If you follow the lightpost that faces them up to the set of balconies you'll see an old studio of mine. I lived there the year between tree-planting and going back to school. It was where I learned to never ever (again) play drinking games with grappa. It was where I saved up my pennies, between being on unemployment insurance and working as a schlep in a deli, for a two week vacation in Halifax in a house that seemed to be the epicenter of the art-school scene and would be the focus of drunken accusations years later. It was where I decided that eating Becel margarine makes a person petty and insane (or just plain stupid if you've seen the tv ads being shown in Montreal, lately.) Our landlord was a lawyer who kept his offices on the ground floor. Sometime in early spring he defaulted on his morgage and every month one of us would walk up to St. Viateur to the bank that had seized the property. Eventually, the blank stares from the bank employees would turn to knowing grunts as they muttered our landlord's name as though we were somehow guilty by association. There was a small office in the apartment next to ours where a man and a woman, both in their early forties, worked. When it was warm, I would always see atleast one of them sitting on the balcony reading a stack of magazines or newspapers. That was their job. I don't know whether they were generalists or if they were after something specific. I don't know who they reported to or how. But, I always think of them when the conversation rolls around to weblogging.