The lines started to fuzz in my vision, so I put down the pen at last.  I'd been sitting there for ten minutes just thinking anyhow.  No more drawing was going to happen tonight.

So I went up to the rooftop.  Twelve stories above the city to better watch the sunrise.  —Watching through windows takes away from the experience somehow.  And the room is filled with sheets of paper with my character's faces gazing up at me.  Flat and unloving.  Just ink on paper.

The city was in that nether region of being half awake and half asleep.  Not an altogether unpleasant place to be unless you have to be somewhere.  The first few commuters travelled the streets with all four lanes to themselves.  I rubbed my eyes and stretched at the ache behind my shoulders which sometimes comes when I've been working too hard.  I yawned and noticed the air.  —Cool and fresh and almost sweet.  Like it always is outside the city where air is taken for granted.  But here you notice it.  Before long, the city exhaust and dust will kick up again for another busy day of belching trucks and briefcases and power suits.  It's only bad on some days, but in any city, the air only smells really good at five thirty in the morning.

In the east, the sunrise crept up, orange and pink.  The factory chimneys across the bay stood like black pillars before the approaching light, but they were soon utterly overwhelmed and it was too bright to look directly, so I didn't. In the other direction, all the metal and stone and glass buildings began to gleam in the air; the castles of our economy.  Toronto is really quite stunning in that kind of light.  And it occurred to me then, (one of those moments of total clarity), that each little flashing window was a tidy slot for a briefcase or powersuit to sit and keep track of thin streams of inventories and decimal points.  —All the windows all together keeping track of all the trucks and shoppers below.  And of the various goods they traded. . .  Coffee and doughnuts.  Two for one frames while you wait.  And movie set pieces.  (Lots of films shot in Toronto).  And discount footwear.  And guitars and cement and television parts and books and charcoal briquettes for rooftop barbeques.  It's all accounted for behind those tiny glass windows, and for that moment while I watched, with the trucks rumbling along and the all the little doors to all the little shops sparkling in the sunlight, the whole city seemed to me like an intricate model where you can see all the parts in motion.  Like a big clock.  But organic and changing.

And alive.  —A city will breathe in, sucking goods and knowledge, youth and power from the landscape, (cool and fresh and almost sweet?), and it beats like a giant heart, every day another thump in its pulse, with all of us, tiny parts of it.  Cells, perhaps, in a dragon. . ?  (Well, maybe not a dragon.  But a beast of some sort.)

Behind my gleaming little window, I make comic books.

Something about that made me frown, so I hopped over the garden fence onto the gravel and tar to sit right on the very edge of the building.  There is only a little wall, only a foot or so high, between me and the drop.  More than enough to trip over and be done with.  My neck hairs tingle through fug of my yawns and I sat quickly, (somewhat sheepishly), so that I wouldn't stumble.  —My legs dangling over the edge the way I imagine Rubel's might, though I don't expect he would hold the edge so carefully.  For some reason, this makes me laugh.

So I look.  The city is bright and right, but it doesn't look beautiful or ugly.  It just is, and I am always struck by how content I feel when the world looks this way to me.  Everything works so nicely, with all the parts moving the way they should.  Even the dirty and dangerous ones.  Even the parts with death written on them.  And this sort of contentment bothers me.  The wonder and the rapture I often feel in life are strangely absent when I feel this way; when everything seems to work.  I always ponder how this could be, but always give up.  Thinking takes effort, and I am usually very tired when I reach this state.  So I let it go and just sat.  Perhaps the Dragon is as slow as anybody to be inspired when just crawling out of bed, which is fair enough.  Inspiration is usually an afternoon thing for me anyway.

So I watched the solitary pedestrians blow on their hands and march with set strides.  I sat until the cold began to creep through my jeans and the city grew just a little too active for the experience to still be private.  With the sun no longer in question, the day was there, and I headed back down to shut off the desk lamp and hit the sack.  But first I stopped to write this all down.

See you all in issue #15.  G'night.