Voodoo Curse

            On Wednesday I spent a lot of the day getting caught up on my journal entry for Tuesday, about my class at U of T. Since the poet we covered was El Jones, who in her book “Live From The Afrikan Resistance” is extremely political and about her Black heroes and hard core Black issues, I found it interesting when I looked up the many images of her that are available online, that if I already hadn't read her book I would have thought she was Native. I don't see any African features in her visage at all. George had mentioned that she is Afro-Metis but I wonder if she writes about her Metis or Native side. It seems to me that there's even more to be political about over there.

            In the evening I stepped out to buy a can of beer to have with dinner, and noticed that the sidewalk in front of the liquor store was empty. There was no one panhandling. That's the first time that I haven't seen a beggar or a busker there when I've passed or gone in since that store opened up on Queen several months ago. Not that I care either way. It's just interesting like suddenly the CN Tower has temporarily disappeared.

            I watched a couple of interesting episodes of “Leave It To Beaver”. In the first one, Wally, the Beaver and Eddie Haskell were going to the movies, but when June found out they were going to see a film called “Voodoo Curse” she forbade Wally to take the Beaver because she felt he was too young. Wally promised that he wouldn’t take him, but the devil in his ear, Eddie Haskell argued in front of the theatre that he technically wouldn’t be breaking his promise if the Beaver took him to the movie, so that’s what they did. Beaver though forgot his baseball cap in the theatre and when Eddie found that out he called up Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver to tell them at which theatre Beaver had left it. He seemed to do this out of deviousness because that revealed to Wally and Beaver’s parents that the kids had disobeyed them. While they were banished to their rooms Beaver took a doll, put Eddie Haskell’s name on it and stuck it with pins. The next day, Eddie was home sick from school. Beaver felt responsible, so he went to see Eddie to apologize. Eddie’s mother led Beaver to Eddie’s bedroom but as soon as his mother was gone, Eddie jumped out of bed and revealed that he was faking and that he does it all the time. Beaver confessed what he’d done with the doll and Eddie asked why he’d do a goofy thing like that. Beaver said matter of factly, “Because you got us in trouble, I don’t like you very much, even Wally doesn’t like you very much and he wouldn’t like you at all if you weren’t his best friend.” Upon hearing about the pins that Beaver had placed in the stomach of the doll, Eddie got psychosomatically sick in those areas.

            The other episode involved a general intelligence test for the whole school of which Beaver got the highest mark. It was determined that Beaver was a genius and so he’d have to go to a special school. It turned out that a new kid had switched his test with Beaver’s because he noticed that everybody liked Beaver but nobody liked him because he was a genius. He thought people would like him more if nobody thought he was smart.

            I remember we had one of those tests in Grade Six and afterward they moved me to a smarter class, even though my grades for most things besides English were still below average.