On Saturday morning I only had time to eat an energy bar and a granola
bar for breakfast, along with a few sips of coffee, before heading over to the
food bank to get in line. I was behind a young guy named Trevor, who seemed to
be friends with the tall slim guy who wears the pirate bandana. The man in the
bandana, who Trevor called Bart, was particularly expressive this week compared
to last. While before he had spoken very little, this time he was shouting at
traffic and making some very incoherent and sometimes creative comments to
people that were passing by, without fully looking at them.
At one point he called
for some person across the street to shove their self up a purple dragon and
eat their self. The purple dragon returned in another comment later on. He also
mentioned a “curtain made of pussy”. As a multi-racial group of teenagers were
passing he said, “Go home and have sex with your inadequate brother and pretend
you’re Indian and not White!” He indirectly asked someone else if they’d ever
met a Black person and then said something about broken glass melting in the
face. There were lots of other bizarre things that Bart said but I didn’t take
notes. He also spit about every minute. At first he spit out to the edge of the
sidewalk but as the morning wore on he began doing it just down in front of him
until there was a circle of mucous visible on the sidewalk.
Trevor was looking at
his phone a lot and at one point reported that a black bear had been shot by
the police in Scarborough. I looked this up later and it turns out that the
bear was near the Toronto Zoo. Mention is made that the cops looked to see if
they could get the bear tranquilized and found that they could but that Animal
Control didn’t have a cage big enough to hold the beast and so that’s why the
officers had to kill it. There is no indication that they took advantage of the
fact that the bear was near the zoo, where one assumes there are plenty of
cages and tranquilizer guns. I’m pretty sure that when the big animals were
delivered to the zoo they weren’t brought on a leash via Toronto Transit. There
is something very wrong with the excuses that the fuzz are giving for having
assassinated the poor creature.
The guy from Guyana
that I’ve chatted with a couple of times in the line-up walked by and stopped
to talk with me. He said he didn’t need the food bank this time so he was off
to buy some food.
A guy that I see every
morning from my window walking up Dunn Avenue to the Coffee Time beneath me and
then back down a while later was hanging around to wait for the free breakfast at
PARC. He almost always wears either bright yellow or red clothing and this time
he had on his yellow pants with a matching yellow baseball cap and a green
sweatshirt. There was a period a year or so ago when the donut shop ran a
little behind schedule on weekends and opened a few minutes late. As soon as it
was one second after 6:00 I would hear him loudly complaining and banging on
their door, whining, “Come on! You’re supposed to open at 6:00! Why aren’t you
open? I want my coffee!” Another time I was standing next to him at the
crosswalk and he began to complain to the red signal, “Come on light! Change!
Why won’t you change?” On this morning in front of PARC he came to briefly
linger near the food bank line-up, shouted, “I can’t go to the food bank because
I live in a room! I can’t cook!” And then he went back in front of PARC again
to wait for breakfast.
This was the weekend of
the Spring Into Parkdale street festival and so there was a lot of activity on
the sidewalks of from people involved with the event. Across the street in a
parking lot there were canopied tables set up and I noticed that Den Ciul from
Bike Pirates had a bike stand set up with a bicycle clamped to it, perhaps to
demonstrate the kind of work that’s done at the volunteer run do it yourself
bike repair shop.
When I wasn’t
distracted by the things that Bart was shouting, I continued reading the short
story, “Micromegas” by Voltaire. This is one of the very first science fiction
tales ever written and it features a gigantic man from the Sirius star system
who has thousands of senses compared to the six that we have down here on
Earth. It is pointed out that no matter how many senses we have we always have
interests beyond our capacity, which causes us to be continuously bored. Looking
down to read the story seemed to cause me a pain in the neck.
The second hand smoke wasn’t too bad for a
while, but once the line started moving and I got closer to the front, there
were people smoking under the canopy of the building over the doorway, which
seemed to collect and concentrate the fumes in that area.
Once inside I was given number 27.
At the dairy counter, Angie asked me how I
was. I told her that I was upset about all the second hand smoke that I’d had
to breathe in the line-up, but other then that I was fine. She laughed but I
don’t know if there would have been much sympathy from her since she sometimes
comes out and smokes in front of the doorway too.
This time instead of the half litre cartons of
2% milk she had one-litre bags. The meat she offered was the tube of frozen
finely ground chicken and gristle. I took it since I can’t afford to be
choosey. Lastly there was a choice between a bag of eggs and two cups of
coconut Greek yogourt. I took the yogourt since I had plenty of eggs at home.
Angie apologized that there wasn’t much this time. Then she asked if I do
sweets. I answered, “Sometimes” and so she handed me five Brookside dark
chocolate cranberry almond with blood orange flavour bars. She assured me they
were excellent.
The vegetable lady, who Angie called Sylvia,
gave me two potatoes, two green peppers, two onions and a bag of what looked
like frozen pasta, but I think it’s frozen, cut yellow beans. I guess I’ll find
out when I cook them.
From the shelves I took a box of rosemary and
olive oil Triscuits. My helper gave me four small bags of barbecue flavour
potato thins, three oats and chocolate chewy bars, three blueberry nutri-grain
bars and four single-serve packages of Hellmann’s Italian dressing. She asked
if I wanted coffee and I did so she passed me a box of the kind of pods one
puts into compatible coffee machines. I accepted it, knowing that I could just
open the pods up and still brew what was inside, but neither of us noticed that
it wasn’t coffee at all but rather rooibos chai tea in pods. It has a very
aromatic fragrance though and I’m sure I can still use them.
Their shelf that usually holds pasta sauce has
had nothing but canned tomatoes for more than a month. There have been plenty
of canned beans but no tuna for quite a while. I took the only can of baked
beans with pork in molasses sauce.
I didn’t take a carton of chicken broth this
time because I had a few at home. I was also well stocked with cereal, which
was a good thing since all they had was chocolate Batman cereal. I also
eschewed the bread this time, since I only eat bread on Wednesdays, Saturdays
and Sundays I go through it very slowly.
Although the food bank this time had a few
interesting odd items, there was not much in the way of protein or nutrition on
offer.
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