We didn’t quite, as far as we know, break the record for hottest May 31st in Montreal history - but it was close.
Fun to talk about insane weather in terms of broken records. We normally associate that kind of thing with positive accomplishments. So-and-so broke the record for fastest marathon, such-and-such a movie broke the box office record for opening weekend, etc. Great achievements are marked by broken records. It would be weird to do it with negative stuff. That person broke the record for most glass eaten, that man took a record-breaking amount of fentanyl, that teen’s eating disorder broke all records, that recent grad has been ghosted by a record-breaking number of companies after applying to a record-breaking number of jobs.
In any case, we almost broke a heat record today. In the near future, there’s going to be a summer where we break a record every single day. Wonder what we win.
We usually avoid Sainte-Catherine street, but - for reasons beyond our understanding - we’ve somehow ended up here today.
This street is always so full of so many people going from shop to shop and acquiring ever more bags. They’re all talking and looking and laughing and buying stuff. Is that last part, the buying stuff part, the condition for the rest? Or is it just an incidental outcome? Does it matter? Would folks walk, together, from place to place and observe and discuss and consider what they saw if there was nothing to buy and nowhere to buy it? Would they have as good a time? Or seem to at least?
A girl straight-up took our picture while we were walking down the street. She stood ten or so feet in front of us, squared up, steadied her phone, and took our picture. Full body probably. We weren’t, at that moment, in the midst of a crowd. She smiled and made eye contact after the picture was taken. It was as if it was the most natural and normal thing in the world to photograph us. We kept walking.
We wondered whether it was us or what we were wearing that motivated the picture, whether we looked especially good or terribly bad. We were a little curious what, if anything, she planned on doing with the picture.
Whatever she’s going to do or has already done with the picture is, we suppose, none of our business - but we like to believe that she’s taking pictures of people based on the beauty of their aura. She’s collecting images of only the most gorgeous souls on earth and only for her own private, spiritual reasons. Her friends think she’s a little weird, that this is a pretty eccentric thing to do, but she isn’t worried about that. She takes her pictures. She’s glad she saw us because, legit, our aura is based as fuck. It’s unreal. We’re also, truly, pretty hot today and can see why someone would want to take our image home with them.
If she can take our photo, we can speculate about her intent. That’s the rule.
A guy was playing guitar outside of one of the malls for five or so minutes. He was playing some chill neo-soul stuff. A pretty big crowd formed around him. People were videoing him. He seemed pleased, but unbothered. He was just playing. He wasn’t selling anything. Didn’t even have a sign up advertising his socials or a hat out to collect change. Cops came by and told him to stop and leave because music wasn’t permitted in that area. He packed up without a fuss and the people watching dispersed.
A block away, where music is permitted if you have a permit, some dude is singing horrible hit songs passably well and no one is paying any attention.
It’s hard to tell whether the streets got busier or not across the afternoon. It seems, when inside the crowds, like there’s just a steady amount of people. It’s vague, though. There’s just “lots.”
While standing on some random street corner (Stanley?) with lots of others, we remembered Anthony Appiah talking about how - for many, many thousands of years - humans lived only and exclusively amongst a very small number of people. Now, Appiah notes (we’re pretty sure in the opening pages of Cosmopolitanism?), we encounter more people while standing on a street corner for one minute than generations of our ancestors encountered in their entire lives.
In addition to the sheer number of people we encounter, we are also different from our ancestors by dint of the number of strangers we encounter. For generations and generations, there were essentially no strangers. Everyone you knew you’d known all your life. Now, we know almost nobody we see in our daily lives.
Taken together, on Appiah’s view, these two facts fuck us and everything up.
Appiah thinks the change of scale and quality of our encounters with others means we need new ethical and political models to make sense of and get along in the world.
We can’t recall what those models are right now, but that doesn’t appear to be a problem. On these street corners, at least, everyone seemed to be getting along just fine insofar as we were all doing a very good job of pretending to be oblivious to the fact that we are each within six inches or so of people we have never met and will never meet again.
We had a good, temporary thing going. Ignoring each other, but nicely.
Almost dead from dehydration after wandering around directly in the sun for too long, we bought a Gatorade from a dep for four dollars. While drinking it, we figured out that Gatorade is around five times the price of gas. We’re pretty sure, though, that drinking gas wouldn’t help rehydrate us or taste at all like COOL BLUE™ so maybe that’s a fair price.
According to the bottle, Gatorade is SCIENTIFICALLY FORMULATED. Few drinks boast of their formulation, fewer still their reliance on the scientific method. You can tell by tasting it that science was involved. Still, though, four dollars is pretty steep for 500 something milliliters. Wonder what a MYSTICALLY FORMULATED sports drink would cost. Probably like $6.50 at least. Inflation and supply-chain logistics haven’t been kind to mystics in the sports drink business, we bet.
We spent so much of our day wandering back and forth looking for something unusual. We wanted to see, like, someone announcing the end of the world or a clown fighting a pigeon or maybe tourists taking pictures of other tourists. No success, though. It was all very regular. Whether because we have walked down this street thousands of times or because today is too damn hot for unusual shit, the street was full and busy and everyone was just doing their own regular old thing.
The newspaper is full of remarkable, unusual stories. Most of them terrible and anxiety-inducing. There isn’t, sadly, a publication for all the unremarkable, usual stories. Most of them pretty OK and maybe even nice. There’s maybe a bizarro world where everyday stuff, rather than heinous and remarkable events, is what preoccupies people.
What’d that be like? Waking up in the morning to read that people slept well and would try to be pretty OK to themselves and others over the course of the day and maybe accomplish something minor or talk to someone they enjoy or buy a nice top. Some stories would be about people being low-key shitty and underhanded, but in a non-threatening and mostly just inconsiderate way.
This strange anti-newspaper would, we guess, be much much much longer than the regular newspaper.
Who’d want to be a journalist that reports on all the people doing regular, boring things pretty well or at least not terribly? Besides us, obviously.
Needing a break from the heat and wifi that we don’t have to pay for, we went into the mall and settled in a food court.
The kids (like 13 years old?) at the table across from ours were talking about whether a joke could be sexist or not if you didn’t mean it to be sexist. Like, if you’re making fun of sexism by making a sexist joke - is it sexist? They couldn’t figure it out. They kept going around in circles. They stopped arguing when one of them said that the joke wasn’t even funny so it wasn’t even worth saying in the first place, so it was kind of irrelevant whether it was sexist or anti-sexist. They then watched the same TikTok no fewer than nine times with the volume on their phone turned all the way up.
We didn’t hear the joke, so can’t weigh in on whether or not it was sexist and/or funny.
We did, though, hear the TikTok and, y’know, it wasn’t the best thing we’ve ever heard. Maybe the video was really good tho. The kids, in any case, fucking loved it.
The mall has been slowly emptying of folks as we write all this up and the custodial staff is starting to give us looks, so we better wrap this up.
Tomorrow is apparently going to be as hot or hotter than today. Lots of people will end up on Ste-Catherine just like they did today. They’ll buy nice things, take pictures of strangers, play music, be told they can’t play music, and various other things. Drinks formulated by manifold means will be bought and consumed. Different kids will maybe argue about differently problematic jokes. Everyone will hopefully find a way, like they did today, of somehow navigating the thousands of strangers surrounding them without great issue or strife. We might break a record, but maybe not. People might do unusual things, but maybe not. We don’t know.
Tomorrow, not unlike today, everyone’ll enjoy and enjoy whining about the weather. Most will be hot in more ways than one. Not us, though, We’re going to stay home and do regular things, but like in a cooler setting. We’ll, then, just be hot in just the one way tomorrow. Our auro, tho, will still be un-fucking-real.
It’s hard to conclude a report on the regular goings on of regular people in a regular city on an almost irregularly hot day.
Hot in More Ways than One
Love this post too! Such a light breezy vibe these past two posts REALLY into them. So fun. thank you
also highlight of the article for me was the sentence
"We wanted to see, like, someone announcing the end of the world or a clown fighting a pigeon ..."
wanted more on this:
"Appiah thinks the change of scale and quality of our encounters with others means we need new ethical and political models to make sense of and get along in the world.
We can’t recall what those models are right now, but that doesn’t appear to be a problem. "
not a problem temporarily sure, but curious to know what new ethical and/or political models one would propose for the non-temporary.
Love those kinds of aimless days - especially in Montréal.