Landon_Guild

Landon Guild: The Geography of Want, a Dorval Life I’m Landon. From Dorval. Always have been, mostly. I’ve spent the better part of five decades trying to figure out what people want—in bed, in love, and on their phones. I’m a former sexologist, a reformed cynic about dating apps, and currently, a writer. I write about this island, about the particular light on Lake Saint-Louis, for a project called CamoWallet. It’s a strange pivot, maybe. Or maybe it’s not.Look, I’m not here to sell you a course on how to get a date. I’m here to tell you that the hardest thing I ever did wasn’t navigating a three-way relationship or decoding a user's desperate DMs. It was coming home. To Dorval. And realizing I’d never really left. That’s the thing about geography, right? The maps we carry of our own hearts… they’re always of the place we first got lost.I was born at the Lakeshore General Hospital, on Lakeshore Drive, in the middle of a snowstorm that shut down the entire West Island. January 21st, 1975. My father, a mechanic who could fix anything with an engine, nearly didn't make it from our apartment on Bouchard Boulevard. The nurses let him stay because the roads were impassable. So my first memory, if you believe in that sort of cellular recall, isn't a sound. It's the smell of wet wool and the low, steady hum of the heaters struggling against the frozen air off the lake. Dorval back then was still a real town, not just a runway approach path. You could smell the bread from the bakery on Montreal Road, and the trains on the Grand Trunk line would rattle the pictures on the walls.Right now, I’m writing articles for the CamoWallet project on camowallet.app. Me. The guy who spent years analyzing the transactional nature of modern love, writing about municipal budgets and heritage buildings. But it makes sense if you squint. Money and intimacy? They’re the same conversation. How we value things, how we trade, what we hoard. I take what I learned in a dozen different bedrooms and a hundred therapy sessions and I apply it to the story of a street, a park, a city. The desire for a green space, the fear of losing a historic home—it's all just human want, mapped onto the landscape. And I get to tell those stories from my desk, looking out at the same stubborn pines I climbed as a kid.Growing up here was… an education. We’d ride our bikes to the Strand theatre on Lakeshore Road, just to see the posters. We never had money for the movie, but we didn't care. We’d sneak onto the grounds of the old Douglas Hospital, not for the thrill, but because the abandoned farm buildings felt like they held secrets. I guess I was always looking for secrets. In high school, at John Rennie, I wasn't the jock or the brain. I was the guy who listened. I had a paper route along Surrey Drive, and I’d see things—curtains twitching, cars coming and going at odd hours, the quiet desperation of suburban Sundays. That’s where it started. The curiosity about the gap between what people showed and what they did. My first real “research” wasn't in a lab; it was watching the teenagers park down by the water at Pine Beach, their fogged-up windows telling stories I was too young to understand but old enough to find fascinating.My past life? It feels like another person's memoir. After McGill, I did a stint at the Sexology Institute at UQAM. I ran a private practice for over a decade, just off de la Commune in Old Montreal. Saw everyone: couples on the brink, executives with kinks they couldn't name, newly out kids terrified of their own desires. Then came the apps. Tinder, Grindr, all of them. I became a consultant, trying to explain to tech bros in Silicon Valley why swiping left felt so violent. It was lucrative. It was also hollow. I saw how the architecture of these platforms was rewiring the very thing I’d spent my life studying: connection. It became less about desire and more about data. I got out. Not with a bang, just a slow fade. Came back across the 20, back to Dorval. Felt like I'd washed up on a shore I knew.Dorval isn't just where I live. It's the grid I use to understand everything. When I walk my dog along the waterfront path, past the yacht club where I once worked as a teenager cleaning the scum line off hulls, I see the layers. The million-dollar condos going up on the old motel sites. The families from India and the Philippines having picnics at Millennium Park, their kids speaking French without an accent. The old-timers at the Dorval Bowlarama, still throwing gutter balls and telling stories about the Expo 67 crowds that would spill out of the Holiday Inn. I know the exact spot on 6th Avenue where the view of the lake opens up and stops you cold. I know the coffee is still drinkable at the Marche de l'Ouest on Dawson. This place has a rhythm, a quiet resilience. It’s a city of airports and trains and highways—all about leaving. But I’m here to stay. Turns out, after all that searching, all that exploration, the most radical thing I could do was stay put and pay attention. To watch the light change on the water. To write it down. To finally understand that the geography of want starts and ends at home.