What separates us from ourselves
November 2025
This past month, my birthday week included attending a roadside vigil.
This one was for Rosalie Tennison, a Winnipeg author who was hit at the corner of Osborne and Roslyn, later dying in hospital. She was one of two people killed by cars just this past month.
Reflection and fury have gone hand in hand and I am leaning on both to propel me forward in organizing around making our streets safer and advocating for better city policy and hopefully confronting at some level, however small, the malaise of car culture.
“The lack of communication between us all, is what separates us from ourselves.“
This was one of the many lines that stuck out to me written onto the pillars of the building I passed by at the corner of Garry and Main Street (I like to think of it more as an ad-hoc outdoor poetry exhibit).
The line is ringing in my head as I reflect and think about the impact of cars on those outside them but also on the people inside them.
Privileged people of a system can in fact be harmed by that very system, making drivers victims of car culture as well. Cars separate drivers from each other, dissolving people into hunks of metal. People talk about smartphones and social media isolating and polarizing people, but cars have been doing this for more than a century.
I feel it every time I get into a car and can only imagine the cumulative effect across an entire life and then multiply that across our entire car dependent society.
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November was mournful, magical, and menacing . Looking back, it was full of:
Jays losing, Super thrift, CBC interview, Back to the Future, ipod modding, 1 on 1 meeting, Columbus Radio, Boiler fundraiser, Tokyo Drift, Spirited Away sleepover, house meeting, Church AGM, street protest, wall climbing with the youth, working on neighbourhood project, Grey Cup, serving John Hamm coffee, marketplace meetups, setting up my winter bike, hanging out in friends studio spaces, breakfast with Dad, meeting guy who spoke Cantonese on my neighbourhood walk and ended up drinking tea with him, meeting new family, late zoom meetings, Birthday meals with family, chats with distant family that have become friends, making quinoa salad, community catering,
Enjoy the photos,
Michael, not Mike
