Juvenile Jungle

            On Saturday morning the old man in the dented silver-grey car drove past my place about fifty times when I was doing song practice. He still always makes a U-turn at O’Hara and then drives west to turn around again. He could have driven to Scarborough and back with the amount of driving he does in a very narrow stretch of Parkdale. I wonder if he’ll still be doing it after the Coffeetime downstairs closes forever on Tuesday.

I worked out the chords for the first verse of “L’amour prison” (Jailed in Love) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I didn’t go to the food bank and won’t be going for at least a few weeks because I have assignments to work on and can’t spare the time it takes to write my Food Bank Adventures.

            Around noon I washed the bottom shelves of the set of shelves in my kitchen hallway. There’s no point taking a picture to show that I washed it because the shelf is black and it’s in a dark corner.

            I rode down to No Frills where I bought four bags of black sable grapes, a pint of strawberries, six bars of Irish Spring soap, a bottle of Murphy’s Oil Soap, mouthwash, strawberry Greek yogourt, hot salsa and a bag of thick-cut chips.

            When I got home I went back downstairs to the Coffeetime and since they would be closing on Tuesday I bought one last plain donut. In the twenty-three years I’ve lived above the Coffeetime I don’t think I spent more than $23 there altogether.

            For lunch I had Triscuits and old cheddar and then I ate the donut with some strawberry yogourt. It was delicious! I love plain donuts but once Coffeetime is gone I wouldn’t bother to walk to Tim Hortons to buy one, so I thought I’d take advantage of proximity one last time.

            I was thinking about why the Maori are considered Indigenous to New Zealand while the Icelanders are not considered Indigenous to Iceland. The Maori were Polynesians that settled on New Zealand in the 13^th Century and the Icelanders were Vikings that settled on Iceland in the 9^th Century. In both cases they were the first humans to arrive in the place they settled. I read one argument that one can’t be considered Indigenous to a region unless one is colonized. That would mean that no one that lived in North America before first contact with Europeans was Indigenous and that seems like a fucked up argument. Someone else said that people have to have a harmonious relationship with their environment in order to be considered Indigenous. That would mean that the Aztecs, the Incas, the Toltecs and the Mayans were not Indigenous since their large populations and cities did negatively impact their environments.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story begins the morning after Kingfish and Sapphire return home from a party held by well-to-do people. Kingfish is sick because he made a pig of himself. She tells him that at a buffet one isn’t supposed to pull a chair up and eat directly from the bowls. He says he wasn’t the only vulture there and tells her that when he rested his hand on the table for a second someone put ketchup on it. Kingfish asks if any of his friends called to ask how he was feeling. Sapphire declares that he has no friends because he’s always trying to cheat them, especially Andy. He starts thinking about that and decides to turn over a new leaf. That day he goes and gives Andy $5 to prove he’s a new man but when Andy puts the money in his billfold Kingfish sees $200 in there. He immediately forgets his resolution and tries to con Andy into giving him the money. Andy walks away disgusted. Kingfish has a dream that he died and everybody’s happy about it. He decides to tell everybody that he’s going to kill himself. He shows Andy his suicide note and tells him he’s just on his way to get it notarized. Kingfish hides out in New Jersey and then after three days of not seeing him, his friends start getting worried. They raise $300 to pay a detective to track him down and are very happy when he is located in a hotel in New Jersey. Kingfish is also happy because now he knows he has friends and he’s especially happy that he has the $300 that he got from posing as the detective they hired to track himself down.

            I tried to copy some information from the pdf of the executive report on the Indian Day Schools class action suit. It seems certain sections allow themselves to be copied while others don’t. I converted it to a Word document on Cloud Convert but whenever I opened it the document would begin loading but then shut down along with any other document I happened to open. I had to just transcribe some of the information. There was one testimonial from someone that went to a reserve day school starting at seven and he was strapped whenever he spoke his own language. He also says he was sexually abused by nuns. I wonder what the nature of the sexual abuse would have been. Obviously any type of abuse is wrong but corporal punishment was not unique to reserve day schools. Since schools for learning the white man’s ways were asked for by the chiefs in the treaties one assumes they didn’t think the education was going to be in their own language. Of course they should have had teachers capable of teaching English in Native languages but I wonder how practically possible that was.

            I fried two strips of bacon, an egg and had them with toast and a beer while watching Zorro. In this and the previous story Diego and Garcia and Reyes are all back in Los Angeles, without any explanation as to why the change was made. Garcia has collected the annual tax money from the landowners and the local blacksmith Salvio and his son Eugenio have constructed a super strong rolling iron safe to transport the money to the governor. The key is sent ahead to the governor and the money is placed in the big iron box to be hauled with six horses to Monterrey. But when Garcia is about to place the enormous padlock on the box he stupidly closes the lock on itself before attaching it to the box. Salvio has to make another key. Meanwhile Eugenio is being seduced by a woman named Moneta who is ten years older than him. What Eugenio does not know is that Moneta is in league with a band of thieves that are trying to use him to open the box. The soldiers escorting the box are killed except for the driver, who releases the box and sends it over a cliff. Moneta tries to force Eugenio to open the box but he does not know how. He says he was merely bragging to impress her when he said he knew everything his father knew. The bandits instead hold Eugenio hostage so Salvio will come. When Diego sees Salvio ride out of town with a man that Bernardo had earlier seen try to snatch the copy of the key, he follows as Zorro. He rescues Eugenio and they capture the thieves.

            Moneta was played by Rebecca Welles, who later starred in “Juvenile Jungle”. She appeared in four films but most of her work was on television.