What is interesting to read on these things? What is interesting to write about? I’ve entitled this post to capture that essence…

Stuff I find interesting during my rather mundane days these days:

1) The wheel assemblies on the GO trains I take each day are manufactured by Dofasco.

2) The windows of the trains are double-paned and have some sort of (UV?) coating that splits colour reflections in them into separate red and green images – slightly out of register by perhaps 12 degrees or so.

3) The inside of the roof at Union station in Toronto – platform level – is simultaneously badly-aged concrete coming down in places, and lovely iron girders of communist scale with great rivets and arching spans (plans are afoot to replace all of it, of course).

4) People actually run off the train on arrival at the station in order to be the first to reach the stairs and make it down to street level. Half-wits.

5) People actually run off the train at arrival at Oshawa in order to get to their cars and beat others to the lineup that assembles on the only road out of the 900 car parking lot. Lemmings.

6) There is a strikingly barren and beautiful stretch of publicly-accessible beach and cliff along the way into Toronto near Rouge Hill. Its often misty and in winter great ice sheets crumble against driftwood along the beach and create phantasms and gargoyles.

7) While walking away from the train station westward along Front Street, you see the same people walking near you every day, despite the sheer numbers of people dwarfing the imagination.

I nod and murmur hello every day to a fellow I don’t know after work, walking back along Front Street toward Union station. He is a quiet fellow and somewhat burly. He has a marvelous moustache, slightly curled at the ends, that makes him look quite jolly. We greet each other with smiles and nods. I am always wearing my iPod and so only hear music, and he is always somehow tucked into himself and emerges for the second we pass each other – but it is often the highlight of my working day. I wonder what he does for a living.

9) No one ever looks up at the buildings bordering Front Street, or any downtown street in Toronto for that matter. Sometimes I gaze up at the structures towering over us pedestrians, and semi-intentionally draw others into the gaze up as if observing a black hole develop up there.