5.14.2025

My favorite thing about Montreal is that cardinal directions don’t mean anything. If you’re going east along the St Lawrence River you’re traveling northeast by any standard anywhere else on the planet but these folks don’t care and besides what business is it of mine. If I wanted to make enemies fast I’d start correcting them about it. Freedom means having the freedom to define your own geography. In the Midwest it’s all by driving distance. Traverse City is four hours from Detroit. I was on a really boring date once who bothered to correct me on this, insisting that if you do the drive correctly it should only take three hours and forty-five minutes. I thought about going to hide in the bathroom until the place closed after that. Instead I just fell asleep in my mind with my eyes open until it was over. Most of Chicago, artificial monstrosity of urban planning that it is, is laid out on a grid. Makes it hard to get lost there but that doesn't mean you don't have to know where you are. Plus it’s pretty easy to tell where the lake is from most places. Eight blocks to a mile. Traffic lights and bus stops every four blocks, generally. Still, the locals will use their own reference points. Where I might say a place is 3200 West and 1600 North someone who grew up there will look at me like I’m stupid and be all, oh you mean the house where an illegal bakery burned down in the 1950s.