When I was a teenager, I loathed pretention and people who took themselves too seriously. The irony in this, of course, is that I fairly oozed pretentiousness AND I took myself quite seriously, as evidenced by my diaries which shall be burned upon my passing.
While my friends and I spent a great deal of time in cafes, passing back and forth dog-eared copies of Milan Kundera novels and underlining key passages, we believed there were others whose sins were far greater. Those others were the leeches of cafe culture. They wore berets unironically, they smoked clove cigarettes. They wore Indonesian hats with puffy elephants and pretended to read difficult tomes while scoping chicks and writing them cryptic notes.
I remembered all this when cleaning out some old boxes, I stumbled across a note that was passed to me one summer afternoon at a cafe on Bloor Street, August 1992. I was sitting with a large group of friends, but had the end seat of a table, facing no-one. I took this opportunity to drift and look out the window, next to which sat a young man who was making very overt eyes in my direction and smirking to himself as he scribbled in his notebook.
When I went to the bathroom, the waiter (who was the hunky object of my unrequited affection), gave me this note, written on the back of the flyer, from the guy by the window, who had since departed. Hilarious! "I know you're an artist", it begins. And then, well, you can read the rest.
By the way, I've never been able to paint worth shite. Could he have detected some latent talent as yet (17 years later) unrealised? Also, does anyone remember project 9?
