Fluffy Books

            On March 15- On Sunday morning I woke up at 4:00 because I had gone to bed so early the night before. I stayed in bed until 4:38 and I was too sore to wait for the alarm.

When I got up the wifi had still not connected. I was wondering during song practice if the café across the street had shut down because of the coronavirus and taken the wifi with them. But afterwards I was able to connect. It’s a mystery because I didn’t notice that the café had opened up at all. Maybe someone above the place was doing downloads all night that had just bumped me out of sharing the stream.

From the early afternoon on, except to post my five and thirty year journals, I went dark on social media.

On March 16- On Monday I worked on my essay from 7:00 on, but slept from 10:00 to 11:30.

I had to take a break from my research paper to renew books at the library. Around noon I rode downtown to OISE. One of my books gets used a lot in the bathroom and I’d left it sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I guess it had been under the towel that I use to dry my hands and water has dripped on several pages. Consequently the pages have gotten fluffy and I guess it picked up a little grit from the edge of the bathtub where it sits. The librarian said twice that it was disgusting and asked if it had been like that in the first place. It hadn’t, but it also hadn’t been in great shape beforehand, so since she’d fed me the opportunity to lie I took it.

I had seen a notice online that the library would be closing from the next day on. I asked how I would have been able to renew my books if the deadline had been Tuesday. She didn’t exactly know but said that one option might have been to email the library to get them to do an override.

I asked also when the renovations on the building would be finished, since I still had to come in through the side door and access the library on the second floor. She said if not for all of the problems with the virus the work was supposed to have been finished by the end of this month. Now she didn’t know when things would be back to normal. .

            Most of the grape tomatoes I’d bought on Saturday were overripe and since I knew they were out of tomatoes at Freshco I stopped at Loblaws on the way home. I bought nothing but tomatoes but I had to stand in line about twenty minutes. It was the longest supermarket line-up I’d ever been in. Someone mentioned that at some other supermarkets the line-ups are two hours long.

            As I went down the escalator a guy passed me with no shopping bag and grumbled, “Fucking idiots standing in line!”

            I took an hour siesta in the afternoon and then worked on my paper until almost midnight. So far for the last two days working on my paper involved just editing notes and slowly eliminating fifty pages of unnecessary information with about a hundred more pages to go.