If You Can't Commit Yourself To A Single Addiction, How Can You Be Trusted To Commit Yourself To A Relationship?

           

            On Tuesday I felt kind of sleepy all day but I managed to stay awake until 14:00. I took a siesta for an hour and a half but still felt sleepy when I woke up. I seriously considered going back to bed, but there was stuff to do. I did some writing and then at 17:00 I got ready to take an early bike ride. I went to Broadview and Mortimer and then down Jackman. On the way home I stopped at the supermarket. Once again the original plan had been to buy coffee, but I forgot about the coffee from the start because I needed bananas, wanted grapes, bought cinnamon-raisin bread, a whole chicken for $6.10 and some yogourt. I guess I’m not very addicted to coffee. That’s like a junkie going out to get a fix and coming home with a bouquet of daffodils instead. Where is the commitment? If one can’t commit to an addiction how can one be trusted to commit to another human being?

            At the checkout I heard someone behind me call my name. It was Barbie from Hell, though I don’t think she calls herself that anymore. It’s just the only name by which I know her. She came to the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy open stage years ago, and that’s the name she gave me before she read a poem. I think she might have made it up on the spot. Anyway, we run into each other from time to time and chat for a while, as we did this time. We talked at the checkout and then continued while walking to our bikes. She still works at Canada Post but has gone from delivering mail to working in one of their stores. She said that delivering mail was damaging both physically and emotionally, but where she works now also has its problems. She said that management is tyrannical. I told her that I probably would have gotten fired pretty quickly having to deal with that kind of bullshit. I related to her that when I was nineteen I was offered a job on the loading dock of Canada Post, but that I’d decided around that time to leave Toronto to study yoga, so I didn’t take the job. She thought that was a good decision.

I asked her if she was on Facebook but she said she was more modern than that and that she was on Instagram and Twitter. I told her I was on Twitter too and she asked me for my handle but I always forget exactly how I spell it. It’s my name without the “n” on the end spelled forwards and then backwards: “christiaitsirhc”. I got her handle instead. She says that mostly she posts tweets relating to animal rights. The thing that she is recently angry about is that a lot of people that were evacuated from Fort McMurray left their pets behind, some of which either died or were injured by the fires. I assume that they were left behind though because residents were given such short notice. What does one do if one’s cat is out wandering in the bushes and one gets a notice that they have to abandon their home right away? One doesn’t stay around with one’s family as a fire is charging toward you, looking for the cat.

            She also told me that Avon still uses animals to test their cosmetics. I told her that Hitler would have had the Avon people gassed for that. She hadn’t known that Hitler was an animal lover. She argued though that one has to also have respect for people, which is true.