Toronto’s “C” change

As the endless summer stretches out before me like a million patients etherized upon a million tables — in those private clinics that Doug Ford swears are not the beginning of the end of public health care in Ontario — I realize with horror that I don’t have enough entertainment to keep me going until September. Not by a long shot.

All I have is a Kobo e-reader loaded with books, a gaming laptop groaning with pirated Adobe apps, a bookshelf crammed with actual printed books, subscriptions to Amazon Prime, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Toronto Star, The New York Times, Medium (where I am also an author on rainy Tuesdays) and Daily Beast, a pipeline to every movie ever made in the form of a torrenting app and a VPN, sixty-five channels that I follow on YouTube, classes in visual arts purchased from Skill Share and Domestika, a forty megapixel Nikon DSLR and two expensive lenses.

And an iPhone, of course. Not the latest model, but then again, I’m not homeless, what would be the point? My life lacks glamour.

I only have twenty-two cookbooks, a digital kitchen scale and a hand mixer with a dough hook; a digital thermometer so whatever dead animal I decide to eat doesn’t take post-mortem revenge on me in the form of E coli; a microwave that doubles as an air fryer and a regular oven; and a slow cooker with more settings than my mother had on her end-of-life…