Stars Rarely Get Discovered Anymore

            For lunch I decided to thaw out the sausage that I’d gotten at the food bank. I put it into the oven until I could slice it, but it didn’t slice like any sausage that I’d encountered before. It seemed loose like ground meat but it was still partially frozen enough to make a few fragile slices. I put one of them back in the oven and turned up the heat. After fifteen minutes I was eating it and realized that this had been raw meat before I’d started cooking it. There were still raw parts in the center of the slice and so I put it back in the oven for a few more minutes. It was tasty and well-spiced meat but I could have used some warning about it having been raw.

            As I began my bike ride the sky was mostly overcast and a lot cooler than the day before but I was still comfortable in my summer clothes once I got moving. I passed every cyclist until Broadview and Danforth where a couple of guys that were ahead in the queue stayed ahead for a while after the light changed. I eventually managed to pass one of them but the other couldn’t be caught.

            I rode to Birchmount and Sadler and rode it the two blocks until it turned into Marta and curved north. I decided to just turn around and take Sadler back to Birchmount because Zenith, the next street north would take quite a bit longer to explore and I could save it for a day when I wouldn’t have to stop at the supermarket. I went down Birchmount to Danforth Rd and took that to Danforth Avenue. Westbound at that hour I find that sometimes I don’t see another cyclist until I’m back in Greektown.

            I stopped at Freshco and got some more grapes and peaches. Most of the hard peaches that I’d bought a few days ago went rotten because I miscalculated how long it would take for them to ripen. I noticed that they had Ontario pears, so the apples can’t be far behind.

            I pressed the spicy “sausage” into burgers and made sure they were cooked properly this time now that I knew they were raw. I had one for dinner while watching an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. One of the regular pictured characters in the opening credits, though he rarely plays a major role in the story and sometimes doesn’t appear at all, is Deputy Mayor of New York, Barry Lawrence. He’s presented as a relatively honest politician who also happens to be an asshole. He and Mike Hammer share a strong dislike for one another. In this story Lawrence is running for district attorney and one night he receives a call at campaign headquarters from his hot but unstable girlfriend, Tracy, demanding that he come to her right away or she would tell his wife about their affair. He leaves campaign headquarters and next we see Tracy backing away from someone just before she is killed. Tracy’s parents come to Hammer and ask him to prove that Barry Lawrence killed Tracy. Hammer says they don’t have to worry about money on this case because he would pay them to put Lawrence away. While investigating Tracy’s apartment Hammer found one fake fingernail. He checked to see if Tracy was missing any nails but she wasn’t. He found out that the nail belonged to Lawrence’s campaign manager of fifteen years, Lucille. She had been worried that Tracy would ruin all of her work as she built Hamilton up from deputy mayor to district attorney to mayor and beyond and so she’d killed her.

            Tracy was played by Alexandra Bokyun Chun and Lucille was played by Karen Moncrieff. Both of them are also writers and directors. This is something interesting that I’ve noticed from looking up the supporting actors in this 1997 series and comparing them to those from 50s shows. In the 50s and before, supporting actors were usually just actors, whereas now a lot of them are doing everything. Most actors now go into the business with a degree while in the 50s people were discovered. Really, it doesn’t seem that the acting graduates are any better at acting than the ones that were just plucked off the street or from a drug store like Lana Turner was while she was skipping her high school typing class. People that worked in theatre for a long time and then got into television and movies tend to be better actors than those with drama school experience.

I'll Have What He's Having

            Wednesday marked five years since I’ve paid for the internet. I figure I’ve saved at least $2,500 in that time. Well, I didn’t save it as in accumulate it but it amounts to at least an extra $40 a month for groceries. I’m lucky that I live within catching range of so much free wi-fi.

            For a long time the forecast for today was rain and even in the morning it was still predicted for the time of my bike ride, so I was looking forward to a holiday. But in the late morning the forecast pushed the rain to sundown and then by the afternoon there was little chance of it happening until Sunday. I was disappointed, but when I stumbled past the mirror with my shirt off after getting up from my siesta I could see that I needed the exercise.

            Some of those bicycles that have been converted into e-bikes can really clip along. They seem faster than the regular e-bikes that are made to look like little motorcycles.

            I stopped to use the washroom at the Firkin at Woodbine and Danforth and afterwards was unlocking my bike while looking at the interesting cloud textures in the west. There was a background of grey clouds in the sun with smaller, darker clouds beneath them and traveling quickly south while one bent cigar-shaped vertical white cloud stood out by itself in front of them all. A car drove my and a middle-aged drunk passenger with a cigarette leaned out, telling me to smile and have a beautiful day.

            I rode from Danforth Avenue north on Birchmount to Danforth Road and followed that east to Kennedy and exploring all its southern side streets along the way. I wonder if people started calling Danforth Avenue “The Danforth” to distinguish it from Danforth Rd, as it being the main Danforth.

            On my way back at Avenue Road a guy driving a Bike Share velo went through a red and dodged pedestrians that were crossing. I wonder what happens if renters have an accident. They only say to report it to both Bike Share and the police. I assume they’ll make you pay for the repairs.

            I went down St George to Queen and headed home. On the way I put my hand on my right pocket and didn’t feel my phone there. I was sure I’d put it there before leaving and that I had felt the bulge while riding. The only way I could have lost it is if the motion of pedaling had caused the phone to wiggle its way out of my pocket, but that seemed strange considering that I’d been riding with it all summer and my phone was never once raised even by a millimeter in my pocket. I was hoping I would find it when I got home but I was doubtful and began reluctantly making plans to buy a new Motorola. When I got home the phone was there in the living room.

            I walked over to the liquor store to get a can of Creemore.

            I watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. This story begins with Erin, an old friend of Hammer coming to see him about the death six months earlier of her boss, Simon, who was also a friend of Hammer’s. Simon had reportedly been killed in a lion attack along with the rest of his safari (It’s hard to sympathize there), but Erin thinks he was murdered. Hammer says he’ll look into it. That night he goes home and gets into bed in the dark but then he realizes someone is in bed with him. He grabs his gun and warns the person not to move and then the intruder says, “It’s me, Simon!” Simon proceeds to tell the story about the safari. His hunting party was all taken out by a sharp shooting assassin but Simon’s bullet went through his coat and was stopped by his flask. Simon played dead while the assassin was killed by a lion. Hammer arranges for Simon to stay hiding while he investigates the people running Simon’s business in California. Hammer’s assistants Velda and Nick take shifts babysitting Simon but when Simon meets Velda he is shocked because she looks exactly like his now deceased girlfriend Maria, for him he’d left his wife Connie. Simon and Connie had never divorced and so she had inherited all of Simon’s assets. When Hammer arrives he sees that Connie has a boyfriend that is helping her run things. Hammer figures that Connie arranged for Simon’s death but he can’t prove it. He arranges for Simon and Maria to appear before her in order to shock her into confessing.

            The character Erin is played by Deborah Lacey and she is the first Black person to have a major role on this series. She played the mother of Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine and the maid Carla on Mad Men.

           

Scarbitecture

            On Tuesday during song practice my E string broke, so I spent at least ten minutes replacing it. I more than made up the time though by just singing one verse and one chorus of most of the songs.

I worked on editing my book, “Paranoiac Utopia”. I removed one poem altogether, took out most of another and reworked a few more. Some years ago I thought this book was finished but now parts of a lot of the poems seem lame to me.

            I took a siesta in the early afternoon and woke up an hour and a half later feeling very hot. It was a hot day but this felt like I’d left the oven on and I could smell burnt air. I got up and found that I'd left the kettle on the stove since before I'd gone to bed. It doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s scary.

            When I took my bike ride that same smell and that same sensation of being near a hot stove often came to me in certain areas that I rode through. When I smelled food cooking I felt like I was standing over the pot.

            Just south of the railroad bridge on Brock Avenue there was a boot in the middle of the road. On the other side of the bridge and about a block north there was a running shoe also in the center.

            On the Bloor bike lane going through Koreatown there were about seven cyclists in a row in front of me. I called out to the first one that I was passing on his left but he had buds in his ears and probably couldn’t hear me. I said it a couple more times and then just swerved out onto Bloor Street and rode until I was past the line of bikes.

            I stopped to use the washroom at Woodbine, splashed some cold water on my sweaty face and continued on.

            On Birchmount just north of Raleigh I stopped to take pictures of an industrial building with curved corners that looked like it might have been built in the early 60s. I’ve noticed a few similar buildings in Scarborough with kind of an art deco feel. I turned right on Parnell, which is another industrial street. Running south off Parnell is Jeavons where I found another interesting building that houses an envelope company. The structure is shaped like a wedge that is narrow at the entrance and then widens gradually to the back. I went back up to Parnell and continued east a block to where it ends at Edgely, then pedaled back down to Raleigh, across to Birchmount and south.

            Lost in thought, I overshot Danforth by a few meters and had to walk back across the street to head homeward. In Greektown another cyclist passed me fairly quickly. I came up behind him at the Broadview light and I left a space the length of a bike between my bike and his. Then a guy wearing a fat Foodora backpack parked his fat mountain bike in the space that I’d left. When the light changed he shot ahead of the guy that I’d stopped behind. For some reason they both slowed down at around Castle Frank and I passed them. Some riders are sprinters that get tuckered out in the long ride.

            I stopped at Freshco because I’d run out of fruit sooner than I expected. I had just been there on Monday but I thought that I had enough.

            When I got home there was a message from Nick Cushing asking me if Bike Pirates sells road bike fenders. I knew they had them second had but I since they were still open I thought I’d pop down there anyway to find out if they have new ones but I found out they only have used. On my way home I ran into my upstairs neighbour David, who was wearing a Ghostbusters t-shirt. He told me he’d knocked on my door earlier because he wanted to give me some food. He came later to bring me a long meatball sandwich and a can of Labatt’s Blue. I asked about that camera battery he hadn’t given back to me yet and he said he’d give it to me. I followed him to his place and got it. I thanked him again for the sandwich, we bumped fists and then he exclaimed, “I'm boiling!" It still was pretty hot even though it was sunset.

            I watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. The story begins with a masked burglar with a limp with high tech equipment stealing a new microprocessor from a software developer. When the security guard catches him he stabs him. Meanwhile, a former burglar named Herman whom Hammer had put away twice is treating Hammer to dinner because he is now a successful computer expert as a result of courses that he took while in prison and he says he owes it all to Hammer. The next day, Herman is arrested for the theft and the stabbing but Hammer steps up as Herman’s alibi because they were together at the time of the burglary. The security footage though shows that the thief has a limp exactly like Herman’s. An attractive insurance investigator named Toby, who is working for the software company insists that Herman is guilty and bets her body against Hammer's hat that she will prove it. Hammer discovers that Herman had been in prison with another burglar named Frank who was also a talented mimic. Frank turns up dead. Toby is also killed and in the end Hammer discovers that while Herman did not perform the burglary of the software company, he had been behind it and was in possession of the chip. The problem was though that the microprocessor was useless. The software company had hyped it as the next big thing and had hired Herman to steal it from them because its return would send their stock through the roof, then they would cash in by selling. Hammer leaves his hat on Toby’s grave.

Robyn Peterson

            I hoped that on Monday when I went online my gmail problem would have gotten resolved, but there was still just a blank page. Later that morning I was just unsuccessfully trying to find one of the forums where I’d posted my problem when I clicked on the gmail icon and everything came back. I have no idea whether reporting the problem did any good or not since I received no notice, but the important thing was that I had it back. Google recently made changes to the gmail format and perhaps that caused glitches.

            I got my first modeling bookings lined up for the fall semester at OCADU. One in October and two in November, but I’m sure there will be more.

            At 17:00 I ventured out to tentatively take a long bike ride, but there were lots of puddles and I figured there might be lots more out in Scarborough and I didn’t fancy driving through them. Besides, it's hard to avoid glass when it's covered by dirty water. I've gotten flats from going through puddles before. I decided to just ride up to Bloor, across to Dovercourt, down to Queen and then to stop at Freshco on the way home.

            After locking my bike, as I walked towards the store I stepped aside and gestured with my right hand to let a cute little, maybe 40ish blonde woman in glasses pass. We seemed to have a moment as we smiled and our eyes met.

            I didn’t buy any fruit but just some yogourt and ice tea. I still have plenty of fruit right now and besides, it seems the BC cherry season has passed.

            I edited some poems in my book and I’m considering taking some or pieces of them out.

            I watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. At least the 1950s Mike Hammer series had a variety of crimes for Hammer to solve other than murder. This story begins with two actors that hate each other, Linda and Calvin, who have also been married several times, fighting during the rehearsal for a play called “Countdown”. That night while Calvin is lying in bed he is bludgeoned to death with a heavy object. Later, Linda and Hammer are getting ready to have sex in Hammer’s apartment when the police knock on the door and arrest Linda because her fingerprints have been found all over the murder weapon, which is the base of an acting award. Linda is released on a bond so she can continue the play but then the fund raiser for the play is murdered and found in Linda’s dressing room closet and so she is put back in jail. Hammer discovers that both Linda and Calvin had won the same award but then the plaque with her name on it had been removed from hers and put on the murder weapon. It turns out that the producer killed Calvin because he wanted the play to flop so he would make more money that way.

            Linda was played by Robyn Peterson, who started out as a Vogue model in the 70s and a decade ago wrote and performed a one-woman show about her experiences called “Catwalk Confidential”. I'm sure she's had an interesting life and that there’s plenty write about in the fashion industry but I watched a clip of her show and both the writing and acting were pretty bad.

Abstraction

            I spent a lot of Sunday writing about my Saturday food bank adventure.

            The coffee shop downstairs has changed their password three times this weekend, but the only thing they change is to make the first letter a capital and then to switch it back later to small case, etc. 

            It was quite warm and very humid when I took my bike ride in the late afternoon. For a Sunday there were a considerable amount of cyclists heading east. I rode up Birchmount and headed northeast along Raleigh to Kennedy. It was a pretty simple ride since Raleigh is mostly an industrial avenue just north of the railroad tracks and there are no southern side streets to explore. Kennedy goes over the end of Raleigh on a bridge and so I had to weave around and then go up a ramp to head south.

When I got home my gmail wouldn’t work. There was no error message and I was able to access everything else under my Google account, such as my blog, and so it obviously wasn’t a password issue. I submitted my problem to a few forums and maybe officially complained to Google, as far as they read those things. It hadn't resolved itself by the end of the night.

I watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. As usual, the story begins with a murder that Hammer has to solve. This murder was of an acclaimed abstract expressionist painter who also happened to be the lover of Hammer’s secretary, Velda. There was a lot of making fun of abstract art, and the director made sure that the art displayed in this story was pretty bad. It seemed like kind of a dick move to present the genre according to the stereotype of it being something anyone can do, when there is some powerful abstract expressionist artwork out there. It turned out that the owner of the gallery that sold the painters works had killed the artist to drive up the prices.

Public Urination

            Just like the Saturday before, my place in the food bank line was behind the African woman with the snow-white cart that was lined with the Christmas bag. The next person after me was the angry guy with the prematurely grey hair, who slapped down his blue gym bag on the sidewalk behind me and then stormed away. The line was already longer than usual, as we were just west of the steps of 1501 Queen. Brenda and Tammy were sitting on the steps and Angie came out from downstairs to show them some photos of her sons and grandchildren. She said she’d been married for six years, long enough to have two kids, but he was very quiet and she was very loud and it just didn’t work out.

            I was about to start reading my book when Moe walked by, said hi and continued on. I felt the urge to pee and so I went downstairs to the washroom. When I came back Moe was chatting near the entrance with a guy in sunglasses who looks like P. Diddy and whom I’ve seen many times at the food bank line-up. I walked over to them and Moe was talking about his plan to go backpacking in South America after his eye surgery is finished. I suggested that he wouldn’t be going to Venezuela but he wondered why not. He said it’s right next to his home country of Guyana. I said, “It’s pretty rough down there right now” but he responded by advising me not to believe the media. He said the US has its own reasons for painting Venezuela in a negative light. He said it’s safe as long as you keep your eyes open, mind your own business and don't act like you're from a different class. He said he would first go home to Guyana and travel from there with a bodyguard and a gun. He said you’re allowed to carry guns down there. According to my research, this isn't true for most countries in Latin America and especially not in Venezuela. No citizens are legally allowed to own guns now in Venezuela. Even if his bodyguard has a gun permit in Guyana he’d have a hard time bringing it anywhere else in South America. I think you need a work permit to get a gun permit in most places. Moe said he was in Venezuela in 2008 and I think he mentioned knowing people there. From what I’ve read, in addition to needing to be extremely aware of one’s surroundings the most important thing for someone visiting Venezuela is to know someone there because it’s absolutely essential to have a native to exchange money on the black market for you. It’s considered to be a great travel experience but more for seasoned adventurers than for tourists.

            I asked Moe if he’d ever been to Peru and he answered no, but he’s had a couple of Peruvian girlfriends. He said that Peruvians are the best counterfeiters in the world. This is apparently true. Sometimes entire neighbourhoods are supported by some sort of counterfeiting industry, whether of money, driver’s licenses, passports or university diplomas.

            I told him that when I lived in Parkdale in the late 80s there was a Canadian born woman named Judy across the hall from me who’d just come back from living several years in Peru. She’d been in a common-law marriage with a Peruvian man who was both a general and a judge and had two children with him. When she left him she brought her 14-year-old daughter, Mia, to Canada. She told me the story about Mia having been kidnapped and held for ransom by a Peruvian gang but that the police had caught the crooks and saved her daughter. Instead of trying the kidnappers in a court of law, the police asked Judy for the appropriate punishment. She told them to take them over the jungle in a helicopter and to push them out, so that’s what they did.

            The guy that looks like P. Diddy said that he is looking into applying for, unless I didn’t hear him correctly, an IMF grant so he can open a studio, though I didn’t think to ask what kind of studio he has in mind. If he really thinks he can apply for an International Monetary Fund grant he’s the victim of a scam, since the IMF doesn’t give grants to people, but only to countries. Maybe he said “CMF”, which is the Canadian Media Fund. Moe said he might have a problem getting a grant if he has a criminal record. The guy said he got into trouble when he was younger but when he asked the police recently to call up his criminal record they couldn’t find anything.

            Just then, a skinny and disheveled old man whom I see every Saturday wandering around zombielike as he waits for PARC to open, walked to the far left corner of the slightly set-in sheltered area on each side of and above the entrance to the food bank, unzipped his fly and started urinating. While the stream of piss flowed into the crack between sidewalk tiles, traveled west and then ran north towards us like a precise irrigation canal, the guy that looks like P. Diddy walked over and gave the old man a kick in the behind. He began to chastise him about children being around and why didn’t he just go downstairs to use the washroom. The old man zipped up and calmly admitted, "I should've done that." As the elderly man was walking away, Moe asked him, “You want something from me too?" I suggested that he doesn't know any better. "Moe said, "Well, at least he won't do it around us any more!” I said that I doubted that would have any impact on him. I argued, “He’s an old man. If he’s doing that kind of thing at his age he’s probably done it a hundred times, with similar reactions. I doubt very much if you taught him any kind of lesson here.” The guy that had kicked him nodded, it seemed in agreement.

            I don’t know why he implied that what they old man had done was particularly wrong because children might see. The idea that children should be sheltered from seeing someone urinate on the street reflects something sicker about our society than does an old man taking a piss in a public place. We don’t seem to mind our kids seeing squirrels squashed on the road but a carelessly exposed penis is something that they should never behold? We have warped priorities.

            It was after 10:30 and so I decided that I’d better take my place in line, though Marlena hadn’t let anybody in yet.

            I started reading my book but I heard someone call out, “Christian! What are you doin here?” It was Dennis, one of the keyholding volunteers at Bike Pirates. I told him I was there for the food bank and I guessed that he was there for the Tool Library. He said he was almost late for work and I was surprised. “You’re not going to Bike Pirates today?” He explained that he’d gotten a job through another volunteer at Bike Pirates. He said, “I got hired by the Kensington Market Business Association to walk around with a broom and a bag and sweep up garbage!” Then he came up close to tell me, “And they’re paying me $17 an hour to do it!”
            Dennis left his Norco bike with the trailer on the back leaning against a pole and didn’t bother to lock it when he went downstairs to the Tool Library. When he came back five minutes later and was putting the netting back over his trailer, I commented that it sounds like a pleasant job, to just walk around Kensington Market on a Saturday. He responded in almost a whisper, “I check out the ladies!” I don’t know why he lowered his voice at that point as if it was politically incorrect to be attracted to women. Dennis pedaled east for the Market.

            I returned to my book but then a guy from the back of the line came up to me and asked what I was reading. The first time that I’d spoken with him was a few weeks ago and he'd approached me then to ask the exact same question. I showed him the cover and then specified that I was reading Flaubert. He responded with, “Ooh la la!” Then he declared, “I don’t know why I'm here!" "You don't know why you're here?" "Maybe it's because I'm drunk!" He went on to explain that his freezer recently became packed with steaks and salmon that somebody gave him and so he shared, “I don’t really need anything from the food bank, except for maybe some onions." He decided to leave.

            I managed to read a page of the story, “St Julian the Hospitaler”. After Julian ran away from home out of fear of fulfilling the prophecy that he would kill his parents, he joined a band of Christian mercenaries and soon became the general of his own army that wandered the world defeating evildoers and the enemies of Christianity, including Troglodytes. He was always cautious though never to kill someone without first seeing his face for fear of accidentally slaying his father.

            Whenever the line moved and I stepped forward the bitter guy behind me would get up long enough to kick his gym bag forward, often hard enough that it would hit me, and then he would sit down again.

            It was after 11:00 by the time I got downstairs.

            This time I remembered to return the Atkins peanut butter-chocolate bars, sweetened with sucralose, that I’d forgotten to bring back over the last two weeks. The best before date is for the end of November of this year, so there was no reason for them not to give them to someone else. Unless of course one takes into consideration that sucralose was discovered accidentally by scientists that were employed by the military to develop chemical weapons.

            There was even less stuff on the shelves this time than last week. The top shelf had some Nabob coffee pods and a fancy box of chamomile tea, but I didn’t need any coffee badly enough to break open pods to get at it and I have enough tea.

            The only granola bar type snacks were more Atkins bars of different varieties. There was also no cereal and no tuna.

            I took a bag of chipotle wheat and potato chips.

            On one shelf there was a wide variety of spices in those little jars that tend to fit onto spice racks. My volunteer made sure to let me know that she had lined up along the front of the shelf every type of spice they had, so I didn’t need to dig around behind to see if there was anything else. I've got a pretty complete collection of spices at home but I ran out of black pepper a few weeks ago, so I looked for that but found none. The only spice they had that I didn’t were spearmint leaves, so I took a jar of those.

            As usual I took a can of chickpeas and as usual I didn’t take any pasta or rice.

            The final item I got from the shelves was a 355 ml bottle of honey water with lemon.

            Angie seemed surprised that I didn’t want milk, although I've been turning down the 2% for several weeks now. I explained that I was trying to watch my weight. She said, “You're watchin your figure eh?" and gave me four extra small containers of fruit bottom yogourt. Angie was about to offer me a choice between two flavours of sausage when she suddenly realized she’d forgotten that she'd been in the middle of serving someone else. Dana said that I could finish but I insisted that she and Angie finish their business. Then Angie asked, “Now, where were we?" I told her she was about to give me some spicy sausage. It was a sizable hunk of sausage that was as wide as bologna. She also gave me three extra eggs because I hadn't taken any milk.

            Sylvia offered me a bag of potatoes but I still have lots. She gave me two fistfuls of plum tomatoes, a cantaloupe, a dark red delicious apple, two cucumbers, a 680 gram bag of sugar snap peas and a small bag of what looked like frozen hand chopped squash.

            There was no one minding the bread section this time and Lana wasn’t there. Neither was the young woman she'd had the argument with last time. There wasn’t much of a selection this time, as all of the loaves were white, crusty and boring. I found a bag of apple-cinnamon breakfast buns though and left.

            There were still about twenty people in the line-up when I unlocked my bike and headed home.

            After putting my food away I rode down to No Frills where I bought two baskets of nectarines and a bag of cherries. I remembered to buy peppercorns and I got some milk and a few other items.

            For lunch I heated up the fettuccini alfredo with chicken that my upstairs neighbour David had given me on Friday.

            I didn’t take a bike ride that afternoon because it had rained and there was a good chance of it raining some more. I went out to the liquor store that evening to buy two cans of Creemore. On my way home, at the corner of Dunn and Queen I met Barrie Carleton, who was on his way to buy beer too.

            I made eggs and toast for dinner but when I tried to play an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye but the video only appeared as about the size of a CD case on my screen. I did a search of the problem and someone had offered the solution to someone else to delete preferences in VLC so I did that. It still didn’t work but after I restarted it did, so I don’t know if it was the restart alone that did the trick of if it was the deleting of preferences plus the restart. I had the day before made adjustments in VLC in order to flip a video, so maybe that messed with my set-up.

            The Mike Hammer story had a detective story writer hire Mike Hammer to help him solve the murder in his unfinished novel. While Hammer was working on it the writer was murdered. Hammer figures that the writer had really wanted Hammer to prevent his own murder. The suspects are the writer’s publisher, his agent and his wife.

There’s a stupid scene where Hammer’s assistant Nick is investigating a book warehouse and all of the books are in boxes far larger than one would use for packing books because books are heavy. These boxes would fit a clothes dryer and so full of books they’d weight at least 100 kilos. A guy with a forklift was chasing Nick through the warehouse and knocking over stacks of these boxes like they were empty, which they probably were.

Halfway through I figured out that the writer’s wife had been the real writer of his successful novels.  She was also his killer.

             

           

Bobbie Brown

            I couldn’t have coffee or breakfast on Friday morning because I had an appointment at 9:15 for my annual check-up and I needed to fast for twelve hours before going for the blood work and giving the urine sample to the lab down the street afterwards. I’d been feeling kind of groggy during song practice and while working out the chords to a new song and so I took a shower before getting ready to go. That really freshened me up and put me in a good mood while riding to Bathurst and Bloor.

            The waiting room was empty of patients when I got there and the receptionist still hadn’t logged on yet. She told me that Dr. Shechtman had an emergency and had to cancel all of his appointments. She said they’d tried to call me but I hadn’t answered. I saw later that they’d called two days before. The next earliest appointment they could give me was the following Friday 11:15. That will mean I'll have to fast for an extra two hours.

            I went home and had breakfast.

            That afternoon I was just getting up from a siesta when there was a knock on my door. It was my upstairs neighbour David. He gave me a container of chicken alfredo pasta and the sauce was leaking out of the container so he’d wrapped it in a newspaper to soak up the liquid. I put a plate under it and stuck it in the fridge.

            I took a bike ride an hour and a half later. On the Bloor bike lane I was passing a guy and the asshole tried to race me. Fortunately I was faster but when will these people realize they are putting people’s lives in danger if they speed up while someone is passing?

I went back out to Birchmount and Danforth like the day before. I took Birchmount to Highview, turned right and then took the next street north, which is Aylesworth. Aylesworth travels in a northeasterly direction but all of its side streets cut directly south and so each one east of another was longer until Aylesworth ended just before Kennedy. I would have preferred to just travel on a few of the streets and then head back but because of the weird angles I thought I might get confused and go on some streets more than once if I didn’t finish everything south of Aylesworth and west of Kennedy this trip. I found Haddon Avenue and it reminded me of my friend Brian Haddon because of the name but not because of its length, since it’s very short and he’s very long. It’s a quiet street with a fair number of small, cottage style homes where people without kids or with grown up and gone kids might live.

I uploaded some video that I’d shot with my Kodak camera, but each video was flipped clockwise by 90 degrees. I found a YouTube video that showed how to rotate videos in VLC but I was only able to flip them for my own viewing. The instructions for making the rotation permanent were very complicated and I tried to follow them but wasn’t able to permanently rotate the videos. I uploaded one of them to YouTube and then found another YouTube video explaining how to flip a YouTube video. I followed those simpler instructions and I got a message to wait, but it still hadn’t rotated by bedtime. The next day though my video was upright, so maybe it just needed a restart.

I watched an episode of the 1997 series, Mike Hammer, Private Eye. Velda calls Hammer, giving him the impression she’s in danger in the bar downstairs from his office. He comes into the darkened room with his gun ready and then the lights come on and everyone yells “Surprise!” because it’s his birthday. Hammer is presented with a giant cake, out of which pops a bikini clad entertainer who gives him a cell phone, which rings as soon as it’s in Hammer’s hands and when he answers it he receives a death threat. The number of the caller turns out to be the payphone at the local police station and the caller was a dirty cop that Hammer has been tailing. The stripper, Randi and her crime boss employer are also involved in the plot to kill Hammer.

Randi was played by Bobbie Brown, who was married to Jani Lane of Warrant, who she met when she was dancing and posing as the iconic eye candy for the video of the song “Cherry Pie”.

Rough Patch

On Thursday I did my laundry. I got $10 worth of quarters from the machine but then I realized I’d need three loonies for the top-load washer and the elegant old Korean or Japanese attendant seemed disappointed when I interrupted her and her smart phone to ask to change twelve quarters into loonies.

            I was waiting for my shorts and sweatpants to finish in the top-load washer before putting coins in the dryer and watched a guy putting his clothes in the dryer below mine. I always just grab everything and throw it into the machine but he was shaking out every single item and turning them, I guess, outside in before putting them in.

Later that afternoon I was getting ready to take my bike ride while my next door Queen Street westbound just after University is broken up and cracked to a rim-bending degree for cyclists and it's been like that all summer. It could be avoided by going out onto the streetcar tracks, but there's also an accidentally formed narrow path of concrete that curves in and kisses the curb until it clears the rough area. I'm not the only cyclist that uses it but it would be interesting to see what percentage do.

Benji was getting the garbage ready to put on the curb and cleaning the bins. He’s just doing it for two weeks while the landlord is on vacation. When Raja does it he doesn’t usually come on garbage day. He takes it in his van to a bin that he rents at another location. That seems like a smelly thing to do to your van when you can just get someone like Benji to put it out. Raja is giving Benji a small cut in his rent for this month.

            I took a bike ride in the late afternoon. I didn’t feel like riding until I was on my way. Until I got to the Bloor Viaduct there were several long spaces where I rode with no other cyclists in front of me. On the bridge though I had to pass about ten cyclists, including Madame Pavlov. Shortly after Broadview a husky woman in black with her hair in a wide braid under her black helmet passed me. She slowed down at around Donlands and I went by her, but after Coxwell I saw her come up beside me and so I slowed to let her pass and then tried to catch her again. She was built the way a lot of female cops are and wore her hair in a similar way. She stopped at Main Street. Why was she faster? With an aerodynamic helmet and leaning forward she would probably have an advantage because wind resistance, more than anything else, is the main speed killer in cycling.

            At Danforth and Birchmount is the Eli Lilly company and it takes up a very large block, a whole acre of which, besides some perfectly lined up trees around the edge, is nothing but closely cropped lawn. There's no fence around it and no sign saying "private property" so I assume it's accessible to the public but it would make a boring park as it is. I wonder why Lilly keeps it. Is it there just in case they build an extension to their drug factory? It’s a fun fact that Laura Nyro wrote "Eli's Coming" about Eli Lilly because she had a vision that he was bringing her drugs. It’s a fun fact because it’s not true.

            One thing about racing with the lady in black is that it got me to that area within fifty minutes. I had time to ride up Birchmount to Highview, turn right and explore all the streets that ran south off of it until the point where Pinegrove joins it, and started heading home in less than an hour from when I left.

            I stopped at Starbucks to pee and sometime since I'd been there last someone had stripped the abandoned blue and green bike that's been locked there since at least April, of both of it's tires. Now it looks particularly pathetic, as it hangs by its lock without touching the sidewalk.

Just after University I stopped to shoot some video to see if any other cyclists besides me take the smooth detour around the broken part of Queen Street, if they go over it or if they go out to the left and closer to the tracks. I shot about ten riders going by and almost all of them went to the left, while one went over the rough area. Not a single one of them did what I do.

I stopped at Freshco where I got two litres of nectarines, two pints of blueberries, a tomato and some yogourt. It was the first time in a long time that I could carry everything home in my backpack.

I had a chicken leg for dinner and watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. In this story a stockbroker is murdered and the gun and silencer are left with the body. The old janitor comes in and freaks out. His hands are all bloody from touching the corpse and he’s holding the gun when the security guard comes in. The old man grabs both the gun and the broker’s briefcase and shows up all bloodstained at Hammer’s door. He spends the night at Hammer’s place and Hammer is surprised the next day when he takes him to the police as a witness that they arrest him for murder. When they go to the old man’s apartment they find $250,000 in cash in his refrigerator along with compromising photographs of the murdered broker. The old man says the money is his life savings that he’s been hording for fifty years but he doesn’t know anything about any pictures and he doesn’t even own a camera. During his investigation, Hammer forms a sexual relationship with the dead broker’s partner. The old man dies a few days later of natural causes while still in jail. Hammer finds out that the broker’s murderer was his partner.

I checked my bank account that night and discovered that I got the $300 back that I’d left in the bank machine. Yay!

Frenchie and the Gang

            I went to bed 16 minutes after midnight on Wednesday but I was woken up 23 minutes later when I heard cops shouting. I got up and looked out to see that two guys were face down on the ground and being handcuffed beside a brand new looking metallic orange brown coloured SUV and an already cuffed young white woman was being escorted to the police car in front of it by a husky female cop with long highlit hair tied back in a bun.

I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures. I'd considered using it to shoot video but the action part of the scene was clearly over.

The tall young black man was taken to the police car behind the SUV. The shirtless and tattooed young white guy with the neck-length light brown hair was lifted up, but he was having some difficulty with the cuffs and so they took them off and cuffed him from the front. That surprised me because anytime I’ve been handcuffed by the cops they always cuffed my hands behind my back and left me that way no matter how much the bracelets cut into my wrists. With his hands in front, the guy, could smoke while he leaned against the SUV and talked to the cops. I think he was called “Frenchie”, though he had no accent and the woman in the police car was his girlfriend. She was shouting to him out of the open window of the cruiser and he called back, “Love you!” Eventually Frenchie was led to a police car behind the SUV and I thought it was all over and went back to bed.

I couldn’t sleep because I was too curious and so when I had to get up to pee a half an hour later I came back to the window on my way back to bed and saw the cops going through the inside of the SUV with a fine-toothed comb. I returned to try and get some sleep and I think I did dose off a bit. I usually only have to pee once in the middle of the night but I had to go again an hour later. I checked the situation outside my window and now Frenchie was back beside the van.

At first I’d thought that there'd been a fight between Frenchie and the Black guy, perhaps over the girl, but it seems that they had been all riding together when the cops pulled them over. The female cop was saying, “So you say you didn't steal the car and somebody gave you the keys? Who gave you the keys?” Frenchie threw up his hand and answered, “I don't know!" "You went to your parents' place and stole drugs, jewelry and alcohol ..." Clearly family values have gone down the toilet. In my day it was fine to rob your parents of alcohol and jewelry but we left their drugs alone. Some things are sacred! I went back to bed.

An hour later I got up again and saw they’d removed the cuffs from Frenchie and were releasing him and his friend but his girlfriend was being taken into custody. Maybe she’d been the one driving the SUV, since I would think that one wouldn't be released after being caught driving a stolen vehicle. The young woman was pretty pissed off about having to go to jail. Frenchie called after her that he’d “fix it” and he shouted at the female cop that she was a “fucking bitch" just before she drove away with his girlfriend. The two cops that were remaining were just there to watch the car while it was waiting to be towed and they couldn’t answer any of Frenchie's questions. One of the cops looked up and saw me watching, and then he gave me a little nod of acknowledgement. He directed Frenchie to go to 14 Division if he wanted to find out exactly where and when he could see his girlfriend tomorrow. I went to bed for one last time and at best I got an hour and a half of sleep.

I got through my morning routine without conking out. I only felt a little out of it about a third of the way through song practice but I persevered and didn’t even screw up the songs much at all, even though I was singing in French.

I took a siesta at 14:16 and slept for almost two hours. I didn’t feel quite caught up but I was okay.

I took my bike ride at 17:00. It breezy and almost cool enough to have worn a long sleeved shirt, but I was fine once I got rolling.

There were a couple of cyclists ahead of me from downtown until they disappeared far ahead of me after Donlands. One was a short white guy in a white shirt and the other was a taller Asian guy. I thought for sure the Asian guy would beat the white guy because he looked more like a cyclist but he stayed behind him the whole time.

I rode up Birchmount two blocks to Highview, took that one block to Aylesworth, rode south to Pinegrove and then headed back to the Danforth.

A cyclist passed me, but before he could get very far ahead a car cut him off to get into a parking space. Suddenly he slowed down, though I don’t know why. I doubt if the sudden use of the brakes had caused his bike any damage. I swerved around the squashed raccoon corpse and passed him.

At around Pape I had a hassle of my own. I was waiting at the light beside a rickety and noisy old black truck. When the light changed I went forward and so did the truck, but then it began to turn and was coming dangerously close to me, as it seemed I was in the driver’s blind spot. I steered out to avoid him and finally got ahead where he could see me and then I continued west. This is how cyclists get killed by trucks.

Queen Street westbound just after University is broken up and cracked to a rim-bending degree for cyclists and it's been like that all summer. It could be avoided by going out onto the streetcar tracks, but there's also an accidentally formed narrow path of concrete that curves in and kisses the curb until it clears the rough area. I'm not the only cyclist that uses it but it would be interesting to see what percentage do.

I stopped at Freshco, and as I came in I passed a conversation between a young woman from Africa that has worked at the store for a few years and a tall guy of Portuguese descent that was doing the work of a stocker in the fruit section but had the manner of a manager. It seemed that she’d asked to borrow some money but he was reminding her of a time when he'd asked her for money and she'd given him a hard time. Her response was incredulous with a mix of laughter thrown in for effect, No! No, no ...I ..." I didn't catch the rest.  I bought Ontario grapes and nectarines, BC cherries, one-year-old cheddar, paper towels, yogourt and a jar of honey. The only male cashier is Jeremy, who’s very personable and good at his job. He asked how I was and I said, “I’m okay. How are you?” He said, “Not too shabby!" That implies that he's just shabby enough.

I grilled the four steaks that I’d bought on Saturday and had one with a potato and gravy while watching Mike Hammer, Private Eye. This story had a bizarre premise. A man undergoing surgery emits a toxic chemical as soon as he is cut open, which causes the patient and the entire staff of the operating room to immediately die. The patient’s daughter asks Hammer to investigate. It turns out that the patient was unknowingly part of a murder using chemical ammunition and he wasn’t the target but the weapon.

Is My Book Cover Finished?

            On Tuesday it rained on and off from the late morning on and sometimes it came down quite hard. It was definitely too wet for a bike ride and so I just got caught up on my journal. In the late afternoon I took my camera and tripod out on the deck and took a few pictures of myself and my new haircut.

            I worked on my book cover and I think it’s very close to being done.

            I roasted five chicken legs in the oven and had one for dinner while watching Mike Hammer, Private Eye. In the story, a Father Dressler comes to Hammer for help. We learn that Dressler was Hammer's priest when he was a child and a choirboy. I haven't read all the novels but I've seen a lot of Mike Hammer shows and movies and this is the first one that refers to Mike Hammer as being Catholic. I know that Mickey Spillane’s father was Catholic and his mother was Presbyterian and he was Baptized in both churches but he wasn’t raised as either and he didn't get religious until he joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I think it’s a mistake to pin Catholicism on Mike Hammer because I don’t think that Spillane would have approved.

            Father Dressler administers to prostitutes and he comes to Mike Hammer because hookers are being murdered. They are found shot, with a wooden cross wrapped around their necks and wearing a red wig. Shortly after talking with Hammer, Father Dressler is also murdered. We don’t see the killer’s face but he talks through an electrolarynx like some throat cancer survivors do. The priest that takes over after Father Dressler is Father James, who does not think the church is a place for prostitutes. Father James is more interested in the new church that is being built for the parish by wealthy developer, Jason Carter. Jason’s father died of throat cancer and his mother, a redhead, committed suicide with the same kind of derringer that Jason has been using to kill the prostitutes. One hooker named Candy is fed up and she asks Hammer to let her serve as bait to trap the killer. Hammer arrives just in time to save Candy at the site of the new church.

I Like My Stylist to Talk My Hair Off

            On Monday in the early afternoon I called Top Cuts at Yonge and St Clair to make sure Amy was going to be in that day. The person I spoke with confirmed that Amy would be there from 14:00 to 21:00. That meant that I could leave my place at 17:00, the time that I would normally take a bike ride.

            It took me half an hour to get to Yonge and St Clair, but once I got there it took me twenty minutes to find Top Cuts, not because it was hard to find though. I knew that the address was 1442 Yonge Street and before leaving home I tried to remember which side of a north-south street the even numbers are on. Recalling an address that I’d had on the east side of Bathurst back in the early 80s, it came to me that it had been an even number and so when I got to Yonge and St Clair I spent several minutes looking for 1442 on the east side and I was confused and frustrated that between 1431 and 1443, 1442 didn’t seem to exist. I walked into 2 St Clair West to be free of traffic noise when I called Topcuts. The woman that answered told me they were on the west side and then I realized what a dummy I’d been. At that point I remembered that the address where I'd lived on the east side of Bathurst had been 597. I unlocked my bike and rode a little past Topcuts because the only free bike post ring was several doors south in front of the Home Hardware where the staff were in a very good mood as they were bringing in their sidewalk display items to get ready to close.

            The studio was smaller than the one at Bay and Dundas. Amy and one other attractive stylist, who looked like she might be Ethiopian, were the only staff. Amy had the only female customer and there were three guys in the chairs ahead of me. I was the only one of them that looked like he needed a haircut.

            I sat and tried to remember and then wrote down what I remembered about the events of Sunday.

            As the guys ahead of me got attended to, two or three more men trickled in. When it was my turn I let the guy behind me go ahead because I was waiting for Amy. The other stylist smiled. No one else seemed to care which stylist worked on their hair, though I’m sure I'm not the only one that has a favourite. I saw a few guys with preferences at the Dundas and Bay salon.

            Amy and the other stylist have two very different styles of engaging with customers. The other woman just chews gum and quietly cuts her customer's hair, while Amy makes continuous conversation with every one of her clients. With me she remembers things that I've told her about my life and so it doesn’t feel like the conversation is forced or artificial.

            When Amy was ready for me I commented that her and her colleague are very popular with the boys. She said that it depends on the time of day but confirmed that there was more of a mixture down at Bay and Dundas. She said it’s better to cut men's hair because it’s less work.

            Amy says she’ll be going back to Thailand for three weeks in December for the first time in six years. Her parents are 70 and 68.

            The haircut after tax was $22.50. I gave Amy $30.00 and told her to give me back $5.00 but I added a toonie to the tip from my pocket.

            I went down Yonge all the way to Queen and rode home.

            That night I boiled a potato, heated an already grilled steak and sautéed the maitake mushrooms that I'd gotten from the food bank. The mushrooms looked like little squids in the frying pan. There were really two meals of mushrooms but I was afraid they’d go bad like the last bunch and so I ate them all and got a little stuffed.

            I watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. This story was set around Halloween. Hemmer is late for a date at his new girlfriend's apartment and when he arrives he finds her bloody and dead in a filled bathtub. There is an “S" branded on her back. This fits the MO of a serial killer named Corey, who Hammer put in prison and is still there. Hammer suspects either a member of Corey’s Satan cult or a copycat killer. Hammer goes to see Corey and he seems more like an overacting male model than a psychopath. The next victim is a middle-aged reporter and friend of Hammer named Blue, who gets an “A” brand, but he survives the attack. Hammer, in looking for advice on how to catch the Corey inspired killer goes to see Rick Dybner who wrote a book about Corey. I knew right away that Rick was the copycat killer. The next victim is another friend of hammer who runs a newspaper stand and he gets a “T” brand. Corey’s style is to kill a total of five people in one spree until he’s spelled out "SATAN". Hammer's sidekick Nick meets an attractive blonde woman named Trish who invites him to a Halloween party but it turns out to be a meeting of Corey’s cult and Nick is the sacrifice. The cult members are all women and wearing matching outfits but they look more like a dark version of Victoria’s Secret lingerie, including stockings and suspenders than Satanic sacrifice attire. Meanwhile Rick kidnaps Velda. Hammer saves Nick and then goes to save Velda. Rick has her in the basement of his building. He did it to renew public interest in Corey and consequently in his book so he could make more money. Rick handcuffs Hammer to an overhead pipe but Hammer pulls down, breaking the pipe and sending steam into Rick’s face. After he takes Rick out he brands his forehead with the “N".

            

The Oldest Store on The Danforth

            I spent a lot of my time on Sunday writing about my food bank adventure.

            Since I planned on going to get a haircut the next day I washed a pair of shorts so when Amy would be standing over me they wouldn’t smell loud and funky.

            It was relatively cool in my apartment all day compared to the way it’s been throughout most of July and August, but when I went for my bike ride I found that, though it wasn’t stifling, it was quite warm outside.

            I was expecting to be detoured again at Byng Avenue but it turned out that the Wheels on Danforth festival had only been on for one day. I rode to Birchmount and then one block north to Pinegrove Ave. I thought that after a block there would be another street going south back to Danforth Ave, but there was no right turn off. I could see Danforth racing along on the other side of a long strip of narrow park. Pinegrove curved slightly north to end at Highview Ave, which I followed east for a short distance until it ended at Kingston Rd, which I followed back until I’d returned to the end of the Danforth.

            The Danforth from Warden and going west all the way to the beginning of Greek Town is a low-income area but it looks particularly run down from Warden to Victoria Park. A few days ago I stopped to take pictures of an interesting storefront between Pharmacy and Warden that closed a couple of years ago but still has the signs up for Lightman’s Department Stores, which specialized in work wear. The sign says "stores" but I think there was only one, unless it means that the one store consisted of three stores side by side. They opened in 1943 when there were still farmers working north and east of there and after their farmer’s market on Saturday all the farmers used to come to Lightman's to stock up on clothing before they went back to their farms. As Danforth was building up there was a lot of construction and on Mondays there would be a line-up in front of the store of construction workers wanting to get work boots. Before it closed, Lightman's was the oldest store on the Danforth.

            I got home at about 19:20.

            For dinner I had an egg and some cheese with three toasted crumpets and a beer while watching Mike Hammer. This episode was a little more interesting than the first four, but that’s not saying much.

            Hammer goes out to California because a friend of his named Kate, who moved out to Hollywood a few years before and became a B movie actor, was now charged with the murder of her agent-boyfriend. She says she didn’t do it but doesn't remember because she'd blacked out. They played up the comic relief of Hammer as a New Yorker being a fish out of water in LA. When his rental car breaks down the woman known only as “The Face" drives past him in a sports car. Hammer gets beaten up again by guys posing as cops that tell him to mind his own business. In the end we find out that Kate's lawyer was the killer.

            Kate was played by Denise Gentile, who played the wife of Garibaldi on ten episodes of Babylon 5.

Rosy Sun that Looks Like a Moon

            After I left the food bank on Saturday I was unlocking my bike when Heinz Klein came over to bump fists. He told me that he’s going back to Germany for a holiday soon to visit with family and to play music in six different cities. I asked what part of Germany is home and he said he’s from Kassel, in the north. I wondered if he has much opportunity to speak German in Toronto and he said he meets with a German group once a week. I told him to have fun.

            When I got home I put my groceries away and then headed down to No Frills where I bought four litres of nectarines (which didn’t go rotten before I finished them this time); two bags of cherries. They also finally had Ontario grapes, so I snatched up a two-litre pack of those. I got a pack of sirloin tip steaks for $10 and another of chicken legs for about the same price. I grabbed a few other things to make my life easier and paid by debit.

            I had a toasted cheese, tomato and cucumber sandwich for lunch.

            In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. At Yonge and Bloor I stopped at the light and the cyclist in front of me turned to ask me if the way he was going was east. I confirmed that it was. After the light changed I passed him and the sun shone through the thin clouds for a moment showing my shadow stretched out in front of me. I doubt it was the first time that the sun had popped through so it should have been obvious to the guy that he was traveling eastward.

            When I got into Scarborough, Danforth Avenue was closed off from Byng Avenue to Warden Avenue and about a block up Danforth Road for the Wheels on Danforth festival. It wasn’t an inconvenient detour though to go up Byng to Denton, travel east to Patterson, drop half a block down to Danforth Road and ride that up to Warden. I took Warden to Eglinton, went across to Birchmount and then went south. About halfway between Comstock and St Clair I turned on Anaconda and explored a neighbourhood consisting of three curvy streets and lots of almost identical two-tone duplexes that look they were built in the 70s. Once I came back onto Birchmount, that completed by exploration of all the streets south of Eglinton and West of Birchmount.

            On the way back along Danforth the sun looked like a big orange moon because it had no glare whatsoever. As I crossed the Bloor Viaduct it had turned to reddish orange and by the time I stopped to take some pictures of it on the bridge over the Rosedale Valley Road, it was appropriately rose coloured.

I took Bloor to Spadina and then south. At St Andrew Spadina was closed southbound for the Chinatown festival so I cut through Kensington Market and went down to Dundas. Just before Bathurst, near the hospital was a big open foil tray almost full of what looked like curried chicken and potatoes just lying on the sidewalk.

I had two eggs with toast and a beer for dinner and watched an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye. This story was about a basketball star being accused of murdering his agent the day before he was going to be drafted into the NBA. The formula of the show is that with every murder that Hammer investigates, at almost the exact point in the story of every episode he gets beaten up by one or two guys who warn him to mind his own business. Of course Hammer’s client didn’t kill the agent. It turned out to be another agent. Hammer sees the mysterious “face” again when she walks through the set of a sports photo shoot.

It's Stupid to Call People Stupid

            At around 1:30 on Saturday I woke up with a major cramp running from my right hip down to my calf. It was so bad it felt like I’d somehow injured myself in my sleep. I was worried that it might not be a cramp and that there might be something wrong with my hip. I decided to try and get up to see if that would help. I wasn't sure if I could but it wasn’t much of a problem. I limped a bit when I went to and from the bathroom and then I sat down in the living room for a couple of minutes. It felt slightly better and I went back to bed. I fell asleep again not long after that and when I woke up at 5:00 the cramp was gone.

            During yoga I came up with a theory about what might have caused the cramp. On August 10^th I added a new pose to my yoga routine in which I lean back and balance my body on one hand and foot with my other hand and foot in the air. The muscles that are worked on my right leg by that pose are the same ones that cramped up while I was in bed that morning. I’ve had cramps for a while in the past while my body got used to a new exercise.

            I worked on finding the chords to “L’Oiseau du Paradis” by Serge Gainsbourg. Quick Partitions had the sheet music for the first verse, which is enough for this song because there is no chorus, but only some of the chords sounded right to me. D7, B-minor 7 and F-sharp fit in places but the rest needed other chords, so I had listen to the only version that exists online, the one by Zizi Jeanne-Maire, note for note, over and over again, to find the right chords, but after an hour I only had the first two lines done. I'll finish the rest tomorrow.

            When I started making breakfast I discovered that the two baskets of peaches that I’d bought from Freshco had gone rotten and that the fruit flies had found their way under the bag the cloth bag that I’d been using to cover them with on the kitchen table. The bag was soaked in peach blood. I was able to save parts of some of the peaches but most of them went outdoors in the garbage.

            At 9:45 I went to the food bank and found my place in line behind a white cart containing a large bag with Christmas colours and the close-up cartoon portrait of the face of a smiling snowman surrounded by snowflakes. As I write about it I wonder if an albino snowman would be transparent.

             A few of the regulars were sitting on the steps of 1501 Queen and smoking. Skinny Brenda was standing and chatting with a guy who wasn't a regular but I think I’d seen him there before. Elderly Michael came walking by in his large snow-white sneakers and Brenda came over to give him a kiss on the cheek. He smiled politely but made it clear that he wasn't comfortable with it, so she came in again as if to kiss him on the mouth but he gently dodged away. Brenda returned to her conversation and said, “Ya gotta have a sense of humour or you're dead!” The thought that came to me from that was, if the poor didn’t have a sense of humour, the rich would be dead.

             I read another couple of pages of Gustav Flaubert's "St Julian the Hospitaler". After the dying stag that Julian had shot prophesied that Julian was destined to kill his own parents, he refused to go hunting and spent several weeks in bed. When he recovered his father gave him a scimitar, but while standing on a ladder to take it down from a trophy stand, it slipped from Julian’s fingers and cut into the coat of his father, who was standing below. Thinking that he’d half fulfilled the prophecy, Julian fainted. After this Julian avoided weapons, but his advisor, the old monk encouraged him to behave like a noble. Julian took his advice and began practicing the javelin with the squires. He became the best among them but one day when he saw the wings of a stork through the branches of a tree he heaved his javelin and knocked his mother’s long ribboned hat from her head, nailing it to a wall. Julian immediately left home and never came back. 

            The second hand smoke had me moving away too and there seemed to be more people smoking than usual. It was hard to avoid because people were smoking far to the east, around the PARC door and just as many paces to west, to the end of an extra long food bank line.

            The food bank didn’t open at 10:30. Valdene came with the van and the volunteers unloaded it, then she drove away and a while later came back with another load. We took our places in line at around 10:30.

            The guy behind me in line was a regular who after putting his cart in line goes to sit by himself on the sidewalk until it's time for the line to move. He kind of looks like a gentle version of Charles Manson from when he had long hair, but after he lost his teeth. I noticed two collages in his cart and I asked if he’d made them. He confirmed that he had and that he was taking them to a friend’s place later. They were colourful and made from various materials and objects, such as different textures of paper and cloth and I saw at least one red feather. They had their charm but were not outstanding works of art because there was no flow between the diverse elements incorporated in the pieces and there were empty spaces between each object. The collages looked more like something that came out of art therapy rather than having been the result of an artistic vision. They were nice though and I’m sure his friend will like having them on their wall.

            The volunteers had taken about half a vanload downstairs and while Valdene was waiting for them she sat on the back of the van and broke up bread to throw to the pigeons.
            It was after 11:00 when the line started moving. Marlena was having a smoke after letting some people go downstairs while Valdene was still feeding the pigeons. Marlena commented, “They’re not white anymore!" I don't know if she'd seen some almost white ones earlier or if Valdene had told her that pigeons used to be white. “No, they’re filthy!" Valdene said, "But we took their land away!" She's mistaken about that. Feral pigeons are not native to North America. They’re descended from domesticated rock doves that were brought over to Port Royal, Nova Scotia by settlers from France in 1606.  They’re an invasive species and should not be fed.

            A guy behind me asked Valdene and Marlena if they were still using the number system. Marlena said no and he said “Good!” I asked him why he thought it was good and said, “Because I'm usually here earlier." Marlena said, "Nobody wanted the numbers." I said that think the reason people voted against the number system was because everybody thinks they can get there earlier, although nobody ever does. The first ten people can’t win with the number system and the last ten people can't lose. Valdene said, "I'd shuttle everybody in if I could!”

            Downstairs was a new volunteer that was a very beautiful young Black woman with a long ponytail. When I walked in she was standing by the baked goods section and looking at the bread. Lana, who's in charge of the bread, came up and told her not to touch it. The woman didn’t think there was anything wrong with her touching the bread and they argued about it. The young woman declared that she didn’t want to work on Saturdays anymore. After I’d shown my card and was waiting to shop the shelves, I saw them continuing their argument in the back. Lana told her that she had a bad attitude.

            I don’t know exactly why Lana was bothered by the young woman touching the bread, since the bread she’d picked up was in a bag and it looked to me like she'd been just curious about the ingredients.

            From the shelves I got a package of two almond butter granola cups; three peanut butter Clif bars; a sleeve of soda crackers; a large can of chickpeas and a small tin of tomato paste. There was again no cereal but Raisin Bran was on sale at Freshco that week and so I’d already gotten some. There was also no tuna for the third week in a row.

            As I stood behind the woman with the white cart and waited to shop the dairy and meat section, the row between Lana and the young woman was still going on. Apparently the young woman had called Lana “stupid” and that upset her to an extreme degree. Lana said she was going to report her to the board of directors and “where I come from you don't talk to people that way!" Sylvia said, “I’m with you on that! It's okay to call someone dumb, but not stupid!”

            The woman in front of me was waiting for Angie because she had gone to the back to get something for her, and so my volunteer stepped in and served me from that section. In addition to the usual 2% milk there were a lot of nut milks like soya and coconut, but I didn’t take either. I got a pack of four single servings of cherry flavoured Greek yogourt and the usual bag of three eggs. I turned down the usual frozen ground chicken, hot dogs and bologna. He also offered me a pack of veggie cheese slices and when I said I didn’t want those either, the guy behind me, who'd gotten ahead of the collage guy, asked if he could have mine. The volunteer said that he couldn’t give him an extra pack of veggie cheese but if I took one I could give it to him, so I did. It’s hilarious that I had to make something that I didn’t want mine for a second by touching it, just so someone else could have it, when it should have been enough for me to just say, "He can have mine”.

            Sylvia had quite a bit of stuff. She offered me another bag of potatoes but I told her that I got one last week an I only eat one potato a day. She nodded knowingly and said, “I have some nice mushrooms!" I told her I needed a bag for them and she just happened to have some plastic ones. I think that they were maitake mushrooms, which means, “dancing” mushrooms. She dug down in a box of bananas to get me a bunch of four that weren’t too ripe. She pointed at a bin of broccoli and told me she didn’t like the ones she had today. I agreed that they were a bit too yellow. She gave me a seedless, cucumber, an eggplant and some leaf lettuce and then I moved on to the bread section.

            I only really needed one loaf and there seemed to be plenty of variety already on the shelves but Lana was insistent on going to the back and getting me some more. While she was gone I grabbed a foccaccia loaf with rosemary and a pack of gourmet chocolate chip cookies. She came back with a box containing multigrain bread and dark rye, which she said she calls “chocolate bread”. I took multigrain loaf, even though I didn’t need any more, but I felt sorry for Lana because the other volunteer had been so mean to her.

            Calling someone stupid is really both ironic and absurd. If you really thought that someone was stupid it would be pointless to try to communicate it to them because if they were stupid they would not understand. Therefore the only reason one would have to call someone stupid is for the sake of some kind of mean-spirited self-satisfaction, which strongly suggests that anyone that would call someone stupid is actually stupid.