Monster in the Sewer

            I went to bed just after midnight on Friday, and though I am usually able to go right to sleep, I found myself still conscious an hour later. I decided to get up and take a shower, since I was still greasy from working on my bike for five hours at Bike Pirates and I did have to work at OCADU that morning and also because I also that I’d feel sleepy after getting cleaned and sprayed by hot water. It didn’t help me sleep but it was a good use of the time I would have spent lying awake anyway. I think I finally drifted off at around 3:00, but I was pretty sleepy when it was time to get up.

            Shortly after beginning my yoga floor poses, I became very dizzy. I didn’t know what had brought it on but though the room wasn’t spinning it was making steady quarter turns and I also felt a little queasy. The only thing that helped was just to push ahead with my exercises, which helped me to notice slightly less that I was experiencing vertigo.

The feeling seemed to ease off during song practice, which I had to cut short to get ready for work. I was about ten minutes late getting out the door and my trip downtown was the first long-range test of the replacement bike. It took a while to figure out how to figure out the gears and it was also clear that the seat was not high enough. Along Dundas everybody including women were passing me. I felt like a child on a little bike.

I usually get to work at least fifteen minutes early, but this time I was only a minute early by the time the elevator arrived. I skipped signing in because I didn’t want to be late. I walked into room 615 and saw Bob Berger just inside the door. I reached out my arm to put my hand halfway to his shoulder and he tentatively raised both arms like he was about to give me a hug. He stopped and informed me that I wasn’t working for him that day. I checked my backpack for my appointment book and realized that it was still at home on my couch. He suggested that I might be next door in 617 with Nick Aoki and it was starting to ring a bell that that was my booking. I went over there and Bob came with me to see if the error was on his side. When I saw Nick I remembered that he was definitely the one I was supposed to be working for. I thanked Bob and he left then I started getting ready. Nick told me there was plenty of time because he’d be showing some slides.

I had brought my laptop along because I wanted to work on my Canadian Poetry essay, but the machine didn’t boot up. It just showed an index of various booting options or that of restarting. I tried several times but concluded that Windows XP had crashed.

During the coffee break I went to sleep for fifteen minutes and that kept me awake for the rest of the class.

In the first half of the class Nick had his students create a black pigment out of several other colours and then paint me in monochrome. In the second half he showed more slides to instruct them in doing the same thing in colour. During that time I went to the washroom to unleash a monster. It made me wonder if it had a connection to the dizziness I’d experienced earlier. If so, what terror and havoc is it wreaking in the sewers of Toronto as I write about it now?

My first plan after work was to swing by Modcom at College and Spadina to inquire about my laptop, but as soon as I started riding my bike and used the brakes at the Dundas lights, my back tire seized. I decided to go down to the Urbane Cyclist at the top of John Street. I was able to get my bike rolling sometimes but then it would freeze again, so most of the way I walked while lifting my back wheel. I discovered that Urbane was no longer there anymore. I discovered that once the back brakes were unlocked I could ride and just use my front brakes. I was looking for a bike shop as I rode west, but stopped to take some money from the Bank of Montreal between Spadina and Bathurst. Just a few doors west of the BMO was Duke’s Cycle. I told the guy behind the front desk my problem. He had a look and told me that one of my problems was that I had my bike chain wrapped around my crossbar along which was running my brake cable, but there were also adjustments to be made on my brakes. He noticed also that one of my brake arms was missing a screw that is part of the brake arm, so I needed a new brake arm. He asked the bored looking mechanic at the back how much it would cost to fix a bake and he said fifteen or twenty dollars. I asked if there was a discount for poor people. The reception guy made a few quick adjustments and charged me five dollars.

With my bike rolling again I headed up Bathurst, stopping twice to heighten my seat, and then east on College, stopping one more time until I felt like it was the proper height for me, which is pretty high and just a little past the safety mark. I went to Modcom and showed my laptop to the guy that had sold it to me. He said the internal battery was dead. That would cost about $65.00 but he immediately advised me to just get another refurbished laptop for $150.00. I had walked in there ready to be convinced of that anyway because I had not been satisfied with my first laptop from the beginning. It had required an adaptor in order to go online and even then it was problematic in that regard. It ran on Windows XP, which is obsolete. The rechargeable battery had died permanently two months after I’d bought the computer and besides all that the thing was very slow in general. He offered me a newer, faster IBM ThinkPad for $150 plus tax. I made sure that the wifi worked without an adaptor this time and I bought it.

I rode towards home, finding the new old bike to be much slower than my old old one. I stopped at Freshco where I bought clementines, grapes, apples, a boneless pork sirloin half, some old cheddar, yogourt, cereal and canned peaches.

I slept for about two and a half hours, then I prepared the pork sirloin by rubbing it with a combination of olive oil, paprika, salt, rosemary, sage and quite a bit of Mrs. Dash herb and garlic seasoning blend. I use an oven pan to roast meats but I place a barbecue rack on top of that so the pan catches the drippings. This time though I put two cups of water in the bottom of the pan and it worked out great. I think I will do that from now on because otherwise the grease just dries up at the bottom and there’s nothing for gravy.

I watched the last three quarters of Rod Serling’s Emmy award winning corporate television play from 1955, “Patterns”. I found it kind of boring. A young executive with the rare combination of drive, vision and conscience gets hired by a corporation run by a ruthless man who cares nothing about the people that work for him other than what they can do for the company. The vice president is a good man past his prime who has run out of ideas. The younger man hits it off with the vice president on a human level and works well with him in generating ideas but the president is a bully toward the vice president and since he cannot fire him he treats him brutally in hopes that he’ll retire. The young man discovers that the president’s plan all along was to have him take over as vice president. He protests because the old man has become his friend and when the vice president hears of this he has a heart attack and dies. The young man and the president lock horns and the young executive warns him that if he stays he will fight him every step of the way. The president tells him that is what he wants because the company is more important than he is. The play ends with their agreement to have the right to sock each other in the jaw if the need arises. From what I’ve recently read about Rod Serling, he was very much like the fiery young executive in this play. He apparently had so much trouble with higher ups censoring the scripts he submitted that he finally started his own show so he would have control. That’s how the Twilight Zone came into being.