Our Language Is Richest Around The Forbidden Topics

            

           

            I sighed through the first parts of early Saturday morning, especially my yoga. I was okay, as usual after the singing part though.

            I received an email from K.J. Mullins telling me that she’d published my article about my trip to the food bank and my failed attempt to get enough money to buy a battery for my guitar tuner. She surprised me though when she told me she’d sent me twenty dollars by email transfer so I could get the battery. That was a very nice thing for her to do! She explained, “Music deserves to live.” It’s a good thing she’s never heard me play.

            I was thinking some more about why there are more words for homosexual than there are for heterosexual. I did a search for the word with the most synonyms and found that, hands down, the winner is “drunk”. I would expect that “prostitute” would have a lot of words to represent it as well. There seems to be an ironic tendency for us to come up with so many words to use as a way of avoiding talking about forbidden topics that those topics become rich with language.

            I rode up to St Clair and Yonge and then went further east to finish exploring all the streets south of Mt Pleasant Cemetery. On my return trip I went down Yonge to Queen.

            Yonge Street is such an ugly street, pretty much no matter what section of Toronto it cuts through. Every now and then there is a nice building, but it’s surrounded by such a jumble of architectural crap that it looks like it was all thrown together.

            At Queen I went to the bank machine and took out the twenty dollars that K.J. sent me. I cycled west on Queen and parked my bike in front of the Rex. There was a funk band playing there as I went in to pee. The Rex is a great place to use the washroom, at least for a man, because it’s a short distance from the entrance and it’s at street level.

            I went to the nearby variety store but they didn’t have the battery I needed. The next convenience store east didn’t have it either, but Shoppers did, even though I had to go to the second floor and explore every section before stumbling upon the batteries.

            I watched an episode of Bonanza in which Hoss befriends a man that’s as strong as he is but who is also mentally challenged and plagued by fits of violent anger. Hoss’s efforts to keep Arnie in a peaceful environment are hampered by the manipulations of a saloon girl and her boss (played by Leonard Nimoy). It doesn’t end well for Arnie, since he kills the girl after she laughs at him. The opening of the story is funny though because Hoss and Arnie have a fistfight that lasts for an hour and a half, while Adam and Little Joe sit out on the street with mugs of beer and watch.