April in Toronto. Eat Your Heart Out Paris!

           

            I spent most of Sunday re-reading stories from my Short Story course. I read Donald Barthelme’s take on the fairy tale, “Bluebeard”; I read Douglas Glover’s “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”, but I copied the text from a pdf into a more manageable Word document; I read mark Newgarden’s “Loves Savage Fury” and Richard McGuire’s “Here”, neither which are really short stories; and Daniel Clowes’s “Gynaecology”, which is the story that he did before “Ghost World”. His writing is sort of pornography of hopelessness.

            My internet connection with the café across the street had been sporadic lately, so I had to depend on the donut shop beneath me, which times out about every ten or fifteen minutes, so it’s not good for overnight or any extensive time that I’m either away from the computer or involved with something else.

            It seemed weird to me that it had been snowing both on April 3 and 4, but I checked my journal and the weather was almost exactly the same last year at this time, which was also Easter weekend. A year before that, in 2014, we didn’t have another snowstorm, but it had been a heavy winter and the snow was still only slowly melting away by April 3.