What is Toronto to Me

I am a Torontonian.

I just picked up the September issue of Toronto Life (thx SRS) and flipped through the first few pages - does this mag and this city fit for me?

I am older now, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of what the city has offered up over the years from days clubbing at Nuts & Bolts and the after hours at the Big Slice, wakin’ up after noon and being a regular at The East Side Cafe, meeting life-long wait staff at the original Amsterdams on John Street, taking over Silver Crown from the pizza lovin’ business folk, watching many obscure foreign movies at the Carlton cinemas, embracing the roar of IndyCar, fighter jets over the CNE and staying up for the wee hours of Nuit Blanche.  And yes I call it the SkyDome and I was there opening season for the Raptors.  I was one of 450,000 people rocking it for the massive SARSfest concert and went WTF when Noel Gallagher got tackled on the V festival stage.  

When did the High Park cherry blossoms become a thing?  Did the Distillery and Liberty Village become destinations the same year?  When did Sam’s close and the sign get taken down (it’s up again right)?  When did Sherbourne get bike lanes and is that King Street thing still a thing?

And my neighbourhoods, those corners and intersections I called home for a few years - downtown when the high rise condos stood out, the Beach when the track was kind of still there, Bloor West but in between the dodgy part and the good part, midtown when restaurants changed every few months and the parking problems around Casa Loma.

Intermission: my wife and I got busy raising a little boy and girl as young Torontonians.  

And social circles expanded when we found out about a new sport called ultimate.  We were members of TUC when it was 24 teams and played at the same 3 fields all the time - now it has games 5 nights a week (in non-pandemic times) with a healthy membership of 3,500 players.

But in recent years I’ve been south of Bloor far less often.  I’m lucky to live uptown and my view of Toronto today is quite different.  I love walking my dog in our beautiful treed neighbourhood and window shopping on Yonge Street.  It’s a comfort to know a good pub and a great restaurant are a short walk away and when we’re closer to normal, I’ll be back on the subway to head to a concert on The Danforth, reminisce at an old favourite restaurant or explore new flavours in the urban landscape.  

Have Torontonians changed or have we just got older?  There’s no doubt the diversity has increased - I don’t ever recall hearing Spanish on the streets in the 80’s.  I love it, this town, this big smoke, hogtown, TO.  I’m not ready to unsubscribe to Toronto Life just yet.

Know your audience

I recorded a vlog on Monday called He’s Rambling and Not Even Dressed for It.  I finished editing and uploaded the vlog last night.  I’m up early now on Wednesday thinking about new vlog ideas and one of them is about my audience.

One of the most memorable complements I ever received was a good friend saying she thought I was a Renaissance Man.  I’m not certain if I’d heard the term before, but I think it may have gone to my head a little - I wrote a blog about it and the related term polymath.  Anyway I’m rambling again.  The point is I have lots of different things that interest me, quite a few things that I know something about and there’s a small list of specific things I know a lot about.   You can also see this from the newer format of this blog where I’ve tried to compartmentalize topics into chapters.

Back to the vlog and this morning’s thoughts.  I was going to share my vlog, but I wasn’t certain which channels to use.  It’s certainly not related to business, so I can scratch Linkedin off the list. Twitter was the obvious channel as it is public and has the chance of finding a new audience as well as popping up in friends’ feeds.  The most active channel for friends and some family is Facebook but I’m a little conflicted with the platform recently and feel my frequent sharing of photos and travel videos is perhaps “too much” (need a better word here) for some friends.  

I perhaps watch more YouTube vlog content that read blogs today and I have noticed that a few of my favourites like Peter McKinnon are able to handle multiple audiences. For example, he’ll specifically say in the first part of the vlog that it will be more for photographers using Lightroom than for a audience looking to improve their Instagram channel.  So, I need to keep my audience in mind - a good lesson indeed for many situations, work, family or social.

So, I’m still a little uncertain of the audience for yesterday’s vlog.  So here’s the trick - I’ll use this blog post as a Trojan horse - for those that prefer to read the ramblings of amateur polymath, here you are.  And for Instagram, I like to use a collage to spike a little interest and I’m going to also use the trick where people embed a link into their profile as a path to a different channel.  How’s that?  Enjoy hump day Wednesday everyone.