and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Here in Montreal they have these silly constructs where two streets are one, one is divided in two, both one and the same but separate. It's called East and West, or as they like to say Est et Ouest. Basically, you walk along a street counting the address numbers off looking for that hotel, apartment, storefront you're going to visit.. 100.. 200.. 300.... aha, 500! Perfect. ONLY to find out that in fact this is 500 Ouest and what you required was 500 Est. Somewhere, the world is split in two, a dividing line that breaks apart everything into two paths, two pieces, two halves of a whole.. in Montreal that line is St. Laurent Blvrd. aka The Main, argued over and over by journalists from here to Zanzibar to be the heart of the city, the real working man's haven, the bread and butter; meat and potatoes of the real city that never sleeps, it's very soul.

Life is kind of like that: you wander off in one direction to find what you think you are looking for only to find that what you found is exactly what you need but not necessarily what you want. You're on the wrong side of the street, opposite end of the park, across the pond, Est instead of Ouest.

It's this experience, I think, that gives a true clarity; impresses like the view of a seeing eye dog imprinted onto the hand that holds the leash. If you've never lost your way how can you know you are on your way? - It's this question, these black and whites of one-line philosophies, that sit so glaringly as dividing lines - Main's of the mind - that finally get torn down when the whole view is put together (after an adventure of collecting pieces one by one, jagged on their edges and lacking any uniformity). Like puzzle pieces, outlines compared and images overlapped, you put them together and out comes a clearer idea, a more concrete truth than ying or yang or black and white or good and evil, and it is this: things just aren't so cut and dry.

Like an intensely strong precipitate, the journalists "truth" (the one which says the Main splits the city into two, forms it's Mason-Dixon) is really the boiling down of a complex solution of thoughts and ideas and conceptions; the mathematical equivalent of taking an average; like the chemical creation of the essence of Main.

It's not truth. There is no truth that is so simple and square with clear edges and well-defined corners, flat surfaces so even you'd think God himself bothered to go all the way to Home Depot and get one of those fancy electronic levels. No, the truth is a blur. An inexact sum. A supersaturated solution of complex chemical integrity.

So sometimes, as you curse your wrong directions, looking back Ouest when you've travelled so far Est you may think luck has cursed you but maybe it's blessed you, instead, with soft spoken words of wisdom. If life is a line we are meant to walk, whether wiggling or wavy or simply straight, we can walk that line as exact as we can but the fact of the matter is that it's an unknown line at the very best.