Welcome To My Cranium

If there's one thing that Toronto has confirmed this winter, it's that I'm a country boy, perhaps even a sea-farer, through and through. The landscape of my mind does not include most of what I see here. In Toronto, I'm a hurdler. Obstacles everywhere. If and/or when I ever leap over that final obstacle and break free, I'll arrive in a place with a limitless horizon. The four walls of Toronto can't give me that...not for one second.

For the most part, I want to experience what I already know and love. Toronto forces me to face things that I know nothing about, which is not a bad thing I suppose. The one thing I wonder about here, more than anything (even the 'hardware' of tranny hookers), is cranes. There are cranes everywhere!

Yesterday there was a mobile crane outside the building diagonally across the street. It could only be there for one of two reasons:

1) to perform yet another face lift on a Torontonian
2) to do some heavy lifting for a building.

As it turned out, the pictured crane lifted some heavy stuff to the top of the 18 story building. It may have been heating or cooling equipment, or perhaps something related to an elevator. Dunno. What I do know is that the crane is an engineering marvel. Imagine that it arrives in a package about the size of a tractor-trailer, then is able to unfold/extend to the point where it can lift heavy objects over two hundred feet in the air. How it doesn't tip over seems to defy gravity, though it must be incredibly heavy on the bottom. In an peculiar way it reminds me of the Oromocto Mall experience...i.e. someone reaching for something on the top shelf.

Most cranes in the town are not mobile. Most are affixed to tall buildings. Imagine the crane at Aura, Canada's tallest condo. At some point that crane has to leave the top of that 78 story building and go nest somewhere else, but how does it fly away? You would need a crane to get rid of that crane, wouldn't you?

Every time I see a crane on a building, I wonder how it goes higher and higher as the building grows taller, and I wonder how it comes down at the completion of the project. I never seem to see the blessed event happen, as though the Keebler engineers work while I sleep. I could look the answer up on-line, but that's too easy. One could live one's life on-line, never actually experiencing anything firsthand. I don't want the answer as much as I want the experience. I could easily Wii™ my way through life, hurdling reality. May Wii? Mais non. If I'm going to be in the city, I might as well look it in the eye.

This is a really boring blog, Ian. Your dwindling readership would be better entertained by stories of tranny-hookers and rhino rammings, not endless stories of endless towering stories.

I don't appreciate this criticism as my stories are not endless. They are carefully crafted and I always have a witty ending to