Like just the other day they got new pay shitters. On top of the novelty of $0.25, self-cleaning toilets, residents get the added bonus of getting to watch tourists peepee dance as they hunt for change.

On the east end alls we got now is scrub brush, mounds of dirt, and a bunch of factories.

Kinda ironic considering this section of town predates the west end. And over there they’ve got the Island Airport which Porter Airlines has nicened up considerably (so far, it seems, not abusing their monopoly), the Music Garden, not to mention the Harbourfront Centre and all the artsy shit it barfs up on the shores of Lake Ontario.

On the east end we get the Gardiner, a bunch of container ships, and blisters from climbing on aging industry. Not the whole section of the east, mind you, just the part where I live. Right after the Don Valley, at Riverdale, it starts to pick up again and keeps getting nicer all the way to The Beach. Like there’s an aesthetic-sucking vortex in my area or something.

I mean, it’s true that we have Cherry Beach, but it has yet to shed itself of the image of being a bastion of used syringes and cheap blowjobs.

Cherry Street is admittedly quaint as a summer stroll in an off-the-beaten-path sort of way, but I always feel like I should be wearing construction boots down there.

Thankfully, waterfront revitalization is slowly creeping its way eastward.  Finally.

At the foot of Jarvis, next to a new condo will stand Sugar Beach, a man-made strip of sand similar to the one on the west end.

The beach’s name comes from it’s proximity to the RedPath Sugar refinery (right). I’m told, though I’ve yet to experience this myself, that when the ships are unloading raw sugar, you can actually taste it on the air. Pretty sweet location. (C’mon, when will I have an opportunity to use that one again?!)

Next to the beach and the condo they’re putting up a new George Brown College building, and to the east of that, Sherbourne Park.

But just like the Cherry Street locale, this area can’t seem to catch a break. You know that body they found encased in concrete and stuffed in a barrel in the lake yesterday? Yeah, that was here.

Hopefully, once the dust settles and that post-apocalyptic wasteland look recedes, the crime and seediness will move out east to Scarborough where they belong. I just hope it happens within the next five years because it would really look bad on the city for a bunch of Pan Am athletes to be found sleeping with the fishes.

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Of course, this all has to do with my insistence on integrity. You see, I may resort to describing the glistening contours of the thing that emerged from my bowels this morning, but only if that thing actually took form, and I’m really hurting for a topic. So when I make a bowl of miso, I may freely incorporate it into the discussion, and title, and rest assured it’s better than just any old shit.

This particular bowl of miso also has a history.

I was walking near the lakeshore on Cherry Street pretending to be Rain Man and taking pictures of random stuff in the sky. Here’s one I call “Wapner’s on at three”:

The wind in that area is out to murder people; not hurt or maim, murder. I pulled my hands out for, maybe, three seconds to take that picture and I nearly lost them both to exposure. I need to get a glove fund started or pretty soon I’ll be the famous stumpy blogger who mashes out his photos like he mashes out his posts, poorly. I’m not good with stumps.

By keeping my hands in my pockets, I managed to defrost them long enough to take a few more pictures, but the closer I got to the lake the more it was looking like the wind would have its way with me before tossing my bedraggled corpse over the side of the bridge into the dark, choppy waters below.

And I gotta tell ya, that just didn’t sound like fun at all.

Huddled in my coat and hands stuffed as far away from danger as possible, I double-timed it out of there. The two surviving photos are entitled “I’m an excellent driver” and “Wapner’s on at three redux”, respectively:

Okay, so I’ve just escaped a savage death at the hands of the elements but I’m still not out of the woods; now the miso comes into play.

In that God-forsaken land where there is naught but wailing and gnashing of teeth, there stands a gaily lit T&T Supermarket. The T&T carries probably the most extensive assortment of Asian / Taiwanese goods outside of Asia / Taiwan, many of which I picked up a taste for during my expat years. The winters during that time were cold and damp and my rock-solid cure for them was hot miso and cold sushi. Well, mostly the miso. The sushi came around on one of those little conveyor belts — the fish was kinda secondary. Plus they had killer wasabi.

So I ducked into the T&T and, completely separated from the maelstrom outside, picked through green onions to the soothing sounds of Gordon Lightfoot. I wandered the aisles pretending to be shopping for chopsticks or … woks or … live squid or … tampons until I warmed up enough for the daunting journey back home.Well, since I’m writing this I clearly made it home without losing any extremities. This time. Next time, I may not be so lucky. (really gotta start that glove fund!)

So the miso, which I hadn’t planned on, turned out to have a death-defying story to it in the end. It made the ingredients somehow more … special:

The fish balls are actually a Taiwanese hot-pot thing (a zesty communal broth in which everyone at the table cooks their food), but go pretty well with the soup. Bit sweet – maybe cut them up next time. There was another, un-fried variety in the store but when I saw the ones I eventually picked I noticed that they a) were fried and b) contained fewer preservatives (presumably by virtue of being fried). Sold and sold!

Oliver vouches for the authenticity of the fish balls and the veracity of this post. And I didn’t even have to resort to any racy titles or descriptions of bowel movements!

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