On Monday when I
got up I wasn’t groggy as I often am on waking. This was a sign that my fast
had entered its second phase. This is something that I’ve noticed over the
thirty-eight years that I’ve been doing this annual fast. On the fourth day I
start feeling light. I sleep deeply and wake up fully awake and yet I’m not
full of energy. I feel like a ghost.
On my way out I saw
my across the west hall neighbour standing in front of his door with his arms
full of electrical equipment, a power cord and some duct tape. He looked at me
a little sadly and told me he was moving out. I reached out my hand and told
him that it had been nice having him as a neighbour. He struggled shift the
cord and the tape over to his left arm and then shook my hand, saying,
“Respect!” He told me he had some bottles for me and I said I’d pick them up
out back later on. I asked him if he’d found a better place and he said, “I
think so.” Though he didn’t sound entirely convincing. “I’m tired of this
bullshit!” he declared. I nodded and opined that his bachelor was a little
small, but he just scowled and pointed his finger directly above him at the
apartment of Caesar, the old Italian guy who was here before either he or I, to
indicate that that was the bullshit he was tired of. Caesar is a complainer
about a lot of things, and I recall that he’s complained to me a few times
about my across the hall neighbour’s lack of cleanliness. My neighbour seems to
drink a lot, judging from all the empty, large sized liquor bottles he’s given
me over the years. He used to have a lot of parties in the wee hours of the
morning with Indian pop music blasting and lots of cooking and sometimes burning
of food. He used to spend a lot of time out on the deck in the summer with his
friends, but over the last year he seems to have kept to himself. There was a
loud knock on the front door to which he growled, “Fuck off!” and explained,
“That’s the mover.” As I followed him with my bike down the stairs he
complained angrily that, “Some people think they own this building.” I
suggested that Caesar has milked a sense of privilege from having been here
through three landlords. He said, “I don’t give a fuck about that!” as he
opened the door to the tall, innocent looking, friendly mover. I squeezed my
bike and myself out the door, wished him luck and went to work.
I posed for Peter
Chan on the top floor of OCADU and on my breaks read a little bit of Heidegger’s
“Letter on Humanism”. Language is the loving caretaker of thought, or something
like that. After the halftime break there suddenly came a sound like a torrent
was blasting against the windows. I felt the stage shaking underneath me.
During my next break I looked outside and it looked like a blizzard had cut
loose from the sky. I was dreading riding home in it but then when I looked
outside on my next break there was no trace of a storm.
After work I went
to unlock my bike and was surprised to find that the seat was dry. The pencil
box that sits on top of the old OCA building extends to above the inner edge of
the sidewalk. Though my bike was not directly under the canopy, the wind had
been blowing from the west and so the extension blocked it from getting to my
bike.
It must have been a
pretty strong wind because a lot of the cardboard that had been put out for
recycling in the neighbourhood that evening got blown into the street. One wet
and dirty curled up piece between the streetcar tracks looked like the carcass
of a dog.
I stopped at
Freshco on the way home and picked up a lot of fruit and avocadoes. I bought a
few things that I wouldn’t normally buy if I wasn’t fasting, such as a mini
seedless watermelon and something I don’t think I’ve ever bought: a honey
pomelo. I didn’t buy any bananas because I was so bored with them but I bought
apples, globe grapes, mangoes and seven and a half litres of real orange juice.
I had unloaded everything onto the checkout belt but then I realized just as
the cashier was going to ring my items up, that I’d forgotten the avocadoes, so
I started to put everything back in the basket. But the cashier told me she’d
wait for me while I went to get them. I was really surprised by the final price
of almost seventy dollars though.
Shortly after
coming home I was curious about the taste of the honey pomelo, so I tore open
the red netting around it and peeled off the shrink-wrap under that. It looked
like a very large, slightly oblong grapefruit. I cut it open to discover that
it’s mostly a very thick skin and that it tasted nothing like honey, but was in
fact not as sweet or flavourful as many grapefruit that I’ve had. What a waste
of $3.99!
I watched “La Chute
de la Maison Usher”, which was Jean Epstein’s 1928 silent film adaptation of
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The overall story was
disappointing because it deviated drastically from the original. Madeline was
not Roderick’s sister and lover but just his wife, and on top of that everyone
lived in the end. What was great about the film was the cinematography and the
spooky, nerve wracking avante garde musical soundtrack, perhaps by Ivan Fedele,
that was added to the film many years later.
Just before going
to bed early, I was taking the cat poop out to the sealed bucket I keep for it
on the deck, and when I opened the back door it clinked loudly against several
of the bottles that my neighbour had left for me. I carried some of them back
to my place and was coming back for more when my next-door neighbour opened his
door because he’d been wondering where the noise had come from. He may have
just been looking for someone to gossip with because he immediately started
talking about our neighbour that had just moved out. He said that the landlord
had asked him to leave because his place was so filthy it had been impossible
to enter.
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