"Fuck Your Hand Signal! You Get One Lane!"

            On Thursday morning, after three days of not riding my bike my hip felt a little worse. As usual, once I was up and moving around it eased off but I decided to make an appointment with my doctor to find out if it was serious. I called in the late morning and got an appointment for that afternoon.

            I worked on memorizing Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Frankenstein” and also on writing an alternative English version that’s faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel.

            I had my last chicken drumstick for lunch and took a siesta before getting ready to go see Doctor Shechtman. I did a few exercises for my piriformis before riding my bike. On my way out I saw that the mail had been delivered for the first time in a while because the front door had been finally fixed so the mail carrier could get in. On top of the mailbox was an envelope containing a book of poems sent to me by Nick Cushing and written by a friend of his who wants me to write a review. Inside the mailbox was my new health card, but I just put it back inside to get later. The ride didn’t really bother my hip so much as my leg just below it on the side. On the way up Brock it suddenly occurred to me that I since I was going to see my doctor I should have grabbed the envelope containing my new health card. But I still had the paper to use in lieu of the card and I hoped that would be enough. When I got to the front desk and the receptionist asked for my card, I pulled out the paper and found that it had been damaged by riding in the rain. The number that she needed had not been washed out though and so it was all right.

            I worked on a French grammar exercise while I was waiting and while the receptionist had to deal with someone shouting and swearing at her over the phone. I hadn’t finished the exercise before I was called.

            Dr. Shechtman had my lie on my back while he moved my leg around. He said I had good hip rotation and so it probably was a problem with one of those deep down gluteus muscles like the piriformis. He dug in deep with his hand until he hit the muscle that was bothering me and told me it would help if I could get a deep massage from a physiotherapist. He explained that it would be more uncomfortable after sleeping. He said that he had the same problem a few years ago when his daughter was small and he used to get her to walk on his butt while he was lying on his stomach. He said that at the time she was just the right weight and size to hit the spot. I imagined that she must have enjoyed that too. He told me that physiotherapy is free for those over 65 and asked how old I was. I told him 64 and he asked for my birth date. I told him that it was May 26 and he said, “Oh so you just have a few days!” I reminded him that it was now after May 26. He told me his birthday is May 28. I think that he and I are very close to being the born the same year as well.

            I told him when I first started feeling the discomfort and how it happened on a ride out to Scarborough. He thought it was very interesting that I’ve ridden my bike on every street and alley in Toronto from Eglinton down to the lake and from Kipling to Birchmount. He said that the fact that I was documenting my rides makes for a great history.

            He told me that he didn’t think that I needed x-rays and that I should do the exercises I’d found at least a couple of times a day and not do the long rides for a while. He thought short rides would be okay.

            I rode down Bathurst to Queen and then west. There was a line of cyclists in front of me and I looked back to see if it was safe to pass. The nearest vehicle was far enough back to see my signal and so I signalled and started passing. I was halfway along the line when a vehicle started honking angrily at me, then he pulled to the left and passed me, shouting out his passenger window that I should learn to drive. I caught up with him before Straughan. He was thin and wiry man in his thirties with a baseball cap and a chin beard and looked like an Ontario hillbilly. I asked him if he’d seen my signal. He shouted, “Fuck your signal! You got one lane!” which was odd, since I was well within the right lane, while he’d straddled two lanes to pass me. Maybe he thought there's a bike lane on Queen. I said, “No we don’t! We have both lanes!” I guess he fell behind in traffic because a minute later he passed me again, and shouted, “When we pass we look back!” Frankly he seemed like he might have been drinking.

            I stopped at Freshco where I found that the California cherries are cheaper than the grapes right now, so I bought four bags. I also bought a whole chicken for under $6 and some Greek yogourt.

            My new health card picture seems more than a little out of focus compared with the old one.

            I partially thawed the pack of “ribs” that I’d gotten from the food bank a couple of weeks ago. It’s certainly not ribs but some kind of pre-cooked and spiced mystery meat. I baked it in the oven. It turned out they were ribs after all, but pre-cooked short ribs and not as tasty as ones I’ve grilled from scratch.

            I watched two episodes of Stories of the Century and this time watched them in chronological rather than alphabetical order. The first story was the second in the series and it was about Billie the Kid. These stories would have been much better if they hadn’t injected into each one the fictionalized railroad detectives, Matt Clark and Frankie Adams. Frankie is working undercover as a piano player in a saloon when Billie and his gang come in. Billy wants Frankie to drink with them but she overhears someone come in to tell Billie about the herd of stolen cattle they need to move. Billie starts to take Frankie with him but Matt intervenes. Billy’s men beat him up and they head off with Frankie. Matt sees one of Billie’s men travelling by buckboard and he sneaks on the back. The wagon is stopped by Pat Garret, who discovers Matt, and Matt joins his posse. They stop Billy from moving the cattle and kill some of his men. Billy escapes and goes to his hideout where he takes Frankie on a buckboard as a hostage. Matt and Pat chase them and after a fast chase the buckboard crashes. Billy is arrested only later to escape. Pat later finds Billy in the home of a mutual friend. They have a showdown and Pat wins.

            The real story is that Billy was born in New York in 1859. The family moved out west and when Billy was 15 his mother died of TB. After all the outlaw stuff, the most common story of how Billie died was that Garrett stepped into a dark room where Billie was. Billy drew his gun and backed away, asking, “Who is it?” in Spanish. Garrett heard Billy’s voice and fired twice, killing him.

            The second story was about Frank and Jesse James. The story begins when the James Gang are already infamous. Some bumbling detectives in Missouri throw a bomb into Jesse and Fran’s family house, killing their mother and ten year old brother. The James boys declare war on the law. They’ve heard that a detective is travelling by stagecoach in their area and they stop it to rob it. Fictional railroad detectives Matt Clark and Frankie Adams are on board. One old man is a southern colonel and so Jesse says he won’t rob him. He also lets Frankie off but he robs Matt. He questions all the passengers and when one man says he fought in the war Jesse demands to know the regiment. When the man names a non-existent regiment Jesse concludes he’s the detective. The man tries to get away and is killed. Frankie goes undercover as a post office clerk and intercepts a letter that Jesse sends to Chadwell Pierce. They open it, which I assume is against the law and then they go to Kansas City where Frankie works at the post office there. When Pierce comes for the letter Matt follows him but the detective is detected and beaten up. Later the James Gang pile lumber on a train track and set fire to it to stop a certain train. They steal the safe and transport it as part of a freight wagon train. While searching for Jesse as part of a posse, Matt sees the wagon train and guesses that Jesse is part of it. The posse attacks and after a gunfight Jesse has to abandon the safe. Later two brothers named Ford infiltrate the James gang in order to get the reward. One of them shoots Jesse in the back.

            Jesse was played by Lee Van Cleef.

            In the real story the James boys were hardcore Confederate southerners. Their father had been a Baptist minister before moving to Missouri. The family owned six slaves. The father died after going to California to preach to prospectors. The mother remarried and the new family had seven slaves working a tobacco plantation. The civil war had a bigger impact on Clay County, the part of Missouri where the James boys lived, than on the rest of Missouri because slaves made up one quarter of the population. Robberies by the James-Younger gang were often almost performance art when there was a crowd present. They would rob people at fairs and joke around with the crowd at the same time. Some of their crimes were politically motivated. They would choose banks that they thought were owned by Republicans. After most of the gang had been killed, Jesse took on new recruits, which included the Ford brothers, who shot Jesse for the reward. But the Ford brothers were charged with murder and sentenced to hang, but were acquitted and received part of the reward. They later became part of a show in which they re-enacted the assassination.

            Jesse James had one surviving son, Jesse James, who had four daughters. They moved to California and ran a restaurant called the Jesse James Inn. He died in 1951.

           

Belle Starr

            My hip muscles still bothered me on Wednesday when I got up but it felt like the exercises I found online to tackle piriformis syndrome might be hitting the spot. I’m hopeful that if I do them regularly I’ll be able to strengthen my glutes enough to get back on my bike for some long rides.

            I had a burger for lunch with ketchup, mustard, relish, tomato, lettuce and a slice of pickle.

            I weighed 90.1 kilos in the afternoon.

            I started a project of making a video of me performing "Young Women and Older Men" from the morning of July 27, 2017. I also did a pretty good version of “Insisting on Angels” but for a split second the video kind of whites out for some reason. But it's the only good version I have so I might make a video from it anyway.

            I had an egg, a piece of toast and a beer for dinner while watching two episodes of Stories of the Century.

            The first one was about Belle Starr and begins with her arriving in a town to find her husband Sam having just gambled away all of the money she gave him to put in the bank. She knocks him around , robs all the gamblers and rides out of town. Her specialty is horse thievery and Matt Clark the fictional railroad detective is called in when Belle steals a herd of horses waiting to be shipped by rail. There’s always a female railroad detective collaborating with Clark and this one is Frankie Adams. Adams is working undercover as a dressmaker in the town near where Belle lives and she is making a dress for her. Adams is supposed to help arrest Starr in two days when they have rounded up the evidence and witnesses they need but Belle shows up two days early and so Adams pulls a gun on her. After a long fight Belle knocks Adams out and escapes with her husband. Her husband is later captured and at the jail the sheriff is having a drink. Matt suggests he offer a drink to Sam. The sheriff says, “What? Give a drink to that drunken …” He didn’t finish but he was obviously going to say “Indian”. Matt’s idea is to get Sam drunk so he can tell them Belle’s whereabouts. Later Belle busts Sam out of jail. They try to get away with the stolen herd but they are captured. They spend a year in prison. It is recounted that later Sam is killed in a gunfight and later still Belle was shot and killed while riding by an unknown assailant.

            Belle Starr was born Maybelle Shirley and her family called her May. Her father was fairly well off and sent Belle to receive a classical education at the Carthage Female Academy in Missouri. Belle grew up with the James boys and the Youngers in Missouri. Belle was a crack shot and she liked to dress up. She rode sidesaddle while wearing a black velvet riding habit, accessorized by two crossed holsters and pistols and a plumed hat. Historians agree that she was murdered but not by whom. Belle had a daughter named Pearl who became a prostitute and madame. Pearl had a daughter named Flossie who published an article about her family in 1933.

I know there were female detectives in the old west but I don’t know if there were that many. The first female detective was hired by Pinkerton in 1956.

This was the first episode of the series.

The second story I watched was episode 25 and it was about Ben Thompson, a gambler and a murderer. He did not seem to be a very good gambler in this depiction. It starts with a poker game on a train. Ben is losing and when he’s caught cheating he shoots his accuser and the conductor. He is hired by a man named Kane who wants Ben to scare away some settlers so he can take their land and sell it to the railroad. Matt Clark the fictional railroad detective, in hopes of tracking down Thompson gets hired as a blackjack dealer at the saloon belonging to Thompson’s sometimes girlfriend, Texas Bess. Thompson arrives in town on a stage, flirting with the female railroad detective Frankie Adams who is also working undercover. Ben loses his money at blackjack but when giving Matt a hard time Matt knocks him out. Ben spends a night in jail and Kane comes to pay his bail. Ben goes to work for Kane. Matt comes to stop Ben from scaring away the settlers. Since Ben has failed at his job Kane refuses to pay. There is a shootout and they kill each other.

Texas Bess was played in a low rent version of Mae West style by Claire Carleton, who did lots of feature films as a supporting actor, numerous TV shows and stage appearances.

As has been the case with all of the stories in this series, the real life story of Ben Thompson is far more compelling than the fictionalized one. Ben Thompson was a gambler and a gunman but he was also at several points of his life a lawman. Thompson was born in England and came with his family to Texas when he was eight years old. He fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and after that fought for Emperor Maximilian of Mexico against the revolutionaries. While he was away from Texas he found out that his wife was being physically abused by her brother. When he returned he attacked him and spent two years in prison for attempted murder. 

Thompson opened a saloon in Abilene, Kansas where he became friends with John Wesley Hardin and enemies with the sheriff, Wild Bill Hickock. Thompson moved to Fort Elliot, Texas where he befriended and defended Bat Masterson. Thompson became a marshal in Austin, Texas until he got into a dispute with and shot and killed the owner of the Vaudeville Variety Theatre in San Antonio. He was charged with murder but was acquitted and resigned his position as marshal. He didn’t become a cop again but when he returned to Austin the people welcomed him. Three years later when he returned to the Vaudeville Theatre he was assassinated. 

Augustine Chacon

            Despite not riding my bike at all the previous day my hip still bothered me when I got up on Tuesday. I’ll try two more days without riding and after that if the problem doesn’t diminish I think I’ll go see my doctor about it.

            For the last five years the bookshelf to the left of my desk has been pulled away from the wall because I’d kept it that way for the exterminator to be able to spray behind it for bedbugs. For the last three and a half years that's been unnecessary but I’d avoided moving it back against the wall because I had to clean behind it first. On Tuesday I finally tackled that job. I pulled my couch out so I could get behind it and access the shelf, pulled the shelf out and vacuumed thoroughly behind both the shelf and the couch and then pushed the bookshelf against the wall. My apartment is suddenly bigger but now I have to reach further for my beer. It’s okay though because I can just move the couch further to the right. My next project will be an even bigger one because my desk has been pulled out from the wall for just as many years and there’s a lot more to clean under and behind it.

            I played three versions of “Young Women and Older Men” that I’d recorded in 2017 and decided on which one I would make into a video for uploading. Musically they were all equally okay, except that on August 2 I seem to have sung “gem" instead of "them" at one point. I settled on the one from July 27, because the light was so soft and warm that morning that it made me look much better.

            I did a French grammar exercise on futur simple and futur anterieur. I got seven out of twelve right.

            I researched my hip discomfort symptoms on various sites and I’m more and more certain that it’s wallet syndrome or more technically piriformis syndrome. I found some exercises that might help.

            I used Cloud Convert to turn the Sound Recording of my July 27, 2017 song practice into a WAV file.

            I boiled four small potatoes, steamed some broccoli, heated two drumsticks and some gravy and watched the first two episodes of Stories of the Century. This is a western series in which each story focuses on a famous or infamous historical figure from the Wild West. They keep the main events of the character’s life historically accurate but then fictionalize some of the details and add two regular characters into each story. The fictional heroes are two railroad detectives named Matt Clark and Margaret Jones. I see upon looking this series up online that the titles in the file I downloaded were not in chronological but rather alphabetical order. What I watched then were the second and fifth episodes of the second season.

The first that I saw was about The Apache Kid. The narrator actually referred to "Apache infested territory of Arizona. According to the set-up the Kid was an Apache that was taken under the wing of a man named Sieber and raised to be an army scout, finally achieving the rank of sergeant before going renegade and becoming a murderer and a rapist. At first Sieber doesn’t want to believe his boy has gone bad but once he is convinced he, Clark and Jones track the Kid to Mexico where he gets knifed in the back by a woman he’d kidnapped and then he falls from a cliff. The Apache Kid’s real death was apparently from tuberculosis in Mexico. They mention that but say that Sieber altered the paperwork.

According to Wikipedia the Apache Kid’s real name was Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl. The article makes no mention of him having died of TB but there were different accounts of a violent death in the late 19^th Century by different people in different locations. Ranchers in New Mexico claimed the Apache Kid was alive and rustling cattle up until 1930.

In the other story Clark and Jones are called in to investigate because two men were left locked in the back of a wagon on a train track and killed when the train hit. They cross into Mexico and discover that they are looking for Augustine Chacon, a charming, handsome but brutal killer. He is in the business of helping outlaws get across the border and evade the Texas Rangers, but he often kills the people he is helping and takes all of their money. Clark and Jones find him in Arizona. Chacon discovers that Jones is a detective at the same time that he meets Clark, who pretends to want to pay Chacon for passage across the border. He puts both Jones and Clark in a wagon and plans on leaving them on the tracks when they are chased by rangers. Chacon is shot, caught and in 1904 he is hanged. In this depiction he was smiling as he climbed the gallows and joking about having to wear a tight collar.

According to Wikipedia Chacon’s nickname was "El Peludo", which means "the hairy one". For a lot of settlers along the US-Mexico border, Chacon’s criminality was more like that of Robin Hood. Chacon started out as a peace officer and then had a reputation for being an excellent cowboy. He became an outlaw when Ollney, the rancher who had been employing him refused to give him his pay. Ollney drew his gun and Chacon killed him. He then killed four of Ollney’s men who tried to stop him. A posse cornered Chacon in a box canyon but Chacon charged them on horseback with both guns blazing. He killed four of them and escaped with a flesh wound on his arm. He was later captured and thrown in jail but when a lynch mob planned on hanging him, his girlfriend, Ollney's daughter brought him a hacksaw. He escaped before the lynch mob arrived. Chacon formed a gang of horse thieves and rustlers that operated on both sides of the border. In 1895, after robbing a general store the Chacon gang retreated to their cabin overlooking the town. A posse surrounded the cabin; Chacon’s men tried to get away but were killed. Chacon was paralysed temporarily by wounds to his chest and shoulder. He was sentenced to be hanged on June 18, 1897 but on June 9 he escaped by digging out of the adobe jail while his fellow inmates played guitars and sang to cover up the noise. Chacon escaped to Mexico where he joined the Rurales, which were a kind of rural assisting force for the Mexican army. But after a year and a half he became a bandit again. In 1901 the Arizona Rangers were reformed and their first captain was Burton Mossman, who went after and finally captured Chacon in Mexico, bringing him back to Arizona. When Chacon was on trial in Solomonville, several local citizens petitioned to have his death sentence reduced to life. Chacon was hung on November 21, 1902. Before the execution he asked for a cigarette and a cup of coffee and then he gave a half hour speech explaining that he was innocent of the murder that he was being hung for. He shook hands with several of his admirers and his last words were, “Adios todos amigos” which means “goodbye to all of my good friends”. He still has living descendents and his gravestone in San Jose Cemetery has the inscription, “Augustine Chacon, 1861-1902, He lived without fear, He faced death without fear, Hombre muy bravo”.

The Collins Kids

            On Monday I was back to my usual routine. It’s nice to break it up every now and then and yet there’s comfort to be found as well in regulated activities.

I finished working out the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Pour un Homme” and posted it on my translation blog.

I got caught up on my journal.

My hip muscles were still bothering me. I had to renew my books from the OISE Library. I have to renew them every two weeks but I can renew them three times online before I have to bring them in and take them out again. I had lost count how many times I’d renewed them and so I was dreading the possibility of having to ride downtown and agitate the muscle strain. I was relieved that they I was able to renew them online until June 10.

I finished editing the video of me playing and singing “L’alcool” by Serge Gainbourg and then uploaded it to YouTube.

I weighed 90.3 kilos in the late afternoon.

I was feeling kind of tired even though I’d taken a siesta. A bike ride would have perked me up but I couldn’t risk it.

For dinner I cooked a potato, some broccoli, heated two chicken drumsticks and some gravy and watched The Steve Allen Show from December 23, 1956.

Most of the songs and skits were more sentimental than interesting. The show starts with Santa Clause going “ho ho ho” and then the camera scrolls down to reveal Steve Allen tickling his feet with a feather. The opening act was really the best thing on the show. The Collins Kids performed Rock Around the Clock and In My Teens. Larry Collins, who was 12 at the time, was a virtuoso guitarist. Lorrie, who was 14 at the time of this performance, two years later began dating Ricky Nelson and when she was seventeen she married Johnny Cash’s manager. Larry became a successful songwriter, with his most famous song being Delta Dawn. Lorrie died after a fall last year. The other main performer was singer and comedic actor Martha Raye, who did a couple of mostly silent skits with a lot of movement and facial expressions. There were also two Christmas songs by the Vienna Boys choir, which was formed six years after Columbus stumbled on America. Steve interviewed Norman Vincent Peale. Nobody on the show could top the Collins Kids.

         

Connie Russell

            On Sunday I got up at 5:00 as usual and did my yoga, but after that, since it was my birthday, I broke my regular schedule. I did my song practice but often chose different songs according to preference and spent a little more time working out the chords  to one particular song.

            On a normal day I would have spent an hour in the morning writing in my journal about the previous day and since on Saturday I’d gone to the food bank I would have come back to it later in the day to finish it. I decided this time to just get it all out of the way in the morning and so I wrote for three hours until it was finished. I had my usual Sunday breakfast of a piece of cinnamon toast with margarine and a bowl of spoon size shredded wheat with milk and honey, except that today I had an extra piece of cinnamon toast.

            I looked at some porn for a while, shaved and showered and then rode up to The Dufferin Mall to buy a pillow at Walmart. The pillow that I have is fine in terms of comfort but I sometimes pick up the odour of insecticide left over from when I had bed bugs four years ago.

            They had some pillows on sale for $5 but I was drawn to one for $9 with a cotton shell that was firm and which was said to be ideal for side sleepers. While I was there I also renewed my sock supply and get ten pairs for $8.

            I then went down to Freshco to buy some vanilla Hagen Das and a small tub of sour cream.

            On the way home I stopped at Home Hardware to buy a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap to clean my wood floor.

            I bypassed my place and went to Ali’s to buy a spicy potato roti for lunch. By the time I got home it was 15:00. I started eating the roti with lemonade but that was gone fairly quickly because the roti was so spicy and so I had to eat it with a beer. The roti was delicious.

            I watched an instalment of Last Week Tonight that I’d downloaded a few weeks ago. In it John Oliver interviews Monica Lewinsky and tells Jay Leno to go fuck himself for all of the slut shaming jokes he told about Lewinsky over the years.

            I took a late siesta siesta and tried out the new pillow. I woke up after two hours with a stiff neck. Maybe I could get used to it but I think I’ll just stick with my old pillow for now. I’ll keep the new one for when my daughter comes to visit.

            I watched some more porn and then went out to Six Point Pizza across the street and bought a pepperoni slice for dinner. This was the first time I’d tried the pizza there since they opened over a year ago and it sucked. I could get a better slice from Pizza Pizza.

            I watched an instalment of the Steve Allen Show from April 5, 1959. This was after he’d co-founded and hosted the Tonight Show. It was an interesting format with some regular players like Don Knotts who went on to become famous from doing other shows. The regulars played characters in sketches. One of them involved an interview by Steve with a mob boss and the funniest line was that he made the most of his money from selling protection to the United States Army. There were two singing guests. One was Connie Russell, who was attractive and had a strong voice. The other was David Allen, who had more range but less of a stage presence. Both of them did uninteresting songs but I was impressed with the dancers and the choreography that accompanied them. The comedy guests were the Three Stooges and Lenny Bruce. Steve Allen joked that there is no type of satirical humour that will not offend someone and so he’d decided that once a month he would book a comedian that offends everybody and get it all over with. So he introduced Lennie Bruce. Lennie’s sketch consisted of an explanation of how he became offensive. He said he used to come to school drunk when he was seven or eight and he’d anger the teacher by calling Columbus a fink. Then listed words that offend him, such as “segregation”. He did a skit about an eight-year-old kid sniffing glue but gave the child the voice of George MacReady, who had a famously snooty voice. Then he outlined a fake musical he’d written about a couple that had broken up and gotten back together so many times that it was driving their kid nuts and so they decide to break up for the sake of the kid. The Three Stooges did a silly skit in which Curly played a Maharaja with special talents and Moe was his promoter and Larry was the one who had the knives thrown at him. Whenever Moe addressed the Maharaja he’d say “Maha!” and Curly would respond “Aha?”

Dementia

            Early Saturday morning I had trouble sleeping because my hip was bothering me. I should probably stop saying “my hip” because I don’t think that’s the problem. Having looked up the symptoms I’m pretty sure that I have an overworked gluteus maximus, also known as wallet syndrome, resulting from riding my bike too far before those muscles had been conditioned up to going that distance. I rode up to Birchmount and almost Eglinton a couple of weeks ago and it was clearly too much. I tried to ease back on my riding but I didn’t do it enough and so it kept straining the muscles. When I got up at 5:00 my glutes on the right didn’t feel as bad as the day before.

            I finished memorizing and started learning the chords to a 45-second song by Serge Gainsbourg from 1972 that I recently translated, which at first I’d thought was a parody of a commercial. But it turns out that this was a real jingle that he’d done for the Caron perfume company for their eau de toilette for men called “Pour un Homme de Caron”. The song translates as: “

I pass for a man / not a very handsome one / but still for a man / full of seduction // What gives me my charm / and renders me armed / is my secret: Pour un Homme de Caron // There are for a man / a few tricks of fashion / that can carry a woman / into passion // What gives me my charm / and renders me armed / is my secret: Pour un Homme de Caron // Pour un Homme de Caron: A touch of cologne and a whole lot of charm”.

            The weather forecast had been calling for rain on Saturday all week but for the first couple of hours it was dry outside and so I thought I might have caught a break for later when I went to the food bank line up. But it started raining about an hour before it was time to go. I considered skipping it and keeping dry at home but finally decided that it would save me some money to go.

            There were more people in line than I expected for such a rainy day but then it was the last Saturday before the social assistance cheques would be issued so the cupboards would be barer now than next weekend.

            Graham was a few places ahead of me and chatting with a young man behind him whom I hadn’t seen before. Behind them was a big woman with a big black umbrella and behind her was the mumbling old man that’s been there the last few times. I was behind him but I stepped back to leave a space for the tenants in 1501 Queen West to get out, but also to avoid him shooting snot rockets onto the sidewalk at his feet and the fact that he was smoking. It seems to me that people in the line-up smoke more on rainy days but I would have to do a study to say for sure. The cigarette cupboards certainly don’t seem to be bare at the end of the month. There were people behind and in front of me smoking all up and down the line and so it was very difficult to avoid.

            I’d brought my book to read but couldn’t take it out in the rain and so I paced a bit until I came over to chat with Graham and his companion.

            Graham was talking about the people that mark their places with shopping carts and then go for breakfast. I said it would be funny to get hold of a mannequin and to use it to mark one’s place. One could dress them up and it would be especially hilarious if there were a whole line of them. The other guy said that one could use crash test dummies and then started talking about a Crash Test Dummies cartoon series. Looking it up I see that there was no Crash Test Dummies half hour cartoon show. There was one half hour special in 1993 featuring The Incredible Crash Test Dummies and after that a series of animated shorts were produced.

            Graham said he’d heard of the show but he’d never watched television with his kids or his wife. I asked, “What about when you were a kid?” but he said they hadn’t had a television when he was growing up because he was brought up in England. He must have come here when he was small because he has no British accent whatsoever. He said one needed a licence to have a television in England, although the licence for black and white TVs was cheaper. The other guy said he knew about this because his parents are from England. I was shocked to hear that such a license ever existed, let alone that it still exists. It’s basically a television tax that pays for 75% of the operation of the BBC. Right now it costs 154.50 pounds ($263. 96) per year. It’s half price for the legally blind and free for those 75 and older.

            I’d read that they still had outdoor toilets up until the 1960s on older urban properties in England. Graham confirmed that his family had to use a community washroom where they lived in a town outside of Yorkshire. He said there had also been a community telephone. I told them that where I grew up in New Brunswick we had a party line with our ring being one long and one short. But when I lived at St Clarens and St Clair in 1988 we shared a line with an old Italian lady who used to cut in when I was on the phone and ask, “You finish?”

            Graham said that he’s set up his laptop in his room as a security camera that’s triggered by his door being opened. He’s captured on video his landlord coming into his room twice. His landlord denied it but Graham showed him the proof and warned him not to do it again.

            I asked if people are still stealing his stuff. He said they are but that he’s got a bar fridge in his room now so he only has to use the community fridge for the freezer and he’s thinking of wrapping everything in tape to discourage thieves.

            Graham pays $600 for a room with a shared kitchen. The other guy said he has a two-bedroom basement apartment for $600 on St Clarens.

            Graham was living in a shelter before he got his room and he said the shelter system finds people rooms but there are no compromises. Whatever place they find for you, even if it’s a crack house like his building, you have to either take it or live on the street.

            The line started moving about fifteen minutes early. Martina went down the line and told any smokers to step out of line and smoke at the outer edge of the sidewalk. This seems to be a new policy and it’s nice but it’s too bad it’s only enforced after the food bank opens and not during most of the time people are standing in line and smoking. I wonder if my complaints have had anything to do with this rule and if anyone involved with the food bank have read any of my Food Bank Adventures. It’s possible that it’s just that the tenants in 1501 Queen have complained about the smoke coming into their apartment windows while people are smoking right up next to the building.

            I looked behind me and saw the old man standing three places back. I reminded him that he was ahead of me. He said, “I don’t know!” and came forward.

            When I was third in line the woman at the front stepped forward to stand out of the rain and shake out her umbrella. The old man shuffled forward in tiny steps as he swayed his body uncertainly from side to side. The woman stepped inside and he followed her. Suddenly Chico, the guy in the wheelchair who just sits chain smoking by the entrance and pushed the button to open the door for people, yelled at him that he wasn’t supposed to go in. Another guy, who always seems drunk, and who also just hangs around there smoking, I guess while he’s waiting for PARC to open, yelled at the old man to get back in line and told him he was lucky he didn’t punch him out. Meanwhile the big woman who’d already gone inside didn’t get yelled at.

            Downstairs, as five of us were lined up to show our cards to Valdene at the desk she said to the old man that he’d already been there yesterday and so he couldn’t get any food. He stood there swaying from side to side, looking confused as I stepped around him to get processed.

            My volunteer was a young man I hadn’t seen there before.

            I took a bag of Terra “exotic” vegetable chips. But I’ve heard that exoticism is wrong, so if I’m attracted to the chips because they are exotic then I’m ethically at fault. I was allowed four chewy fruit and nut granola bars and he offered me a box of Cheerios but Cheerios are too light and sometimes they just float away even when you pour air on them.

            I was just selecting a can of chickpeas and another of fava beans when Valdene yelled. I turned and saw her storming towards the old man because she’d noticed that he’d put some of the food near the exit in his bag. She ordered him to leave it as she came for the bag. He called out, “My bag!” and finally she picked it up and tossed it down on the shelf beside him and shouted, “Take it! And don’t come back this week!” I think he left without his bag. I said to Valdene, “He’s confused”. She barked back, “He’s not confused!” I assured her that I’ve talked with him and I know he’s confused but she insisted, “He was smart enough to come here yesterday and to try to take our food today!” I said, “It doesn’t take brains to go to the food bank!” What could have happened that made the old man come twice in one week was that he might very possibly have forgotten that he’d even been there on Friday. He could have gotten his groceries on that day, put them down and then forgot them when he walked away. But no elderly man with dementia is going to pull the wool over Valdene’s eyes. If I were a volunteer at this food bank I would clash with her like crazy.

            I got a small bottle of Simply Lemonade and four fruit punch drinking boxes. My final selection from the shelves was a package of kalamansi flavoured Pancit Canton instant noodles. Kalamansi is a type of lime from the Philippines and Pancit Canton is a Filipino noodle dish.

            At Angie’s section I took the pack of eight single servings of Activia yogourt but later saw that they contain stivia, which gives me a headache. Maybe I’ll be able to give them to a homeless person later.

            I was out of eggs and so I took the three she offered, but to avoid breaking them I slipped them into my right jacket pocket. Of course later on one of them got broken because I forgot that they were there, but I managed to save it anyway by pouring it from the bag into a frying pan to cook and have on a sandwich for lunch.

            Since I didn’t want milk Angie gave me a carton of orange-tangerine juice. She also gave me a pack or frozen ground pork.

            The bread section had a lot of pita this time but I decided not to take any.

            Sylvia’s carrots and potatoes didn’t look in great shape but I took two bunches of broccoli. She still had bags of five vine tomatoes and offered me two bags but I didn’t think I could go through ten tomatoes in a week. Yes, I know I could have taken the extra five and made sauce, but that’s only something I might have done when I was raising my daughter.

            From the “take as much as you want” section near the door I grabbed a cantaloupe, a zucchini and a bunch of very ripe bananas. I was trying to find a bunch that was not so ripe but Sylvia, with slight impatience, told me that they were all the same. Yes, I know I could make banana bread with overripe bananas but I wasn’t going to do that either without someone else to bake for.

            It was pouring when I left the food bank and I was pretty much soaked from the three-minute ride home. I wanted to go out to the supermarket but thought I’d wait until the shower subsided, which was about half an hour later.

            At No Frills I bought grapes, a bag of three mangoes, a larger, unlabeled and an un-bar-coded pack of strawberries among the smaller ones for $2. The cashier listed it as “other” on the bill. I also splurged on a bag of cherries. I got detergent, mouthwash and shaving gel and then from the other side of the store I grabbed yogourt and hot salsa.

            I had an egg, cheese, tomato and lettuce sandwich between two halves of a single slice of toast for lunch.

            It rained off and on all day and quite heavily with thunder in the evening.

            I worked on my journal.

            I made two lean ground beef burgers and had one for dinner with lettuce and tomato and a beer while watching “The Madness of King George”. The movie was well made and well acted, especially by Helen Mirren, but I found the story disappointing. I thought it was going to deal with the conflict with King George III on which the whole English Romantic period was based. It also only covers one six-month period of madness from which he recovered in time to keep control of the throne from which George the Prince of Wales, his son had been plotting to wrest him. A few years later the king did go permanently insane.

Geraldine Page

            On Friday my hip was bothering me more than ever. It's not painful and I’m not limping but there’s an ache and tightness there. I decided that I wouldn’t take a bike ride that day. A cyclists website calls it “wallet syndrome” and it supposedly comes from overworking the gluteus maximas muscles.

            I finished the second draft of my bed bug diary. For the third draft I started taking out the dates so it’s less time-specific and more compatible with prose. 

I weighed 89.1 kilos in the afternoon.

I managed to clip the beginning of my July 22, 2017 song practice video to the place just before I begin singing and playing “L’alcool”. Next time I’ll clip the end and then render the video.

I translated part of “Les ramparts du Sud” by Boris Vian. The story gets increasingly absurd as it goes along. A guy chops down a tree with a monkey wrench and then cuts it up into sticks.

I grilled a pack of chicken drumsticks and had two with a potato and gravy while watching the Playhouse 90 made for TV movie Portrait of a Murderer from 1958. It’s based on a true story about Donald Bashor, who in the process of committing two separate burglaries bludgeoned to death the women that caught him in the act.

The story begins with a documentary style re-enactment of Bashor’s arrest, trial and execution and there are actual recordings of his confessions and interviews with the press. Then it switches to the dramatization of the story as ex-con Bashor tries to live a normal life with his girlfriend Florry but at night he drinks and then commits burglaries. His mother was an alcoholic and now he can’t stand to see women drink although he drinks a lot himself. He refuses to let Florry drink. He’s extremely generous and any time someone asks him for money he gives it to them but of course most of his money comes from crime. When he is caught during a burglary he runs and is shot in the arm. At the station he confesses to two murders and although his lawyer says that in cases of first-degree murder the defendant always has to initially lead not guilty, he refuses. Although it is determined that he was schizophrenic it was found that he was sane at the time of the murders. That assessment is in itself insane or at least stupid. He felt like another person committed the murders and his last lines before going to the gas chamber are that he wished doctors and judges could have just killed the bad half of himself and left the good half alive.

Bashor was played by Tab Hunter, who was a teen heartthrob in the 50s who also had a hit record with the song “Young Love” but he wasn't a great singer. He put in a very good performance in this movie but he didn’t get many challenging roles like this one and so after he lost his teen appeal he didn’t get as many starring parts.

Florry was played by Geraldine Page, who was considered to be one of the greatest actors in the history of the United States. She was married to Rip Torn, who is Sissy Spasek’s cousin. Page was the first woman to be nominated seven times for an Oscar without winning but with her eighth nomination for A Trip to Bountiful, she won.

            Another character in the story who stood out was Sandra, who was a dancer that Bashor leant money to but whom he began screaming at when she tried to invite him home because she’d been drinking. Sandra was played by Barbara Turner, who was the mother of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Turner became a screenwriter and wrote the adaptation that became the movie Pollock.

Postal Station C

            My hip was still bothering me on Thursday morning, maybe almost as much as Wednesday. I suppose I could be developing arthritis in that area but I have it in my knee, ankle and back too and I can still function. Hopefully it will get better enough so I can get back into the long bike rides this summer.

            I finished memorizing Serge Gainsbourg’s "Elle est si" and since it's not a song it was a nice relief to just post it and not have to deal with the chords. When I work out the chords to a song and then upload it to my blog I have to spend several minutes adjusting the placing of a lot of the chords because they change position slightly in the different format.

            A couple of weeks ago my creative writing professor Albert Moritz sent out a general email to the students in the course to ask which of us want comments on our portfolios and then he would invite each of those to his office. I said I definitely wanted comments but suggested that we meet for a beer instead of his office. Today he said we could do the beer thing and he said for me to pick a place in Parkdale. So I’ll be meeting the poet laureate for a beer at Mezzrows in June.

            Even though my hip was bothering me with a dull ache, since it was a nice day I didn’t think it was healthy to not exercise and so I decided to try riding to Yonge Street. Instead of my usual route I took Queen because I wanted to check my mail, as the door to our building still hasn’t been fixed so the mail carrier can get in. Lee wasn’t at the counter this time but the middle aged clerk with the long black hair was there as well as an older man. He checked the back for my mail while the woman started talking about what a nice day it was. It was quite warm but breezy and I was just wearing my tank top. I told her it was surprising how warm it was outside because it was fairly cool in my apartment perhaps because the breeze was blowing in off the lake. She wondered if I could see the lake from my place. I told her I couldn’t but I didn’t think one would have to be very high up to see it. Maybe even from the third or fourth floor. She said she always chooses to take the Spadina streetcar to Union Station just so she can see the lake and be relaxed by it after a hectic day. I didn’t ask but I wondered when her day was hectic since neither her or her colleague had been doing anything when I walked in. There probably are busy times of day for her but I see more traffic at the little post office in the back of Guardian Drugs in Parkdale. I’d heard that the old post office building at that location would be closing down. She confirmed that they’d be moving in October but she didn’t know where. It turned out there was no mail for me. I wondered why I hadn’t gotten my health card yet but when I looked it up later I saw that it takes four to six weeks and today it had been exactly four weeks.

            I rode up Dovercourt to Bloor, across to Yonge, down to Queen and headed west. I stopped at Freshco where grapes were on sale and so I got seven bags. I also bought Bavarian sandwich bread, cinnamon raisin bread, milk, spoon size shredded wheat, ground beef and coffee.

            I got home at 18:18 and got caught up on my journal.

            My hip didn’t feel any worse for the trip to Yonge and back but the next morning tends to say more than after a ride.

            I weighed 90.9 kilos after the ride.

            I listened to the video of me playing “L’alcool". The echo sounded kind of cool in places but ultimately it seemed a bit much. It only took trimming .07 seconds off the sound to take the echo away. After that I tried to trim the first 19 minutes off the synchronized video but something went wrong and I lost the sound altogether. So I closed down the project and didn’t save what I'd done. Then I reopened it and trimmed the sound again just enough to synchronize the whole thing and then I saved it and quit. Now that it’s saved I won’t lose the synchronization when I tackle cutting it again.

            A big “For Sale” sign has been placed between the second and third floors of the building across the street from mine. It’s a stand-alone building next door to the Dollarama parking lot. Not many Dollaramas have or need parking lots and so they’d probably sell theirs easy enough. I wonder if the building will get bought and torn down and then the two spaces of the parking lot and the building turned into a construction site.

            I boiled a potato and heated some gravy and a chicken leg for dinner and watched the two final episodes of the Big Bang Theory.

            Spoiler alert!

            In the first story Amy and Sheldon get the call that they've won the Nobel Prize. Sheldon wonders if he's dreaming and so Leonard takes the opportunity to slap him hard. As we all know, Sheldon finds any change very difficult to deal with and winning the Nobel Prize is his biggest change ever. But that’s not the only change he has to deal with. Now that Amy is in the public eye she’s gotten a makeover and is now gorgeous. Suddenly after all these years the elevator in their building has been fixed. Penny takes Sheldon for a drink and helps him accept the change. He even rides the elevator with her when they come home.

            The second story begins with Amy and Sheldon preparing to go to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize. They’ve bought plane tickets and booked hotel rooms for Penny, Leonard, Bernadette, Howard and Raj. Amy and Penny return from picking up their dresses for the prize ceremony and Amy says that the tailor had to take hers in and let Penny’s out and it was the best day of her life. If no one got that hint then it is revealed to us but not their friends a minute or so later that Penny is pregnant. On the plane it turns out that Raj is seated next to Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame. Also on the plane Sheldon sees Penny going to the bathroom so many times that he begins to panic that she has a disease that will ruin his moment. They have to reveal to him that Penny is pregnant. Leonard is upset with Sheldon for being indifferent to Penny’s pregnancy. Howard is upset that Sheldon is indifferent to him being worried about his children back home. Both couples decide to leave but then change their minds because they love Sheldon after all. At the ceremony Sarah Michelle Gellar is sitting next to Raj and reminds him this is not a date and so asks why he’s holding her hand. Sheldon puts aside his prepared and very long acceptance speech and simply begins to one by one and then collectively thank his friends. In the middle he asks, “Is that Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” and she waves.

Christine Baranski

            On Wednesday when I got up my right hip was a lot more sore than the dull ache I’d been experiencing for the last few days. That told me that riding my bike to Coxwell the afternoon before was a bit too far and that I’d have to ease back for a while. It didn’t feel that bad after yoga but I’m going to go with how it feels when I get up.

            I spent half an hour synchronizing the sound and video for “L'alcool". I got it so it’s just so slightly out of sync that it produces an interesting echo effect. I’m going to have to listen to it again to see if I like it that way. I could always make one video with the echo and another without.

            It often seems that the first dream I have when I’m drifting off to sleep involves me almost hitting someone with my bike and then slightly waking up.

During a siesta I dreamed of someone whose pictures I’d seen many times on an amateur porn site. She was lounging on the floor of a party in a short skirt and tight top and I noticed and recognized her as I had just gotten up to leave. She noticed me too and I lingered. Our eyes met and it looked like she might get up to come with me.

            A 60% chance of rain had been forecast for the afternoon around the time I would have gone for my bike ride and so I decided not to go. Closer to the time I would normally get ready to leave the forecast changed to 30% precipitation but it was already on my mind that for the sake of my hip it might be wise to take a day off from riding anyway and so I stayed home.

            I weighed 91 kilos around that time. Three hours later I weighed 90 kilos. Maybe I peed a kilo.

            I worked on my bed bug story, my alley poem and translations of Les Enfants du Paradis and Les Ramparts du Sud.

            For dinner I had an egg with one piece of toast and a beer and watched the two episodes of the Big Bang Theory that lead up to the series finale.

            Spoiler alert!
            Sheldon and Amy try to apologize for Amy’s outburst against the two researchers that accidentally proved their asymmetry theory. But Dr Pemberton says that all scientific theories are proved by accident, which makes Amy mad again because it’s not true. Dr. Pemberton and Dr. Campbell may win the Nobel Prize for proving a theory that they don’t even understand. Suddenly Kripke reveals that he has proof that Pemberton plagiarized his PHD thesis. If Amy and Sheldon made use of that information they could ruin both Pemberton and Campbell’s chances at stealing the Nobel from Amy and Sheldon. When Amy and Sheldon tell their friends about their moral dilemma Leonard decides to get the dirt on Pemberton from Kripke. But when Penny tells Amy what Leonard is planning it puts her and Sheldon back in the ethical problem because they know. Finally Amy and Sheldon meet with Pemberton and Campbell and give them Kripke’s proof. This has almost the same effect as exposing Pemberton because Campbell hadn’t known about the plagiarism. Campbell reveals that he’s sleeping with Pemberton’s wife and they begin to physically fight. Pemberton gets fired and Campbell has lost his reputation.

            In the second story Leonard’s mother Beverly comes to visit. She is strangely nice and taking an interest in Leonard’s work. But later she reveals that she is researching a book about Leonard’s reactions. Leonard gets upset and finally confronts his mother. He’s about to tell her all the ways she failed him as a mother but then he stops and tells her he forgives her. She says that it feels good to be forgiven and then she hugs him.

            The two mothers on this show are both very sexy.

            Beverly is played by Christine Baranski.

Off the Shoulder

            On Tuesday I started memorizing Serge Gainsbourg’s “Elle est si”. It only has four verses and it’s recited, so I won’t have to work out any chord and it won't take long.

            I had a can of chickpeas with garlic and olive oil for lunch.

            My right hip still ached in the morning but not any more than before and so it didn’t feel like my bike ride to Broadview the day before had done me any harm. I decided to try riding to Coxwell in the afternoon. It was quite warm and so I just wore my tank top with an open shirt on top.  Before heading back I just rode with the tank top.

            I stopped at Freshco to buy toilet paper and grabbed the pack of twelve double rolls of Cashmere that was on display at the front. There were long line-ups, especially for the express. The one next to the express was shorter and I stepped behind a woman who really stood out in the crowd, especially when she stood sideways. She was wearing a tight, red off-the-shoulder sweater-top over a pair of very successfully surgically enhanced breasts. She had long, very straight light brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail and with an artificial red flower on the side. She had a tattoo on the back of her neck, one on one shoulder and another on one arm. Her body was slim and fit and she was wearing black tights. Her face seemed older than her body and while it had some nice attractive features that would have been enhanced if she’d been wearing makeup, I would not say that she had a strikingly pretty or beautiful face. She had more the kind of face one would appreciate over time. She looked at me a couple of times and when she put the grocery divider down for me and I said, “Thank you” she looked at me, looked down and smiled slightly, and said, “Your welcome”. After I put my toilet paper down she suddenly asked the very tattooed young bearded hipster in the baseball cap behind me to go over to where the toilet paper was being displayed and grab her a pack. He obeyed and she thanked him and then she said to me that I’d reminded her to get the toilet paper and thanked me as well. Her groceries, besides the toilet paper were a large pack of ground beef, a can of red kidney beans, a bag of tortilla chips and a case of Pepsi. She showed the cashier a coupon each on her phone for the toilet paper and the pop. She suggested to me that I could probably get the $2 discount on the toilet paper as well. I left while she was bagging her things. I wonder if I’ll run into her again and maybe have more to talk about.

            I boiled a potato, sautéed a green pepper with some onion and heated a chicken leg for dinner. I watched the last two episodes of the first season of Sea Hunt.

            The penultimate story of the season begins with a diver being murdered underwater by two other divers. They shut off his tanks until he drowns and then turn the tanks back on. After he is found Mike is hired to investigate. The drowned man had been working for a chemical company that makes important chemicals out of sea vegetation. The company is on an island and so they have a phone line running along the bottom of the sea to the mainland. It had been the drowned diver’s job to check the line. Mike discovers that the line has been tapped. The head of the company says that important phone calls are made at a certain time every day detailing their research. Certain equipment is brought in to detect when the line is being tapped and when they see it they look for the diver’s bought but find none. Finally Mike dives and follows the line where he sees the divers tapping the line with high tech recording equipment. Mike sneaks up and cuts one diver’s air tube so that he’ll only have to deal with one man. The other man swims away and Mike follows him to a large pipe that leads to the chemical company. He follows it to an engine room where he fights the other diver, finally knocking him out.

            In the final story of the season Mike has become a one-third partner in a manganese prospecting expedition. The main partner is a geologist named Pete Otis who has selected the area of search based on having dredged from the bottom a hunk of manganese. Mike is diving but finding nothing but sharks, one of which he has to spear. In an earlier episode Mike had insisted that sharks tend not to attack people but these seem to be hunting him every time he gets in the water. On another dive Mike gets his foot caught in a fake looking giant clam and has to pry it open with his spear gun. When he surfaces there is a storm approaching and they go to the nearest cove where they are met by a young woman named Pepita that knows Pete. She invites them to her house and feeds them and then her fisherman father Esteban arrives, who also knows Pete. It is revealed that Pete did not find the manganese rock sample but Esteban did. Mike accuses Pete of lying and they fight until Mike wins. When Pete comes to he explains that he hadn’t wanted to get Esteban’s hopes up but that he’d planned on giving him half of his two-thirds. They all become partners and Esteban guides them the next day to where he found the manganese. Mike finds lots of it. Pete says that first they have to set a marker to establish their claim and then register it. While Mike is below setting the marker, Pete hits Esteban over the head and throws him to the sharks. Pete tries to start the boat to head for shore but Mike had anticipated a double-cross and disabled the engine. When Mike surfaces Pete begins shooting at him. Mike submerges and then removes his tanks. He ties them to the marker line so that Pete will shoot at the bubbles while Mike holds his breath and swims to the other side. Mike climbs into the boat and aims his rifle but Mike gets him with the spear gun. He saves Esteban just before a shark gets to him and then saves Pete. He calls the police before he and Esteban file their claim.

            Pepita was played by Josephine Parra, who was credited at Jo Summers.

            One thing weird about Sea Hunt is the opening music. It feels like something better suited for a suspense show like something by Hitchcock. I would have chosen something more melodic and dramatic like the theme for Adventures in Paradise.

Victoria Day

            On Monday I rode down the street to mail my renewal form for this year’s Toronto Housing Allowance. The deadline is the end of June but I thought I’d get it out of the way. That extra $250 a month has saved my life over the last year and eight months.

Afterwards I locked my bike up the street from the hardware store because I wanted to buy some Murphy’s Oil Soap for my floor or something else that’s good fro cleaning wood. When I got to Home Hardware it was caged up and I suddenly remembered that it was Victoria Day. That’s the second time I’d forgotten it was a long weekend.

For lunch I had the rest of the roasted potatoes from the pot roast dinner.

I started working towards synchronizing the sound and video for the song “L’alcool” in Movie Maker. It took me a while to remember how to do it because it’s been over a year since I last edited a video. I always turned on the sound recorder first in those sessions and it kept on recording until I turned it off, while the camera’s memory card only lasts for just under half an hour. I had to delete the first few minutes of nothing from the sound recorder. I stopped with the sound and video being out of sync by about two minutes and I’ll narrow it down next time.

I took a bike ride in the late afternoon but when I started out I was only wearing a tank top with an open shirt on top. I’d shoved my hoody in my backpack in case it was cooler than I’d thought and it was, so I stopped before the underpass on Brock to get my hoody, but it turned out that I’d grabbed my sweat pants instead. I decided to button up my shirt and see if that would be enough. I was halfway between the underpass and Dundas when I realized it wasn’t enough and so I turned around and went home to get my hoody, a scarf and my spring gloves.

I was wondering why there was so little traffic and then realized that I’d forgotten again that it was Victoria Day.

Since my hip had still been bothering me a bit when I got up that morning I decided to only ride as far as Broadview.

I stopped at Freshco on my way home because I wanted to buy toilet paper and realized that I’d once again forgotten that it was Victoria Day.

I ate some watermelon when I got home and weighed 91.2 kilos after that.  I haven’t had a bowel movement for a couple of days so that might be why my weight is going up.

I grilled three chicken legs in the oven, boiled a potato, sautéed chopped onion and green pepper and heated some gravy. I had dinner while watching two episodes of Sea Hunt.

In the first story Mike has been hired by an insurance company to find a ship that has gone down in the Caribbean. The man he was supposed to work with had arrived earlier because Mike’s plane had been delayed by the hurricane that sunk the ship. We see that Mike’s partner is attacked and murdered underwater before Mike’s plane arrives. Mike is told by authorities that only one other man knows where the Minerva went down. He’s a local man named Lord Christobal. Mike goes to see him and finds him singing a calypso song called Dive Deep while being shouted at by his boss Webley. Webley is trying to manipulate Christobal’s superstition into avoiding diving for the Minerva by telling him the ship is hexed. Webley tells Mike that Christobal is under contract to him and so he can’t help him. Mike hires Webley’s boat to get around the problem. But Webley is the one that murdered Lambert and he tries to kill Mike as well. With a hose he fills Mike’s spare tank with the carbon monoxide exhaust from the compressor that is supposed to put oxygen in the tanks. But Christobal ends up using the tank. Mike discovers that the Minerva was scuttled for the insurance because it had no cargo. Christobal becomes poisoned and there is no spare tank for Mike to go down and save him. Webley tries to stop Mike from going down and Mike knocks him out. The authorities arrive in a boat that happens to have a resuscitator. Mike saturates his lungs with oxygen so he can hold his breath longer while diving to rescue Christobal. He saves him and Webley is arrested.

Christobal was played by Bernie Gozier, which I think is a Hawaiian name.

In the second story Mike is called to Baja, Mexico to investigate the sightings of a sea monster. It moves at incredible speed, scares the whales and tears through fishing nets. Two fishermen claim to have seen it briefly. It arrives at the same time every day. Mike dives to try to photograph it but when it comes it creates so much turbulence that he his tossed around too much to see it. Finally they set up a series of fishing nets along its route and it is caught in the fourth one. As I suspected it was a man made object. It was spherical and looked very much like the Japanese landmine Mike encountered in a previous episode. Navy intelligence says it’s an underwater satellite from an unknown country. I did not know there was such a thing and I don’t think there is. There was nothing about that object that could have propelled it through the water like that. There are objects called underwater satellites but they follow currents and don’t move under their own power. There are now underwater drones but there certainly weren’t at that time.

Aline Towne

              On Sunday when I got up my right hip was still a little sore.

A little after noon I got caught up on my journal.

I started a project in Movie Maker to make a video of the song “L’alcool” from my song practice of July 22, 2017. The video loaded to the file with no problem but I couldn't upload the microphone recording of the same session that I’d done with Sound Recorder. When I checked with Help it was suggested that I uncheck all the filters but that didn’t help. The final suggestion was to convert the file from M4A to WAV. I'm pretty sure I didn't have to convert my sound recordings for my previous videos so I wonder what changed. I don't think that Windows supports Movie Maker any more and so I doubt if Windows updates would have changed it. The best recommendation for converting sound files was Cloud Convert. My first two attempts failed but the third worked.

I went for a bike ride at around 17:00 but since my hip had been sore in the morning I figured it wise to only go as far as Yonge Street.

On my way out I ran into my upstairs neighbour David. He told me he’s going back to Ethiopia on Wednesday because his sister is in the hospital on life support.

It was a warm day and I just wore a tank top with an open shirt on top but I would have been more comfortable with just the tank top.

I noticed there’s another cannabis shop opened in the Queen West area, this one being just west of Spadina. Nova Cannabis is a much less interesting name than The Hunny Pot.

When I got home I opened up my video project and was able to upload the converted sound recording.

I weighed 90 kilos after my ride and so I’m just inside the upper borderline of healthy weight.

My next roof neighbour has a new little barbecue to replace the on the wind blow off the roof last summer. He was just breaking it in and happy when I went out on the deck to take out some garbage. A few minutes later though it started pouring rain on his meat and his red peppers. Nature was making him gravy.

I had an egg with a piece of toast and a beer for dinner while watching two episodes of Sea Hunt.

The first story wasn’t much of a narrative. It just had some artificial suspense thrown in to unsuccessfully try to make it less boring. Mike is called to Canada by an engineering firm that wants to blow up a big rock just under the surface of the ocean that has wrecked many ships. The heads of the company are a married couple named Evelyn and Russ Hodges. Russ is an experienced diver but he’s reckless and after Mike saves his life he agrees to let Mike take charge. The company had planned on drilling under the rock to plant dynamite but Mike and Russ discover a cave that runs into the rock. Dynamite would be too cumbersome and so they decide to use much more dangerous to transport nitro-glycerine. Mike handles the nitro in cushioned containers to minimize shocks. He very carefully gets all the canisters into the cave but after running the detonator wire and connecting it to the nitro he sees an electric eel dangerously nibbling on the wire. Mike kills the eel and they blow up the rock from a safe distance.

The little goof in this story is that there are no electric eels outside of South America and they are fresh water dwellers.

Evelyn was played by Aline Towne, who was an avid world traveller. She starred in the serial Radar Men from the Moon and played Superman’s mother Lara in the first episode of The Adventures of Superman.

In the second story Mike is hired to supervise a diving party of six divers that he knows well. But as they wait for the tardy sixth diver a man named Peterson they don’t know shows up with a scooter and a spear gun. They go to an island, one side of which belongs to the navy and is off limits. They go to the public side and everyone is having a good time. They use the buddy system and Peterson is partnered with Ella. Peterson’s scooter is not very fast and won’t endanger anyone and so Mike allows him to use it. At one point as a joke Ella grabs hold of a turtle to race Peterson’s slow scooter but it swims her in another direction and Peterson uses the opportunity to slip away, showing the viewer that he had only been faking the slowness of his scooter. When Peterson turns up missing Mike organizes a search but they can’t find him anywhere his slow scooter could have gotten to. As Mike is searching from the air the pilot suggests that Peterson might have speared something that pulled him further away. They expand their search and see bubbles on the navy side of the island. Mike gets permission to search the classified waters and finds Peterson taking pictures of a top-secret underwater missile launching facility. Mike realizes Peterson is a spy. He sneaks up and grabs the camera. Peterson pursues him with the scooter. He fires two spears but misses. He follows Mike into a cave where Mike ambushes him and cuts off his air supply to subdue him.