Fire in the Hole

We didn't beat the storm.

Sprinting through the torrential downpour, we finally found some shelter.

We dove out from the maelstrom of ice-cold needles and sprawled ourselves onto a concrete slab next to a hotel's entrance way. There was already a wise couple here, apparently as disgruntled by mother nature as we were.

We struck up an awkward conversation for a few moments before we realized how bad we were at pretending to be normal and seceded from the group to find ourselves our own spot to be incoherent and stupid.

The storm cleared out pretty quickly. We'd passed much of the time discussing the possibility of sharing lucid dreams and joining each other in our subconscious minds while we slept. It had been done before - there was no reason we couldn't do it.

The last drops fell from the firmament and we held this thought in our minds as we hoisted our bags on and headed towards the bridge. 

It was only a ten minute walk to the Spadina bridge. This was the bridge of all bridges. Hobo central, Canada. It looked like things had changed a lot since last year though.

Last year, the bridge had been occupied by only the most revered of hobos. There had been six fairly large cubbies situated right underneath the main section of the bridge, elevated between the road itself and the ground by about five feet.

These had essentially been "rented" out to different hobos on a first-come, first-serve basis. It had been truly reasonable - shit never got stolen, people tended to get along, and those who didn't, didn't talk to each other.

I'd stayed in one such cubbie with a friend of mine, P-Dawg Williams. Her concrete cubby had been big enough to fit a single mattress, a couple loads of laundry, three people and enough room to hang her pictures on the wall. Homely.

Despite that, nobody was sleeping in the cubbies anymore. They'd relocated themselves onto a massive stack of pallets on the ground next to the cubbies, that must have been 20 feet by 20 feet across and was standing at least a foot off the ground.

There were a good dozen hobos sitting, lying, standing, drinking and smoking on top of this beastly structure, and they informed us that nobody was sleeping in the cubbies because someone had been going around torching them.

What the fuck? There's a hobo arsonist on the loose?

We didn't want to risk getting torched, and we were way too tired to deal with meeting a handful of hobos at this hour, so we trucked 'er down a bit farther past their camp and found some cardboard. We kicked a bunch of dirty needles out of the way before setting our tarp down and our cardboard on top of it to lay down for the night.

Well, it was nice to be back in Toronto. Now it was time to have some lucid dreams.