Saturday, March 24, 2007
This could have been goodbye. The last post of the blog. This could have been the
last thing i'd ever write.
40 minutes ago I woke up hearing voices in the corridor outside. By the time I got up to answer my knocked door, I'd smelt the smoke, heard the smoke detector going crazy and made a note to get my shit together and get out of here. Sure enough, my neighbours on one side had heard it and decided it wasn't one of the frequent false alarms we get in this block. I'm impressed. It's 3am and they're some of Toronto's hardest working stoners. We wake our mutual neighbour and discuss the situation. To me it smells like burning paper and it's obviously coming from downstairs, probably a mailbox fire. Such things are started deliberately of course. Our mailboxes are found in the little antechamber between the front door and the street. I turn the corner, go down the stairs to the first floor and just see a wall of dense smoke where the ground floor should be.
I don't panic. I go back upstairs, coughing, and tell my neighbours the most probable explanation. Nobody thinks to call the fire brigade or our landlord. Thankfully someone a bit more switched on in the flat below me does those things while it's dawning on us all that this smoke is getting heavy. My place faces out onto the street and has only one way in. My neighbours' places both face out back and have a second exit. Naturally they bid me to come through theirs, so I go to gather my things - clothes, shoes, wallet, coat, laptop, phone - the essentials, still feeling relaxed and so taking a little bit of time. Then I stick my head out the window to see what's going on down in the street below and I find they're already out there and wondering where I am.
I pick up my back, go out of my door and go to neighbour 1's. It's locked. Fine, I'll just go to neighbour 2's... locked. I go back into my apartment and try to go through the fire door, yes the FIRE DOOR that separates my place from neighbour 2's. And it's locked. Fine, fine. I'm still not panicking, I'll stick my head through the window again and ask them to come back up and open their front doors. Fine, someone heads up and I again pick up my bag, go to my door, turn the knob a....
*PLOCK*
....it has come off in my hand.
I am now locked into my own apartment
I cannot get through my door, I cannot get through the fire door and I cannot get through the window that would surely result in a splatted me down on the street below. The smoke is coming in nicely now and I'm starting to think about more creative solutions to the problem. Like taking a shower with my clothes on, putting a bag over my head and running down the stairs through the fire. Or holding my breath til the firemen get here.
1...2...3...4...5...6...7...BOOM!
The firemen arrive, literally booming through the door downstairs, piling in like a kill-crazy commando group and just as I run out of breath, heading for the shower. They'll get me out, I just need to call out to them. 5 frantic minutes of shouting later and they're getting the message that there's someone inside. It's probably a bit of a treat for them, this fire being hardly worth sobering up for. Some classic big burly guy opens the door from the outside with his square jaw and I am free to go through my neighbours' at last. I exaggerate of course, I can't see his jaw because he's wearing an enormous gas mask, shrouded by a cloud of opaque smoke that obscures any other vision. I'm starting to feel very lucky indeed.
A minute later I'm out on the street and we're all wearily laughing about it while. As a huge amount of firemen and cops mill around trying to do something now the emergency is over, the stoner guys next to me start to panic and hope they don't get busted for their big bag of BC weed. Pah, you can't get busted for that. This is Canada. They should worry for me and my kitchen crystal meth factory.
Still, the weather's nice so it's been a pleasant way to take the evening air. Could have been pretty savage 3 weeks ago. Dying of hypothermia to escape immolation. Oh the irony.
So I wasn't in any real danger, at least none that I saw. But it was a touch of bad luck that my cheap heavy door chose to give up working in the one single moment I needed it to perform its doorly duties effectively. It looks like a giant, soundproofed monster of a door when in actual fact it's a cheap piece of crap painted a dull metallic hue to look that way. Who knows if the fire could have spread? There's plenty of old wood in our stairwell, so yes, it's very possible. Then that would have been big trouble but I have my faith in the firemen here, so no, I would not have burned to the ground with the building. I would simply have died of smoke inhalation long before.
Or have I trained my lungs to accept massive doses of toxic fumes over the course of my life? Maybe I should dedicate this post to my good friends Philip Morris and Howard Marks?
So now the question is 'who did it?'. Perhaps it's an anti-junk mail crusader, fighting our corner and upset that someone had put up a large NO JUNK MAIL sign above our mailboxes? Or perhaps it's a pro-junk mail crusader, fighting against us and upset that someone had put up a large NO JUNK MAIL sign above our mailboxes? Or maybe it was the fucking twat who 2 weeks ago ripped from the mailbox wall the notice from the garbage services explaining that some residents had been putting their waste out in the wrong bags and shoved it into my letterbox? Maybe I shouldn't have stuck it back up on the wall the next day with a handwritten note calling him or her 'a fucking twat'? Which of the mailboxes was the one set alight will determine my attitude to living here from now on.
Because I'm thinking of leaving.
Hawksley Workman - Smoke, Baby
|
last thing i'd ever write.
40 minutes ago I woke up hearing voices in the corridor outside. By the time I got up to answer my knocked door, I'd smelt the smoke, heard the smoke detector going crazy and made a note to get my shit together and get out of here. Sure enough, my neighbours on one side had heard it and decided it wasn't one of the frequent false alarms we get in this block. I'm impressed. It's 3am and they're some of Toronto's hardest working stoners. We wake our mutual neighbour and discuss the situation. To me it smells like burning paper and it's obviously coming from downstairs, probably a mailbox fire. Such things are started deliberately of course. Our mailboxes are found in the little antechamber between the front door and the street. I turn the corner, go down the stairs to the first floor and just see a wall of dense smoke where the ground floor should be.
I don't panic. I go back upstairs, coughing, and tell my neighbours the most probable explanation. Nobody thinks to call the fire brigade or our landlord. Thankfully someone a bit more switched on in the flat below me does those things while it's dawning on us all that this smoke is getting heavy. My place faces out onto the street and has only one way in. My neighbours' places both face out back and have a second exit. Naturally they bid me to come through theirs, so I go to gather my things - clothes, shoes, wallet, coat, laptop, phone - the essentials, still feeling relaxed and so taking a little bit of time. Then I stick my head out the window to see what's going on down in the street below and I find they're already out there and wondering where I am.
I pick up my back, go out of my door and go to neighbour 1's. It's locked. Fine, I'll just go to neighbour 2's... locked. I go back into my apartment and try to go through the fire door, yes the FIRE DOOR that separates my place from neighbour 2's. And it's locked. Fine, fine. I'm still not panicking, I'll stick my head through the window again and ask them to come back up and open their front doors. Fine, someone heads up and I again pick up my bag, go to my door, turn the knob a....
aa...
aaa....
aaaa...
*PLOCK*
nnnnnnn.......
ddddddddddddd....
....it has come off in my hand.
I am now locked into my own apartment
I cannot get through my door, I cannot get through the fire door and I cannot get through the window that would surely result in a splatted me down on the street below. The smoke is coming in nicely now and I'm starting to think about more creative solutions to the problem. Like taking a shower with my clothes on, putting a bag over my head and running down the stairs through the fire. Or holding my breath til the firemen get here.
1...2...3...4...5...6...7...BOOM!
The firemen arrive, literally booming through the door downstairs, piling in like a kill-crazy commando group and just as I run out of breath, heading for the shower. They'll get me out, I just need to call out to them. 5 frantic minutes of shouting later and they're getting the message that there's someone inside. It's probably a bit of a treat for them, this fire being hardly worth sobering up for. Some classic big burly guy opens the door from the outside with his square jaw and I am free to go through my neighbours' at last. I exaggerate of course, I can't see his jaw because he's wearing an enormous gas mask, shrouded by a cloud of opaque smoke that obscures any other vision. I'm starting to feel very lucky indeed.
A minute later I'm out on the street and we're all wearily laughing about it while. As a huge amount of firemen and cops mill around trying to do something now the emergency is over, the stoner guys next to me start to panic and hope they don't get busted for their big bag of BC weed. Pah, you can't get busted for that. This is Canada. They should worry for me and my kitchen crystal meth factory.
Still, the weather's nice so it's been a pleasant way to take the evening air. Could have been pretty savage 3 weeks ago. Dying of hypothermia to escape immolation. Oh the irony.
So I wasn't in any real danger, at least none that I saw. But it was a touch of bad luck that my cheap heavy door chose to give up working in the one single moment I needed it to perform its doorly duties effectively. It looks like a giant, soundproofed monster of a door when in actual fact it's a cheap piece of crap painted a dull metallic hue to look that way. Who knows if the fire could have spread? There's plenty of old wood in our stairwell, so yes, it's very possible. Then that would have been big trouble but I have my faith in the firemen here, so no, I would not have burned to the ground with the building. I would simply have died of smoke inhalation long before.
Or have I trained my lungs to accept massive doses of toxic fumes over the course of my life? Maybe I should dedicate this post to my good friends Philip Morris and Howard Marks?
So now the question is 'who did it?'. Perhaps it's an anti-junk mail crusader, fighting our corner and upset that someone had put up a large NO JUNK MAIL sign above our mailboxes? Or perhaps it's a pro-junk mail crusader, fighting against us and upset that someone had put up a large NO JUNK MAIL sign above our mailboxes? Or maybe it was the fucking twat who 2 weeks ago ripped from the mailbox wall the notice from the garbage services explaining that some residents had been putting their waste out in the wrong bags and shoved it into my letterbox? Maybe I shouldn't have stuck it back up on the wall the next day with a handwritten note calling him or her 'a fucking twat'? Which of the mailboxes was the one set alight will determine my attitude to living here from now on.
Because I'm thinking of leaving.
Hawksley Workman - Smoke, Baby
|
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