A Healthy Lifestyle. With Minor Adjustments.

I used to have what could reasonably be described as a healthy lifestyle.

Not the January kind. A real one.

I went to the gym regularly. Watched my weight. Tried to eat properly. Got massages. At some point, regular Coke was quietly removed from circulation.

My body was being monitored.

Mostly by me.

My work was almost entirely mental. For years, I made a living by reading, thinking, writing, analyzing things and solving problems.

So physical activity had to be scheduled on purpose.

Work.

Gym.

Reasonable dinner.

Occasional massage.

The system was running well enough that the obvious plan was to keep running it.

Then I got a message from the head of the company I was consulting for.

The company was shutting down.

That was it.

Not "we're reviewing strategic options."

Not "there may be a restructuring."

Shutting down.

And the previous month's payment probably wasn't coming either.

I was an independent consultant for a foreign company, and nearly all of my income came from that one contract.

The arrangement had one interesting feature.

The taxes were completely real.

The regular EI cushion that comes with insurable employment was not part of my situation.

So the math was unusually simple.

Yesterday: income.

Today: zero.

For a few seconds I just stared at the screen.

People say "it was like a cold shower" as a metaphor.

Apparently the nervous system does not care about literary categories.

The surprising part was that my wife became practical much faster than the person who had spent years being paid to solve complicated problems.

While I was still processing what had happened, she had already moved on to a more useful question:

How are we going to make money now?

We started looking at options.

Uber would take longer to get going.

DoorDash could happen much faster.

We filled out what needed to be filled out.

A day or two later, I got in the car.

My first order was McDonald's.

Six dollars.

A little over five kilometres.

Compared with my previous work, the problem was refreshingly well defined.

I don't remember having any profound thought at that moment.

There was somewhere to go, so I went.

Then another order came in.

Then another.

By the end of the first day, I had done twelve deliveries. I had been online for more than six hours and made a little over a hundred dollars.

That was the entire grand career transition.

No soundtrack.

No internal monologue.

McDonald's, five kilometres, next order.

And strangely, there was something useful about that.

At home, your brain has unlimited time.

It can think about the company that disappeared.

The money.

What happens next.

How a life that seemed fairly organized managed to change direction in one message.

With the app on, things became simpler.

Drive there.

Pick this up.

Take it there.

Find the building.

Find the entrance.

Try to understand why the buzzer code is somebody's last name.

The brain suddenly has more urgent problems.

You just drive.

The strangest part was that, at first, none of it felt permanent.

A few days.

Maybe a week.

Something would work out and normal life would restart.

Normal life, as it turned out, had a different schedule.

So I never really had a dramatic moment where I thought, Well, I guess I'm a delivery driver now.

It didn't feel like a new job.

It felt like an interruption between the old life and the life that was supposed to resume any minute.

The interruption just kept getting renewed.

One week passed.

Then another.

And the carefully managed healthy lifestyle began undergoing minor adjustments.

The gym, which used to appear on the calendar several times a week, became more like an old friend.

We should really get together sometime.

Eating became less structured too.

There is a specific kind of dietary test that nutrition experts do not discuss enough.

You are hungry.

You get into the car.

There is a bag of hot food sitting beside you.

You are not allowed to touch it.

It is not yours.

Your job is to sit next to it for the next twenty minutes.

Sometimes it's fries.

Sometimes fried chicken.

Sometimes Indian food.

Sometimes pizza.

Pizza is especially dangerous.

After ten minutes, the smell has filled the car to the point where you and someone else's dinner are starting to develop a relationship.

But you're a professional.

You deliver it.

Somewhere around then, Coca-Cola returned to my life.

Diet Coke, obviously.

Standards had to be maintained.

If the nutrition plan was going to collapse, there was no reason to involve sugar.

Delivery also taught me that I did not know Montreal nearly as well as I thought I did.

I knew roads.

A few neighbourhoods.

The usual restaurants.

Pizza Pizza.

Domino's.

McDonald's.

Tim Hortons.

A perfectly adequate level of knowledge for someone who had no intention of specializing in food service.

Then I discovered Pizza Salvatoré.

And that Montreal apparently contains far more pizza places than any reasonable person needs to know about.

Before DoorDash, I considered "pizza" a sufficient classification system.

I now understand how superficial that was.

There was A&W. Dairy Queen. Indian places. Chinese places. Filipino places. Korean places. Lebanese places. Sushi. Burgers. Bagels. Desserts. Bakeries.

Food whose name you forget five minutes later, but whose presence the car remembers well into the next morning.

The car slowly became a rolling archive of Montreal's restaurant scene.

Sometimes you get in the next day and yesterday's restaurant is still there.

Not physically.

Spiritually.

Before delivery, my restaurant criteria were embarrassingly simple.

Is the food good?

Now the evaluation system is much more sophisticated.

Is there parking?

Is the order actually ready?

When they say "five minutes," do they mean regular minutes or restaurant minutes?

Can I get back onto the road without losing ten minutes?

Would I ever accept another order from this place?

And exactly how good does the food smell when I am already hungry?

The city changed too.

I started learning entrances, strip malls, apartment buildings and parking lots.

Where you can stop for thirty seconds, and where those thirty seconds can become unexpectedly expensive.

Which buildings look small from outside but somehow contain several kilometres of hallway.

And that "Leave at door" sometimes describes only the final ten seconds of a surprisingly long expedition.

You notice people differently too.

Some open the door, smile and say thank you.

A normal human thank-you can improve an entire shift more than you would expect.

Others look at you as if the app itself has arrived with a minor software issue.

You get used to that too.

We still ask ourselves the same question fairly often:

When is this going to end?

I do not plan to spend the rest of my life moving other people's pizza around Montreal.

That line was definitely not in the original career plan.

But whenever this chapter does end, the city will not go back to what it was before.

I know too much now about its pizza, parking and buzzers.

And if my life ever becomes properly organized again — gym, routine, decent meals, everything back on schedule — I fully intend to return to a healthy lifestyle.

Completely.

Almost.

The Diet Coke can stay.