Ah, fall. A time when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of … wait, I’ve done that already. I guess I’m still in shock at how quickly the temperature’s fallen. I’m walking around with pointy nipples for God’s sake!

It’s also been an unusually traumatic week, what with Bill Carroll switching time slots and all. You can smell change in the air. And musty autumn leaves. And urine. Why’s it always urine?

But no matter. The proper urban rat knows all the warmest holes in the ground. In Toronto it happens to be a long-ish path known as, umm, PATH. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be an acronym or what; not that it would jazz it up any.

Today, instead of writing a long post describing what’s there and blah blah blah, I thought I’d just invite you along for the walk. I am so thoughtful!

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Walking. Is there anything better?

I’m fairly certain I’ve mentioned this before but walking around the city is the cat’s puss.

Not only do you not have to hunt down and maim ever-scarcer parking (the fight with the rival in front of the spot is the maim part), but you don’t even have to find a pole to strap your bike to. You wanna go there, you just go!

Also, it allows you to meet up with fellow walking enthusiasts like the pleasant young Brazilian ladies I played tour guide to today. No matter what angle you looked at that walking from, it looked really good. (I must apologize, I’ve been extremely negligent in my duty to carry a camera. I will try to rectify the situation post-haste.)

I probably shouldn’t go any farther with that, I blush easily. But I will say that my zeal for walking has been greatly rejuvenated. The tourists are sometimes just as, if not more, interesting than the natives. And they’re just walking around like it’s nobody’s business. Awesome!

In a way, we kind of owe much of this to map makers. Especially those who produce maps for tourists. Most of the visitors are on foot while the maps are focused on streets. Great if you’re in a car, but not very informational for someone who can travel a much wider area on foot.

A while ago I was toying with the idea of how a walking map might be different from a driving map. What kind of data should be on there that already isn’t and would also be useful to pedestrians?

Well, for one, I thought, why not mark all areas that are accessible to pedestrians? Lots that can be walked through; breaks between buildings that are not roads (pedestrian alleys); paths through buildings that are generally open to the public (why go around when you can go through?); that kind of stuff.

Here’s an example where the green overlay demonstrates all pedestrian accessible areas.

That covers a lot more ground than a car, even though this map is actually missing a lot of detail; areas indoors and under/over the ground that you could also use to get around, for starters.

Meh. It’s Thursday.

I saw an example walking map in Spacing Wire a while ago but grading sidewalks as “pleasant” or “unpleasant” struck me as genuinely useless. I personally found some of their “unpleasant” sections extremely enjoyable. You’d think for a magazine dedicated to thinking about such stuff, they would’ve had a few good ideas.

Now, as regards the tourist population of the city, I’m not suggesting that we would ever export such maps; what I’m thinking is that we use the guides domestically to give the appearance of being extremely knowledgeable about the city. Breaking the ice could be as simple as, “Hey! Can I show you around in that alley back there!”

By the time I had thought to look up, it was already too late. My face stopped just shy of the wall of denim that now entirely blocked out everything else.

It took me a moment to realize where I was; having your senses deprived like that tends to disorient you. I pulled my head back a bit to get a better view of the full picture.

The ass that stared back was simply thunderous.

The domes were a foot if they was a mile, I tells ya!

I want to be clear here, I’m not talking a bit of chub in the hub. This thing was the prototype for yo momma so fat jokes. I sit on one end, you sit on the other; plenty of room for Gary in the middle – that kinda big. No one was getting in or out of the subway until the the caboose left the station.

I was now stuck between a rear and a crowd and the only thing to do was wait and ponder the ponderous. As I stood there on the steps, straining to twist my head around to focus on something else, I wondered why I had never noticed this before. I mean, surely I would’ve noticed such a beast before if for no other reason than the traffic jam it would’ve caused.

In fact, most of the people in the crowd I spotted around me were pretty normal-sized. Not too many extremes in either direction.I fit into that  generic mid-ground too, though I used to carry a few more pounds  Recently I had noticed that my clothes were a bit baggier and I was using a new hole on my belt. Not much, but I did notice.

The funny thing is, my diet hasn’t improved much since I started living in the city (it arguably got worse), so how to account for this?

When I lived in the sticks, I was driving just about everywhere. Now I walk.

The nearest store was a ten-minute drive. Now, it’s a ten-minute walk. It used to take me an hour and a half to drive to work. Now it’s a fifteen minute stroll to the streetcar. It used to take me another hour and a half to get back home. Now it’s an hour-long walk. Sometimes. When I feel like it. On the weekends I hop over to Chew Chew’s. Groceries; thirty-minutes south at a relaxed pace. If I get the munchies, you guessed it, doin’ a snack run on foot.

It’s really not much, but I guess it must add up. With a full Brazilian I still wouldn’t be ready for bikini season, but it’s nice to see that urban life has advantages other than convenience. Well, that and a few other things.

Toronto missed the fattest cities list a while back so it can’t be doing that bad. It’s not that people here are any less able to put on weight, it’s just that they’re missing the one ingredient that weightier suburbs have: the car. I know, lots of people here own them, but it’s such a pain in the ass to get the car out of that narrow little lane behind the house when you could just walk to wherever you need.

Plus, it’s a lot more interesting. Half of this blog wouldn’t exist without me tripping over unusual people on the street. But really, they don’t need to be that big, I can see just fine.