Ford Calls for Allowing TTC Constables to Arrest Drug Users on Transit
I grew up in Toronto and lived downtown for over 15 years. Riding the TTC was always an exercise in situational awareness — and not much has changed.
I am all for anything that keeps the TTC clear of danger for its tax-paying riders. Why has it become a living room for vulnerable folks in crisis? I recall a Toronto comedian once describing it as a piss-smelling mental hospital on wheels. Harsh — but somewhere between Union Station and Kipling, you understand exactly what he meant.
I have witnessed open drug use from one end of this city to the other. Many riders are simply fatigued — fatigued with feeling like an afterthought to the governments they elect and the agencies they fund. We Canadians need to push through this and take our cities back. I remember hiding around a corner in the '90s to smoke a joint — we were discreet. That discretion has vanished entirely. I hope Doug delivers some real transit enforcement. Sorry softies, but riders deserve to feel safe and comfortable on a system they pay for.
"Why has the TTC become a living room for folks in crisis while tax-paying riders are the afterthought?"
Why Everyone Thinks They're an Above-Average Driver
A statistical impossibility that somehow remains universally true — and what it says about the human brain's extraordinary talent for self-deception.
Statistically, half of all drivers are below average. Yet study after study confirms that roughly 93% of people rate themselves as above-average drivers. This is either the greatest mass delusion in recorded history or the universe is playing a very long con.
The phenomenon has a name — illusory superiority — but naming something has never once stopped anyone from doing it. You can tell a man he suffers from overconfidence bias while he's actively cutting you off on the highway, and he will simply nod and gesture that you should speed up.
A Grocery Store Is Just a Museum Where Everything Is for Sale and Nothing Is Art
Consider the cereal aisle as a gallery of unfulfilled promises.
You walk in with a list. A firm, decisive, adult list. Fourteen minutes later you are standing in the snack aisle holding a bag of something called "Blazin' Ranch Spirals" trying to remember what protein is.
The grocery store is engineered against you. The milk is always at the back. The checkout lane candy is positioned at the exact height of a tired adult's last remaining willpower. The free sample table exists solely to weaponize your sense of social obligation.
"The free sample table exists solely to weaponize your sense of social obligation."
Nobody Actually Knows What They're Doing. We've Simply Agreed to Pretend.
On competence, confidence, and the polite fiction that holds civilization together.
File Photo — The Universal Expression of Someone Who Has No Idea What's Going On
At some point in your twenties, you realize that adults were making it up the whole time. At some point in your thirties, you realize this is fine. At some point in your forties, you realize the whole economy runs on this principle and you stop finding it alarming.
The plumber who arrives confidently, looks at the pipe for forty-five seconds, and says "Yep" — he doesn't know either. He's just made peace with not knowing in a way that reads as expertise. That's the whole game.
The Airport Is the Only Place Where 6 AM Drinking Is Considered Normal
A brief sociological note on time zones, anxiety, and Bloody Marys.
There is a man at Gate C12 drinking a beer. It is 5:47 in the morning. Nobody is looking at him strangely because this is the airport, where the usual rules of time and social conduct are suspended by mutual agreement.
The airport runs on a different clock — one measured not in hours but in departure boards and anxiety. You are not early. You are not late. You are simply in the airport, and that Bloody Mary is perfectly reasonable.