Metro notebook

Saw the Blue Jays beat Texas 3-0 on a silky evening with a temperature of 22C even at 10:30. The team is finally competitive, winning two-thirds of their last fifteen games. Previously, they were losing two-thirds of the time. Fans wear their Jays shirts like memory markers since most of the players represented are long gone: Josh Donaldson, Roy Halladay, Jose Bautista, Robbie Alomar, and Russ Martin. At least the t-shirt quality lasts through multiple washings.

A Jays employee stationed near the dugout is great with the kids, helping them try for souvenir baseballs and allowing them to sneak up a few rows when they shouldn’t. In their tiny stadium studio, Sportsnet’s Jamie Campbell and analyst Joe Siddall appear to fall asleep between on-air appearances. The former curtain is gone; it was better when you couldn’t see them in real life. I miss Gregg Zaun who was fired for being too Zaunie. Outside, the eternal Elvis, who must take hours to get himself silvered, struts his stuff while passers-by shoot videos without putting the requisite coins in his collection box.

A couple of flight attendants get on the subway at Union, likely deposited at the Royal York Hotel by crew transport from the airport. Even after being cooped up together for who-knows-how-many hours on a flight from Frankfurt, there is still levity and laughter as they head to their respective homes. A young man, maybe nineteen, is high on drink or drugs or both. He is standing, eyes closed, each of his hands clutching a hanging strap, rotating on his toes in all directions like a Cirque du Soleil performer. Other patrons give him space. A police officer fifteen feet away carefully does not look.

A couple dances to the sound of a busker playing a guitar. A man stops to watch. He seems to be having more fun than they are. Six young people chatter and look at their phones thereby demonstrating that you can be two places at once. Another man peers at himself in a mirror and tries to re-arrange his hair despite the fact that it has been shorn down to almost nothing. A cleaner dusts the moving steps of an escalator. How does he know when he’s come to the end, the steps are all clean and his work is done? These are the questions that haunt us.