Toronto Ontario – Two of the greatest things about Toronto are its nightlife and its people. Rain or shine, weekend or weekday- there is always something to do or somewhere to go.
Last Friday night I went out with my friends V and Rhi to a bar called Sneaky Dee’s for emo night, which is every Friday night. Sneaky Dee’s is pretty cool place because each night of the week is a different genre of music that city dwellers of all kinds (all over the age of 19) can come to drink and have a good time with their friends. The bar is connected to Sneaky Dee’s down stairs restaurant, which stays open after the bar upstairs, closes down for the night to service all the drunk adults with over six different kinds of nachos.
I was supposed to meet up with the girls around 10pm at V’s house for pre-drinks before heading down to the bar, however what I hadn’t factored into my equation was that it is actually way faster for me to leave my house and head down town than it is for me to leave my house and head into Mississauga (which also costs me more to do). I left my house around nine and by the time I met up with them there was no time for pres and they had to meet me at the bus stop.
We drove to the bar, which meant Rhi wasn’t drinking. By the time we got down town it was after 11pm, we parked what we thought was only a block away from the bar (it was a few more than that) and walked there. It was a nice night despite the on and off drizzle of rain, all down the street were other bars with people all around chatting and drinking, some looking at us as we walked passed.
When we got to Sneaky Dee’s, thankfully there wasn’t a line up and we quickly flashed our ID’s to the bouncer and walked past him and the restaurant, that was just beside the stairs leading up to the bar. We paid our covers at the top of the stairs and headed over towards the restrooms before heading towards the bar.
I think the restrooms at this place were my favorite thing about the place. Both sets of washrooms both in the upstairs bar and the downstairs restaurant are littered with tags and graffiti from head to toe. Hearing about it is one thing but seeing it with your own eyes is completely different. It doesn’t matter where you turn to look you’ll see song lyrics, names, bands, stories, colors, even pictures. Unfortunately most of the pictures I tried to take of this didn’t come out as well as I would have liked but pictures aren’t the same as seeing it with your naked eye anyway.
We grabbed our drinks and headed out onto the dance floor, the first song they played I immediately recognized as: Dear Maria by All Time Low; a band I had been quite fond of back in the day. Through out the night we all danced and drank and listened to a vast array of music dating back to high school.
V kept running into people she knew and Rhi and I just stared back at one another clueless, we even ended up running into V’s younger sister and a couple of her friends. As the hours passed the ginger even ended up making an appearance, as well as two of my best friends Stephy and Lizzie, who were accompanied by Cowboy Dave and Devon.
The four were hungry and buzzed from their own night out on the town but the bouncer for both bar and restaurant, wasn’t letting them in without wristbands from the bar (which they didn’t have) so I casually walked out from the restaurant and explained that food had already been ordered for them, the bouncer was very understandable after that and let them through, which meant that Devon could quit his bitching.
Meanwhile inside, the others had already grabbed a table and were eagerly waiting for food of their own to come. The two groups sat at tables across from each other which meant I could keep bouncing back and forth from one table to the next, which worked out because V started talking to the ginger about how she thought we should get married (we’ve been together less than a year) did I mention he doesn’t believe in marriage? At one point while this conversation was going on, I attempted to hide in my menu but that didn’t work out very well… actually it only made it more apparent that I was in fact embarrassed. Luckily for me the ginger is good at awkward conversations and took over the whole thing while I innocently pretended it wasn’t happening.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I don’t see a future there, with him- I just think that it’s a little soon to be thinking about us getting hitched, especially when he doesn’t believe in marriage. It’s like trying to convince a donkey that it’s a cat, okay… it just doesn’t make sense. Despite that however, it made me start thinking about the future- more specifically my future.
What did I want to do? Who did I want to become? Did I want to be in Toronto my whole life? If I moved where would I go? Was I wasting my talent? Should I publish another book? All these questions and the more I tried to figure it all out the more questions I had. People talk about having a mid life crisis usually coming on around your 40’s, this felt like a quarter life crisis- having all these questions but none of the answers… I know life is about growing and changing and that you can’t always plan every step of your life because nothing ever goes according to plan.
Life is about change; it’s about making hard decisions and the choices that define them. You can try but you will never come up with all the answers to life’s challenges on your own, at least not without a few bumps in the road and a whole lot of mistakes.
Maybe one day I get married, maybe I don’t, who really knows? What I do know for sure is people change, they move on and eventually they leave. That’s life.
Sometimes forever and always is only as long as a year, six months, a day or only five minutes.
We shouldn’t be expected to know all the answers all the time and to be honest with you, I don’t want too. Sometimes not knowing is better than knowing.
Born and raised in Toronto, E. V. Hutcheon studied journalism at St Lawrence College in Cornwall Ontario.
She currently lives in Toronto with her family, three dogs and a rabbit, near the Humber River.