I made a last-minute decision to bail on the blog for the first week of July. I had a lot going on both personally and professionally (real vacations are hard to come by when you’re self-employed). Combined with the July 1 and July 4 holidays, I figured it’d be a good time to flake. I’m glad I did. Here’s what I got up to:

Toronto Pride: The sign above is from the Trans March in Toronto – it was the one Pride event I went to this year. We marched with the enormous crowd, made some new friends, and enjoyed the positivity. It was excellent.

What’s so incredible about events like that is that when the crowd is big enough, the assholes disappear. There was nothing but positivity there. I spoke to all kinds of strangers, and saw a tattoo of some familiar lyrics that took on a whole new context when inked on a transgender person:

I teared up when I saw this. Suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ youth are four times higher than their peers. Events like this literally save lives. It was an affirming, optimistic and somewhat defiant event, much less corporate and commercial than the bigger pride parade a couple days later.

Miss Mae, Judah John, Sunnsetter at Houndstooth: The bands were all fantastic, and they’re all unusually talented musicians. Miss Mae was the standout for me: singer Marissa Mae Monk is a natural performer and I can’t wait to see a proper headline show.

This was my first visit to the venue, and It’s a good spot. The sound and lights are good, they have a pretty good selection of boozy and non-boozy drinks, and shows there are pay-what-you-can. They need a riser though – I’m over 6′ tall and I had a hard time seeing the musicians.

Reflection on the blog: I’m probably going to write more about this, but being away from WordPress was useful too. I have new ideas for topics, a little different perspective on my writing process, and a bit of a new approach to how to run this thing.

Plus I have a backlog of posts for the week ahead! It’s great stuff.

My air conditioning broke: Definitely do not recommend. Luckily it still got cool in the evenings, but sitting in by lovely home office with big windows was pretty goddam unpleasant when it’s 30C outside.

At any rate, glad to be back at it. Lots more to come.

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