Six Months to Live

            My cold continued to make me miserable on Tuesday morning. When I coughed during yoga it sounded like an old car trying to start in the wintertime. Maybe the worst is over though since I made it through song practice and then memorized some French lyrics with burning out my brain. I even worked a bit on a poem. Lately I’ve had to go back to bed by 9:30, but I had to go out and get the money for the rent. I slowly got dressed and headed down to King and Dufferin. It was raining slightly but not as bad as it would later on in the day.

            The Bank of Montreal at King and Dufferin has three male tellers in their twenties who all look like they call each other “Dude!” The guy that seems to be the head teller has black, spiky hair. There was a customer being served by another teller, but the spiky guy came up to say hello to him. Then he glanced at his colleague’s computer screen to see what kind of transaction was being made and he said to him, “That’s what I like to see!”

            When I asked for $650.00, I was waiting for my teller to ask me, as they usually do, how I wanted the cash, but he started giving it to me all in fifties, so had to tell him that I wanted five one-hundred dollar bills, the rest in twenties, but with one twenty broken up into a ten, a five, two toonies and a loonie. He had to count out the money and put it back, then he reprogrammed the cash counting machine to give what I’d asked for. He asked me if I’d had a nice New Year and I answered that I’d been sick. He asked if I’d taken any Buckley’s or any medications but I told him that I didn’t take anything.

            When I got home I went to bed for a couple of hours.

            Later that afternoon I printed some financial information from both my bank and student accounts because the next morning I had an appointment with my social worker.

            I shaved and showered and felt a little better for that.

            Sundar knocked very weakly on my door, so brought him the envelope with my rent. He started telling me while struggling with his breath that he was sick and so I returned that I was sick as well. He said that the doctors give him medications but it doesn’t help. I told him that I don’t take anything, but just sleep a lot. He was talking in a such a low and weak voice that it was sometimes difficult to understand him. He’d said something about “six months” and so I asked him if he meant he was leaving the country in six months. He shocked me by clarifying that he thought he only had about six months to live. It looks like he won the sick-off. He said the doctors don’t say anything about it but he could feel it. I urged him not to give up so easily.

            He lamented that he doesn’t have any friends nearby where he’s living at the West Lodge Apartments like he had when he lived here. All he has, he said, is 911.

            I went back to bed for a while and got up again at 20:00.

            For dinner I heated up the rest of the udon soup that I’d made the night before. The rest though only amounted to about a third of a bowl so I opened a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. It’s amazing how tasteless Campbell’s chicken noodle soup is compared to udon noodle soup with kimchi.

            I watched three episodes of the new season of South Park. The first story covers a lot of ground. It starts with the prelude to a South Park Elementary girl’s volleyball game in which the girls have decided to sit down during the playing of the national anthem to protest their harassment by an internet troll named “Skankhunt42” whose real identity, it is obvious to everyone, is Eric Cartman. But because of all the protests being made during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, Congress decided that the problem lies in the anthem itself. They decide that the US anthem needs a reboot and what better person could they ask to fix the song but the man that saved Star Wars. They ask J. J. Abrams to reboot the National Anthem. Meanwhile the US election contest is in full swing and the battle, as usual is between a democratic turd sandwich and a republican giant douche. Mr Garrison is the giant douche, along with his running mate, Caitlin Jenner. Garrison suddenly realizes that he is probably going to win the election but also realizes he has no idea how to be a president and so he decides to try to sabotage the election, but no matter what he says or does, it just makes his supporters love him even more. In the end, though everyone is still certain that “Skankhunt42” is Eric Cartman, the viewer finds out that it’s really Kyle Brovlofsky’s father.

            The second episode humorously equates Twitter activity with life itself. As Gerald Brovlofsky, fuelled by the attention that “Skankhunt42” is getting in the news, expands his trolling attacks on women and girls. One of the victims, an elementary student from South Park named Heidi Turner is seen walking to the middle of a very high bridge. She hesitates, then our view goes to the sky and we hear a splash. The next day South Park Elementary is full of police officers and weeping girls. When the boys arrive they learn that the girl on the bridge had cancelled her Twitter account. Another student goes to the school counsellor several times to be talked down from the crisis of considering going off Twitter with arguments such as, “How do you think your parents would feel if you went off Twitter?” Meanwhile, still certain that Eric Cartman is “Skankhunt42”, the boys, fearing repercussions against their gender by the girls, decide to take matters into their own hands. They lure Cartman to the woods and then surrounding him with various weapons, proceed to destroy all of his internet tools: his phone, his laptop, etcetera. Of course they find out the next day that “Skankhunt42” is still active, that for once, Eric is innocent and that they have effectively ruined his life.

            In the third episode, as Cartman is wandering around lost without social media he meets Heidi Turner, who seems to be like a ghost at the school, even though she’s very much alive and all she did was go off Twitter. She takes Eric to a park where he begins to experience life beyond Twitter. Garrison, in continuing to try to sabotage his own bid for the presidency enters into his first debate with the turd sandwich. He urges everyone to vote for her because she is more qualified and has more experience but since she has been instructed by her handlers to simply deny anything he says, she simply asserts that his endorsement of her cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, Gerald Brovlofsky learns that his trolling as “Skankhunt42” of a Danish former Olympian and breast cancer survivor has caused her to commit suicide. He tries to destroy all of his internet tracks and throws his hardware in the river, but someone seems to know. Eric is having intimate conversations with Heidi. He asks her if vaginas have balls. She tells him that they don’t. He’s confused and wonders how girls scratch their balls then. He wants to know what girls have at the bottom of their vaginas. The episode ends with Heidi asking, “Would you like me to show you?”