TRIO #29

Monday June 29 2026

I didn’t buy any tickets for Pride. I didn’t attend any marches or vigils or circuit parties, and I didn’t even walk through the Village, feeling too fragile to be witnessed there. Instead, prioritizing the sun, I found myself in a backyard eating chicken, then on a beach, a rooftop, and finally a boat, its sails waving just for show. I clung to friends, I clung to Luke, I clung to the mast to shake ass. I wore a shirt that read ANXIOUS BUT CUTE and felt, at my most vulnerable, like a chihuahua trembling in a purse. The boat docked in a harbour overtaken by soccer fans, just as the baseball game let out. The CN Tower, a half-century old, glitched between colours, unsure exactly what to celebrate.

I’m still in mourning, so all these celebrations came tempered by grief. Mom was a party girl, well before my time, back when the CN Tower was still a baby. She used to tell me about her favourite venues, all long extinct: the afterhours on Ossington she referred to as a “boozecan;” the garment factory on Spadina where, according to legend, cops once broke up a party by descending from the roof via helicopter. I felt her presence everywhere this weekend: in the sand, in the puff of a joint, in laughter between friends. I went to bed around midnight each night, waking up groggy and unscathed.

All weekend I waited to hear Everything’s Fine by Jlo but nobody played it; she only released it on Friday, so maybe it hasn’t had time to register yet. The song, produced by Brazilian DJ Alok (god I hated writing that), comes in two versions: AM or PM. My preferred version is AM, which I’ve come to think of as the “real” one. The concept of a two-in-one single reminds me of the binary Luke has constructed between “daytime people” and “nighttime people.” To me, a daytime person with the occasional nighttime streak, Everything’s Fine (PM) feels overproduced in a way that nighttime often can be. The extra sonic layers make the song sound try-hard, like it’s reaching for transcendence that never really arrives, whereas the AM version gets there by removing all those layers, leaving only what’s essential. Besides the song’s refrain (everything’s fine/I still feel weird), the line that’s stuck with me is the following: I don’t chase joy/I let it pass. As I watched my friends stumble off the boat and disperse toward various nighttimes, I had the urge to scream after them: don’t chase joy, just let it pass!, but I didn’t want to kill the vibe.

Til next time,

Cason