of the neighbouring forest sends chills through you like a wind through a wind chime.

The days are of course beautiful and seemingly endless. Farming is basically working your ass off for next to nothing (monetarily) but getting rewarded in a different, more traditional and more whole-wheat way. Wildflowers smiling at the sky, swaying in the wind and hearty meals and hardy dogs playing with country-bred kids and planting and digging and haying and their respective rhythms and idyllic looking clouds and jokes about the weather until christmas and donkeys and trying to ride donkeys and learning about wild tea and zucchini flowers and pollinators and long shadows over seas of wheat or canola and exploding sunsets over the huge Canadian horizons and all that kind of thing.

I chase something entirely different on weekends, consuming and looking outwards for something to fulfill me, that smile, those laughs, those eyes, that night out, that awesome concert and that attitude of 'people like me and you should too and what do you think of my shoes.' I want to fill a hole with a whole lot of fun and I'm definitely not the only one trying that out. And so it takes me all Sunday evening to change gears. Alone with the dark and the quiet, I have nowhere to look but inward and maybe it is slowly forging strength.

So I think I can do this. It's beautiful, healthy, and colourful. It's sustainable and fulfilling. But I don't think I can do it alone.

(Donkeys, haying, wildflowers)

It's a Life

It's been a whirlwind of a week. Farm life has 80's tones. This old house has sloping floors and the sheds and bookshelves are filled with things from previous decades. For the first week we had only one tape and one speaker so I repeatedly heard Paul Simon sing "These are the days of miracle and wonder,this is the long distance call."

Now things are starting to swing as my body learns to handle this life. No longer nervous around the creepy gang of pervert-weirdo chickens that are more free range than I am. My back is stronger and new muscles are getting sore and recovering every day - thumbs, wrists, balls of my feet. The pent up energy I had to do things, to exert myself fully has been spent building plotting digging pushing shimmying hammering lifting paddling climbing.


Always always outside except feeding time, three times a day when I stuff my face with the freshest home grown holy goodness I've ever had the pleasure of mowing down. And then sleeping time. Like a hefty log. It's a pretty good life if you like the simple things.

Good Signs

Arrived on the farm today and played capture the flag barefoot in the sunshine, a good omen if there ever was one. Have internet and electricity at the house for a few days while I get settled in and until I move to the cabin. Went out for a mosey after dinner and got re-acquainted with the stars. They were out in full force tonight as were the bright lights of Toronto 15o km to the south-west. Guess I won't be needing the North Star for orientation.

Also, to everyone who donated to Katitawa School for the forest project that I wrote about a few weeks ago, thanks so much. We raised the 500 dollars we needed. Check the link.

A Minute for Gratitude

So I've decided to leave on April 1st. Things are winding down as things are starting up. I was talking to Breanne on the way home from French class on a mild spring night and she was saying that I'm leaving just as everything is starting flower and blossom and I agreed that things were just starting to go well here in Montreal. This place is sweet, a brew pot of people and ideas and communities. She said that it passed by so quickly, why didn't we make the most of it? and I said cause I wasn't leaving while I was here.

And then I was talking to Thom as he came in for my last shift at Second Cup and he asked me if I was feeling nostalgic yet and I kind of scoffed because it seemed so ridiculous that I would have any nostalgia about this ridiculous min wage job that produces inordinate amounts of waste and doesn't recycle and where my boss has gotten mad at me for refilling peoples' cups with hot water or giving change for bills. This is a place where we are taught to push extra sales by asking what kind of muffin you would like with that? to make customers think it's free and then charge them for it fully knowing it's stale fatty sugary food. And one time a girl found a tooth in her sandwich. If there's one thing I've learned from Second Cup and maybe corporations in general it's to not trust them because they just care about money. If there's a way to cut costs to the detriment of others, it's likely they'll do it. And then you'll eat it up.

But so then later on in the night as I was cleaning up, picking soggy napkins out of half chewed cups of leftover dregs of coffee and chocolate grinds and coagulated milk solids, cleaning up plates sticky and plasticized with processed shriveled blueberry, an odd moment happened. The Rock'n'Roll Oldies station was playing and Leaving on a Jet Plane came on. Something about that song pulls me viscerally from inside, turns my stomach into a vacuum and generates nostalgia in my whole body. So I started missing my terrible job even while I was doing it. And it was such a ridiculous sequence of events that I felt the need to re-evaluate what I have had and I realized there are elements of this job that are unique, mainly the chance to connect with dozens of people every night. Between midnight and 7AM I have tons of conversations, some good, some uninspired, some fantastic.

I talked with a student recently moved from Taiwan on his own and we talk about how being far from family affects you. In french, I discussed with a man from Iran doing his pH.D and Masters respectively at UQAM and U of Montreal studying Environment and Religion how much time is left before we see some serious consequences of our system and what sustainable development should mean. This cute couple came in, a little tipsy from a few drinks, from Florida and Calgary respectively and couldn't stop smiling at each other and danced and sang a little to the upbeat oldies playing while ordering a coffee and moka. And then Marc came in and talked for a while and drew me a linguistic chart of logic of how piquer un sainte crise doesn't mean sting a holy crisis.


Then a great conversation with a real estate developer about the workings of the real estate market in the past few years and how it's all inflated. And then this grumpy lady got very impatient when I made her a double short instead of a double long.

And so I thought that if I can even feel fortunate towards Second Cup, perhaps the key is the lens through which you look at things, to remember how short-lived this is all going to be so as to make the most of it. If I can even feel good about Second Cup, I should take a minute and take stock of what else I can feel fortunate about. I've heard it's a good exercise for happiness.


Let me just take a minute and count 'em, those things you take for granted until they are gone:

1. Health. This body housing the me. The millions of cells performing a myriad of functions, oxidizing, respiring, repairing, synthesizing, digesting. Whatever you call that sensation when you're moving fast enough that air is blowing throw your hair and across your face and you're breathing deep and fatigue is building slowly in your muscles as they pump hard, your lungs expanding fuller and fuller, trying to compensate for the oxygen deficit and your body is just coursing with life. And to sleep soundly at night.

2. This island city that you forget is an island until you cross a bridge or mount a royal and then you see it from afar or above how it really all fits together, the bagels, the french/english uncertainty, the boroughs, street corners and winter settling in and icing all the cracks and crevices in the city, my first winter in 3 years! and icing over of rinks and the festivals to get you out always out and into le foule, the holes in the walls, the anti-capitalist sentiment, the university and its classes, the practically free french classes, all of us outsiders struggling together to get a handle on french and the french.

3. To be alive in this era, with these all-new challenges and joys and modes of communication and issues being tackled for otherwise I wouldn't know what to do with myself not that I really do anyway.

4. Peeps. The people around me near and far. Thom and Xiang threw me the most epic surprise party on Saturday. I rushed home in the afternoon thinking I was "babysitting" and instead found a house full to the brim with good, good, honest people. They were hiding in the kitchen and gave me the biggest surprise of my life. And they kept pouring out of the kitchen, people I've met from work, from class, from life, all such good people, so human and honest and loving, all doing their best the best they know how. And then we all hung out for the afternoon and everyone got along with everyone cause it's so easy to make friends and be friends, it just requires honesty and a smile. It buoys the spirit. People are so good, they're there to confide in, the laugh with, to share with, to lessen the burden and increase the joy.

5. And my God little Noa is just something else. We go through our phases of friendship, on and off and of course her parents are doing all the legwork here but she's a constant reminder that life is simple and real and beautiful.

6. There's more to this list. You could go on forever.

More Green

I've been learning lately that everything is connected. You, me, them. Social justice and environmental justice cannot be considered apart. The rich and the poor are in it together. A healthy environment has rebounding effects in every direction whereas a degraded environment has the opposite effect in every direction. To oversimplify; green things, be it trees on your street or a forest near your school or plants in your room have subtle effects on everything from air quality, human behavior, water drainage, humidity, health, aesthetics and even greenhouse gases I suppose.

The world is currently looking for ways to encourage more green. Examples include carbon credit trading, ecosystem valuation, urban agriculture and "green" everything, from dish soap to toilet paper to bullets. Yes, like for a gun. Some of these schemes are disingenuous but this one is not:

The school where I volunteered in Ecuador ("All Smiles, Snotty Noses and Eager Eyes") is trying to raise some money to save the stand of forest next to the school, valued more as timbre than as green.

If you have you ever been asked to donate to a cause and have been unsure whether to do it or not because you don't know how much of the money is going to the cause and how much is going into "administrative costs?" here's your chance to donate directly without doubt to good people for a good cause. Take a minute out of your busy schedule and click below even just to read about the school and project. And give a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, if you have it. Donating online through paypal is safe and easy and immensely effective in a world where the internet cuts through boundaries and barriers of communication so incisively. Click this goddamn link:

http://katitawa.blogspot.com/2010/02/blog-post.html

Though it is likely that you will breathe some of the good clean oxygen produced by those trees, you will probably never see Kimberley, Marcia and Alex except in the picture below. You may never even be in the same country let alone meet Robert, the 78 year old American man, dedicated founder of the school or the community of Ecuadorians young and old that will see these trees everyday. But you can rest assured they exist nonetheless and that everything is connected.

Unpolished Dream/Nightmare

I feel like I'm bearing the weight of the world and all I want is for it to get off my back. I know damn well that it's time for action, in fact it's almost all I can think about unless I'm purposefully distracting myself. I think about all the time; that we have to start acting and it still might not be enough but I don't know what to do, I can't find anything decent to do and the pressure is hard so I resort to escapes like everyone sane person does. It's why sometimes you find yourself trying to wake yourself from a nightmare because you want to escape a scary effing thought. But there's no escaping this one beyond denial.

I can barely open my mouth, barely write on this blog without wanting to talk about declining biodiversity, declining forest cover, declining ocean ecosystems. It's a goddamn nightmare.

We need a dream to aspire to instead of a nightmare to run away from. What is that just yonder, right over the horizon, glowing so bright that it's throwing off the darkness?

Martin Luther King uttered "I have a dream" and it captured a generation.

We know what the future has to look like, at least fuzzily. It has to have less clutter, less useless things that make us miserable. We have to take better care of our land, eat better and healthier, realer and plantier food. We have to waste less that's for sure, we'll have to sacrifice a few things too. That's the simplest start I think and I don't think it's much to ask for. The world probably has to be more equal too. I'm going to grab one of those things and run in that direction. Farming, this summer, organic farm internship or WWOOFing. Done. Get off my back you big black cloud.

The Night Shift

Picture Credit

Rode past Second Cup one night at around 2 am on my way home. Looked in the window to see who was working and I had a vision of myself in there working away, completely unaware of what was going on outside the store. As temporary a workplace as I keep telling myself that this is, the minute details of this corner of Guy and Ste Catherine have become part of my life. Milk temperature, rags, 7 scoops sugar shake for a minute, asbc, for here, to go, skinny, pesto, $3.21, grab'n'go, portion sirop, single double short long, copie de votre facture. I'm really good at measuring 6, 8 or 10 ounces of liquid, pouring a full carton of milk into a canister quickly and moving full cups of coffee from one counter to another. I'm amazing at opening packets of tea, putting sleeves on cups and directing people towards the washroom and the key it requires. Also decent at sweeping and mopping and being patient. The sum of it all is worth absolutely nothing in any other circumstance and even in this specific circumstance still no more than a slice of strawberry cheesecake and a medium chai latte per hour of grovel. Our stuff is overpriced.

I'm here now, lap top next to the blenders. Baritones and esses over the steady hum of whirling electronics. Ten minutes ago, cop cars swarmed the corner in a burst of red a blue flashing lights, guns pulled out at arms length aimed at a car of teenagers driving the wrong way down St Cat's. It looked like a sting operation. Their guns look bigger and thicker than I thought they would, kind of fake and plastic. But now it's completely quiet as snow falls silently onto the sidewalk, undisturbed but for a few tracks of meandering footprints highlighted by yellow streetlights. The night shift is a different world and though everyone normal might be asleep, the hours still need to pass until morning.

I humour one old guy for a half hour as he tells me grand stories of how he has a penthouse at the Fairmont and how his sons both just died, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq and how he is going to the south side tomorrow to finish up a quarter million dollar deal and how his great grandfather owned the first construction company in Montreal. And can he get a free coffee.

A hurried man rushes in to buy 200 grams of coffee ground at number 3 and I wonder what his rush is. It occurs to me later that since I'm the only one working, maybe he wanted to get me away from the cookie or tip jar so that while I was grinding the coffee he could steal something.

The big fat late night security guard glides into the store like a hovercraft, slow steady and disdainfully. He's never happy about being awake at night. In the heaviest joual accent he exhales while mumbling "gran noir siltplai." I try conversing with him every night and catch no more than 4 to 5 words.

Two students refill their coffees.


The store is dead quiet for an hour and the curly haired homeless guy sleeps undisturbed in his usual chair with his usual little spiderman bag. One time he took it personally when I told him he couldn't sleep in the store because the boss said so and he asked me who my boss is and told me he knows my boss and that I should go back to my own country and that tomorrow he's going to talk to my boss and I'll never work in this store again.

A well dressed and good-looking young man keeps on coming in and out, ordering a small coffee, sitting around and waiting and checking his phone then popping out for 20-30 minutes and coming back and ordering another small coffee. This is between 1am and 5am in downtown Montreal. He avoids my attempts to engage him in conversation. I imagine what shady things he is up to.

A patchily balding man orders a large dark coffee at around 4 am and sits with an Alcoholics Anonymous book for over an hour, orders a second large dark coffee and is still reading when I finish my shift. He brings me a copy of the book a week later because I asked to see what he was reading.

The same loud cab driver repeats his nightly routine, asks for a coffee and a glass of water for his alka seltzer, promises to me like I'm his doctor that he'll soon switch to tea cause he knows the coffee rots his stomache, offers to trade jobs for a night while adding honey and milk to his coffee then shouts bye across the store as he rushes out the door. The two students refill their coffees again.

A drunk teenager probably pockets some change from the tip jar.

People finishing work late at bars come in for a muffin and a glass of milk or a hot tea to go while they wait for the bus.

People starting work really early start to come in, hot coffee and a croissant for here and the newspaper, yesterday's if today's hasn't arrived yet. La Presse or The Gazette.

People waiting for the metro to open just sit and wait.

And so eventually the sky begins to glow hints of pink and light blue. The morning paper and fresh bagels arrive. Traffic picks up. The digital clock digitally creeps to 07:00 and the next shift comes in and I'm relieved of my duties, extricating the last of the overnight vagabonds on my way out. I walk home downhill as the morning rush starts; cars and buses swim by and the commuter train pulls carriages full of people into the station. The city stirs, wipes her bleary eyes, oblivious to the fact that though nothing really happened last night, it still happened.