Finally feeling my oats.

They say... that when you have a baby, it takes something like 18 months to feel like yourself again (if you ever do...).

Today, for the first time in... oh, a couple years, I woke up wondering what kind of hijinks I could get up to on a Saturday. Instead of wondering how much sleep I could steal.

It was a familiar -- and wonderful -- feeling: energy and curiosity.

A bunch of old codgers up to no good

Whatever they're up to, you know these old men are bad ass. (Did everyone look like an old man back in 1935?)

Streets we love: Ontario East

Why do I love Ontario E.? Because it's dirty. It's real. It's a thriving little community whose inhabitants make their own rules. Though it's close to the city, no one gentrified it. Maybe because Ontario E. is far too complicated...

Choose a glaring day in late spring to walk Ontario E. At times unnerving in a beautiful way, it's as close as you can get to a trip to the carnival. The real carnival. Start at Amherst and follow it all the way to Frontenac.

Walking West to East, here are some of my favourite stops:

1. The Spirit Lounge
Possibly the most flamboyant restaurant in the city. Obey the house rules, or be banned for life.

2. Pat and Robert
Around Ontario E. and Plessis, big-haired couple Pat and Robert have built a small empire: cigar shop, hair salon, shoe store... each a temple to their collective obsessions. Don't forget to visit the Tabagie -- it's amazing. Bring along your granddad...

3. The valley of the tattoo artists
One day I counted 13 tattoo parlours along Ontario E., between Amherst and Frontenac. A week later, there could have been 15, or 10. Not sure I would go there to get a tat. But apparently lots of folks do.

4. Hub cap palace
Near the intersection of DeLorimer and Ontario E. there lives a poem to the noble, lost hubcab... each shiny disk lovingly displayed like trinkets in a magpie's nest. It's dazzling. How could anyone love hubcaps this much?

5. The truly fantastic flea market
It's not fantastic because of what you can find there. It's fantastic because it's there at all. Upstairs used to be the home of a gentleman who was perfect blend of Lindsay Lohan and David Lee Roth. Awesome.

There are so many more gems... the Buddhist temple with astonishing white statuary, two cavernous, almost barn-like churches re-inhabited by newly-arrived Montrealers, innumerable ambiguously named massage parlours (rub and tug, anyone?).

And if you go further East, past Frontenac, under the railway bridge and even past the giant (sugar?) refinery, you'll get to the precious Promenade Ontario -- a thriving commercial strip, loved by the locals and largely forgotten by the rest of the city.

Oh... Ontario East... Never change...

People we love + Photo Story #2: The coolest old people ever

A few years ago, I took my Belgian/Welsh friends to see the tam tams.

It's one of those things the out-of-towners like to see. Every Sunday in the summer and fall, hundreds of people gather at the foot of the mountain to dance, play bongos, take mind altering substances and kick back in the sunshine.

And that's when we saw them: the two coolest old people ever. 80-year-old hepcats dancing their pants off. So far as we could tell, they were totally high. And wearing the most amazing disco clothes. Truly the awesomest, coolest cats I've ever seen. I'll never forget them.

Maybe I don't go to the tam tams very often. But if I make it to 80 and can still shake my wrinkly booty... you can bet I'll be there with my wild-haired old man in tow.

I did see one of them about a year later, doing his geriatric hepcat thing at the Montreal jazz festival. But haven't come across them since...

Ice balls, huh?

Does it really take a Canadian to debunk the supposedly paranormal appearance of ice balls in London? Or am I taking a good yarn at face value?

So some dude found a bunch of giant ice balls all over a park. And wonders... is it some kind of hail?

Maybe.

Where I grew up, it almost never snowed. When it did, the snow was so sticky, we would go outside and roll giant snowballs. They would start out fist sized, and grow and grow and grow and grow until they were too big for our little bodkins to push another foot. And then we would roll another one.

Looking at many of the photos, you can even see the trail left by obsessively ball-rolling kids.

But I like this explanation better... frolicsome Londoners rolling giant balls down Hampstead Heath. W00t!

Photo story 1: The night the shooting gallery burned

Back in 2002, I moved to a little enclave nestled behind the cigarette factory on Ontario St. The neighbourhood was pretty sketchy, but my immediate block was idyllic: a tiny little nest tucked in the elbow of Ontario and Iberville.

Out front, old people watched TV on their front porches and surveyed everything that went by. The depanneur downstairs did a fast trade cashing in empties. Out back, a community garden huddled in the shadow of the giant old church no one went to. And out back, the girls visited their shooting gallery.

Idyllic the rest of the time, things got busy in my neck of the woods every morning between 5 and 8 a.m., when the girls dropped in around the corner to get their fix.

It went like this: at the crack of dawn, truckers would come into town across the Jacques Cartier bridge. Starved for, uh, female companionship and other delights, they'd pay a quick visit to the girls of Centre Sud in the early hours before delivering their goods.

And then the girls of Centre Sud would pay a quick visit to the guy behind my apartment. If you were up early enough, you would see them, all skinny bones, wandering off their fix. If you were up after 8:00, you'd never know they were there.

Sometime around Christmas, things started to get a little strange. One morning, the police cordoned off our little corner. The guy who lived in the shooting gallery (or whatever it was) had lost it. They were trying to talk him down from doing himself some serious harm.

After that, the girls disappeared. The house that was a shooting gallery stayed filthy, but quiet. No one came and went. Nothing happened.

Until the fire trucks woke me up. It must have been February or March... and again, our corner was cordoned off and filled with men, hoses, giant fire trucks. The shooting gallery was on fire.