Goodass

           

            Saturday had to be a laundry day, as I was down to two ragged pairs of underwear. After loading the washing, I went into the Salvation Army to look for curtains. There was a shear, mauve curtain that might have worked visually for my living room, but there was only one, and I need a pair.

While I was unlocking my bike, a lady that had come to watch my yoga class on Friday happened to be walking by. She said she might come to take my class because the one she pays for at the community centre is at night and she doesn't like that.

It seems that the front door of my building has not always been locking by itself after we close it and so someone on Saturday morning must have gotten in to use the space at the bottom of the stairs by the mailboxes, for a urinal. The superintendent is in the hospital and so we had to deal with the smell all day until the landlord finally came, cleaned it up and maybe fixed the door. Someone has suggested that the culprit is the old bag lady who shouts “Faggot!” and “Cocksucker!” all the time. I have my doubts about that, because I think I would have heard her uncontrolled vocalizations differently if they were coming from inside the building.

In the afternoon I went to pick up my jacket from the tailor. He fixed the seam and repaired the lining. I asked him why my brown leather jacket fell apart so easily. He looked at it to see if it was weak leather but he said it was strong, because it was “Ko” leather. I thought I was about to learn something new about names of leather when I asked him to spell it. He said, “Ko … c-o-w … ko.” He told me that pig leather is weak compared to cow leather, but more expensive and stronger than cow leather is horse leather.

I went home and dug out my camera and took some photos of myself in the jacket with the ten-second timer. It took some time to find the right place from which to shoot myself so it wasn’t either washed out in the afternoon light or else too dark. Finally a certain section of the back deck seemed to work fine as a location, with the afternoon light above me and to the left, just behind the building.

I read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”.

The Gilman story describes beautifully but creepily a woman going insane as a result of being shut up to treat a nervous breakdown.

The Chopin piece takes us into the apparent grief of a woman that has just learned of her husband’s death but then shows us that what she is really feeling is relief at being finally free of him.

I began to throw some ideas together for my Philosophy paper on Kierkegaard. I may be biting off more than I can chew but I am going to argue against the probability of god.