I keep thinking about Ballast. Went the other night with my girlfriend Vi. Saw it at the Festival Theatre on Seymour & Davie. It was just so spare and sad and jangly. I wanted, no, I was totally invested in each and every one of those characters. I was on the edge of my breath, constantly wishing and willing them to make it. I keep puzzling over how he did it.

How did Hammer get us so invested in the outcome, so quickly and with so little dialogue? Slow moving Mississippi mud, drear, angst, despair and yet and yet, somehow they creep forward with the little bit of faith in themselves, in the world, in the possibilities of something better.

It was so fragile and quiet and poetic. Not the Hallmark poetry of pretty, sanitized flowers with rhyming couplets, but the poetry found in decay, darkness, heavy rotting mosses and redemption.