The Last Statement is True.

There is a man.
He was born at some point or other in the 1960s or maybe early 1970.
He did not grow up in Toronto – he either grew up in London (Canada) or in some small town in a mid-eastern state of America.
Let me pick small town America. I’m not knocking the US, any small town would do. But it’s easier for me to pick up on the extreme characteristics of the boons in America. My ‘small town in Canada’ life was more or less humorous because all houses were decorated with trendy toll paintings on cut out wooden shapes rather than deer antlers, or carcasses creatively hot glue gunned to tin porches.
(To be fair, I got this impression from Hollywood films, so blame your own published biases for my opinions.)

When this man was a boy of 5, he had a cat and a dog and he lived in one of the better homes inside the town boundaries. It had a porch made of wood. There was no area where children amalgamated and played, apart from the invariable dirty stream on the wrong side of town where all the bogeymen lived, but really it was just Ecoli.
So to amuse himself, the man who was then a boy dressed his dog up in garments lying around the house, and when the dog refused the suspenders being pinned directly to his skin, he bit the boy and refused all other friendships.
This was the first affront by way of friendship the boy suffered and he took it very hard.
He was mostly quiet except when all of the boys cheered, or when all of the boys played pranks on his teacher he was there. He never directly understood the excitement of sports or the meandering, effortless pranks, but he played them none-the-less.
Nearing the end of the public school years, and heading on into high school, things began to shift. He didn’t follow the paths of those heading to the sports activities, he grew bored with the academic and cheeky with the art teacher. He didn’t fall into drugs, because his mother was very clean and also valued cleanliness. Marijuana was stinky, and he was not dexterous enough to roll it. I’m sure it was all a front to replace the friends he did not follow into suspensions or sports – those being the very few social groupings in a remote high school in a town with no natural landscape. So he read and was convinced that he was beyond such a dingy town as that, and by all means he was probably right but there’s nothing wrong with learning from simplicity and ignorance. In fact those who dwell on growing up too fast, and running away too soon often miss the point of the present moment and seem lost while wandering through Paris because there is no enjoyment in the fact that there is a day, and one is in it. Mostly that person just wants to be anywhere but in his own skin, and only a talented artist or a pure genius can transcend biological capabilities. It’s rumored that drugs are also good at that, and why waste a good trip to Paris on acid?

Anyway, indeed he dreamed of bigger better lands. He didn’t go to University (because he was not an academic, nor could he manage dental school or other “menial” tasks). Instead he went to Vegas. I’ve never been to Vegas but I can imagine that going there alone would make it a very scary place. He liked the simple honesty of it all, visited a low-brow pornography theatre, a few costume stores. He met a queen outside a casino who said “Beautiful man looking for a date?” The man scoffed and said he was far too busy and important for such idolatry. I’m sure he didn’t realize the queen was once a man who had since been liberated.

He did drugs once, woke up in his own vomit on the shag carpet of a 70s style room with other men and no memory to account for. The man I am describing is by no means heterosexual, nor a homosexual. Just asexual. And to have been knowingly engaged in any kind of sexual act made him feel sweaty, dirty and used. He disgusted himself, and went to rinse the filth (the touch of unwashed hands) from his body, when he found vomit in the bathtub, and ran out of the building holding his shirt closed because there were no buttons.

He cried on the street, showered in his own apartment, left rent and a note, drank a coffee and took a bus to Toronto. Well, a few as I’m sure there is no direct route. He came into Toronto haggard, well assured he had hit “rock bottom.” The human conception of necessary suffering is such an odd thought. Why must one perceive things always from the “bottom” or the lowly. Why so low? It is necessary in order to gain appreciation, or by of comparison to have something that symbolizes greatness. But why seek out something that will find you in its own time?

Anyway, in Toronto, over years, he survived. I’m sure he perceived a far greater happiness than what actually existed. A cloak of acceptable perception I suppose.
He had a job, not a great one because he bullied ideas far too much, and tried to sort out problems that were not problematic. “Micromanaging.”
One night, he was on his way home from a work staff party. A party held out of office. He went, and he socialized as best as he could. But as people got drunk, he became frustrated and lost. Should it not have been the other way around? He started to feel the same filthy humanity around him. He flagged a cab.

As it so happens, I was biking along the same route as his cab. His window was wound down to get air I heard him pompously yelling at the cab driver. “Oh my God! Why do you idle in traffic? The fumes are hurting my throat. My mother’s going to Kill you!”