Retro #18: October

This retro is the first post that I’m also sending to my email list! If you’re reading this on the blog or RSS and would like to get email notifications, here’s the link!

In October I finally got around to writing my eulogy for the 2026 Blue Jays, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. It got a lot of really nice feedback and a friend told me they loved it even though they don’t care about sports, which is the highest possible praise, IMO. Last year when I wrote about the 2025 team I also wrote about how hard that was to write, particularly because I was so out of practice; this one was a little easier, or at least less of a struggle, which I will consider a victory. When I re-read it I still find all kinds of things I should have spent more time on (why do the tenses disagree there, is this idea really tied in the way I wanted to, etc) but overall I’m proud of it and I appreciate all the comments! (It was also shared by my favourite baseball writer out there which felt very nice, tbh.)

Sometimes I think all of my sports work has just one idea in it, which is something like “wasn’t it nice that we were there even though we’re sad now,” but I guess that’s okay.

This month I went to a handful of great shows including Kowloon Walled City (featuring an old baseball twitter friend, shoutout Ian) at the Monarch, pop songwriting royalty Marshall Crenshaw at Hugh’s Room Live, and Ecca Vandal at Longboat Hall. The Ecca Vandal show featured the most diverse, uncategorizable crowd I have ever seen in my life. I think the age range was something like 18-70, and there were groups of old queers and groups of youths and bro-y white guys and stylish young racialized women and I’ve never seen anything like it, even in a city that looks like that on the whole. I think she’s gotten quite popular on the internet in the last few years, but I’m out of touch and just came to see her on the strength of her first (self-titled) album from 2017 which I played like crazy when it came out. The new one is good but a different style from what I liked best about her; live, though, it was all amazing. The band put on a fantastic show and every person in that crowd was losing their minds.

I also technically played the last couple of shows of our tour in October, but spiritually it just felt like the long September finale (here’s that retro). Here’s a photo from the Longboat Hall show on October 2, though, by my pal Steve McGill:

(I am wearing a Thrush Hermit shirt underneath an Adam Lind Jays jersey, with my saxophone around my neck while I play keys and sing at the same time. I think this is my final form.)

This month a million dear friends of mine also held a screening for their DIY horror film Look Across the Water. It was presented by Wavelength which celebrates its 25th(!) anniversary this year. I truly cannot imagine the Toronto music and arts scene without Wavelength, and I’ve played many WL shows with many of the people who made this film, including Simon (director) and Josh (director of photography) and Alison (who led the Q&A)—we were all in Entire Cities together a million years ago. It was so lovely to see all of my friends up there together and to finally see the great movie they spent such a long time making. I don’t even like horror movies and I had such a good time!!!! It’s beautiful to see your friends make art!

At the screening they also showed a short documentary celebrating Wavelength’s 25th and I am pretty sure an album by my old band was shown in it, which was a very cool surprise. I spend a lot of time thinking about whether I’ve made an impression on groups and communities I belong to and something like this, even if it’s a half-second flash on screen, feels really nice!

Toronto also had a municipal election on the 26th and not only did we avoid the bad thing (electing Bradford for mayor) but a bunch of genuinely good things happened, like a high voter turnout electing Chow with the highest vote total in Canadian history, and City Hall gaining a bunch of first-time progressive councillors. I’m not accustomed to feeling good after an election, rather than just some mix of resignation and/or relief (usually the bad thing happens, or the not-quite-worst thing happens because we were all trying to avoid the worst thing). Is this … hope????

So many more things happened this month but I have to end somewhere, so let me do that by reminding you that autumn is the best season.

Things I liked this month

• How to write it like you told it. You’ve always got to put in the work—but when you do put in the work, and you see the results, it feels amazing. LLMs can make you feel like you can skip the work, but where does that leave you?
• “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.” An interview with Nicole Noren, a senior producer at ESPN and someone whose family was destroyed by gambling, who quit after ESPN started promoting their own sports betting product.
• Related, this CBC podcast on the Jontay Porter affair and the legalization of sports gambling was very good.
• A uniquely clunky sentence is a joy forever. I struggled to pull the right quotes from this and ended up pasting way too many paragraphs, which is a sign of writing I love. This is a really beautifully written piece (as is everything I’ve ever read by Felix Kent) about searching for a mysterious familiar sentence, and the ways art takes up space in our heads, but also mostly about Salinger.
• Are we in a reading monoculture?
• The commenters. Luke Winkie thought the commenters at Slate were out to get him and decided to investigate, even speaking to some of his most relentless trolls. This was way more heartwarming and lovely than I expected!