Thumb Prick

            On Sunday I was wiping the bathroom sink after my early morning ablutions when I pricked my thumb on a jagged peeled out section of the metal coating on the bottom of my faucet. It started bleeding right away but stopped fairly quickly and it didn’t come to my attention again until an hour and a half later when I started playing my guitar. The part of my thumb that was cut is about halfway between the part of my thumb that holds the pick and my thumbnail. Though it doesn’t hit the guitar strings when I play, the pick does spring back and hit the cut and so it’s irritating. I hope the disturbance of the wound doesn’t retard its healing so that I end up stuck perpetually with an injured thumb.

            I was feeling achy in the muscles during yoga because it was the third day of my fast.

            In the early afternoon I went out to Freshco to replenish my fruit supply. I bought four bunches of grapes, some more clementines (though they must be out of season because the ones I buy in those little crates are much less flavourful than they were a few months ago), three yellow mangoes, seven avocadoes, seven tomatoes and two jugs of orange juice. I checked out my items with the only male cashier that I tend to see there and I noticed that his screen was the same green colour as the Freshco uniforms but that the express screen next door was white. I asked him how come and he suggested that it probably meant that his monitor was older since he once had a TV that did the same thing.

            I had been defrosting the fridge with the door shut over the last couple of days but everything melts so slowly that way that it seems to cause more of a mess. When I do it the fast way the water drops directly into the tray under the freezer but in this case it went all the way down and so I had to use up several paper towels for what flooded the bottom and overflowed onto the floor. In the crisper there were lots of rotten vegetables. A couple of carrots looked like curled up giant dead black worms.

            I spent a lot of the day working on a poem that I started the night before using the freefall technique, which is a type of focused stream of consciousness. I decided to write about Parkdale and the initial writing was easy but everything didn’t work just as it fell. I had to construct all the pieces into something that made sense and I wanted to inject myself into what I’d written in a way that was something like the way Fred Wah did it in his “Waiting for Saskatchewan”, but I still hadn’t worked it all out before bedtime.