Some Cyclists Live In Their Own Little World

            I heard a sophisticated sounding voice like that of an Indian or Sri Lankan woman who’d been educated at a British school. Her voice was firm but not urgent and she only called out, “Christian!” once. In my head I responded, “Yes?” and then I woke up and looked the time on my phone. It was 4:59; one minute before I wanted to get up. I like a woman who’s a minute early.

            Nick Cushing had said he would be coming by early Tuesday afternoon, but since I had to leave for class by 16:30 I wanted to get in an hour and a have siesta beforehand, so I told him I’d have to be on my own by 14:30. When I found out that he’d first be doing something at Cad Gold Junior’s place, I figured that there was a fair chance that he wasn’t going to make it to my place at all. Just in case he did make it though I cleaned up my place a bit. I vacuumed the kitchen floor and cleaned the sink, the toilet and the floor in the bathroom for the first time in a few months.

            Nick didn’t make it after all so I took my nap.

            It rained all day in a strange coincidence with the Tuesday before, which was also a very wet day, though then it was because of rapidly melting snow and later rain. I was really hoping it would let up before I left home, and it did a little bit, though it was still splattery when I headed for campus. I got a slightly dam on my behind but it wasn’t too bad this time.

            On my way east on College there was a woman ahead of me riding her bike pretty hard, though I was gradually catching up, but her behaviour was strange. Whenever she was about to pass cars that were parked on the right hand side of the bike lane, instead of just veering to the left enough to avoid getting doored, she moved all the way out into the center lane and then once she was past the cars she went back to the bike lane. Meanwhile I was almost close enough to pass her but when she looked back and saw me she threw her left arm out and then followed it back to the middle of the road. At first I thought she was going to cross the street but then she edged back into the bike lane again. At that point I began to pass her, giving her a wide berth, but she called out to me that I couldn’t do that because she needed to (I couldn’t make out whatever crazy thing she said she needed to do). I got ahead of her but she protested from behind, saying, “Excuse me! Why did you do that?” I asked, “What are you talking about?” At the lights she edged herself past me again. I inquired, “What is wrong with you?” though it was a useless question because she was obviously mentally ill. From this point on she was so desperate not to be passed that she started going through red lights. At St George she was out in the middle of the street on the other side of the red light and while she waited for cars to get out of her way she was signaling to them almost like she was directing traffic. I felt bad about asking her what was wrong with her but at the same time I felt frustrated by my encounter with her.

Christopher Lloyd

            It was called “weapon eleven” and the trigger was simply to speak to the programmed and highly trained agent and pronounce the number “eleven”. This would put the human weapon under the speaker’s control and then what followed were detailed instructions of the mission, which the agent would complete by any means necessary.  He was always successful and the means were not always violent, though they could be brutally so. I don’t know why I dreamed about it though.

I had to do laundry on Monday, and on my way out the door I finally met my neighbour in apartment 2 across the hall from the west side of my apartment. For some reason I had always envisioned her as being middle aged and frumpish, but she’s actually much younger than I thought and kind of cute. I introduced myself to her and she told me her name was “Nicky”. I think she’s the first woman that has lived in this building since my daughter Astrid moved out five years ago.

            I noticed while locking my bike that they are about to open an A&W at the corner of Queen and Macdonell. That seems like an odd location for a major fast food chain. Nothing has ever lasted at that corner for decades and it’s one of the most run down and druggy parts of Parkdale. Then again, a few doors east on the same block there is always a line-up at the Tim Hortons. Maybe the Tibetans will really go as well for root beer and Papa Burgers.

            I grilled chicken drumsticks, boiled a small potato and had it with gravy. I watched a couple of episodes of the Big Bang Theory. Christopher Lloyd guest starred as a homeless guy that Sheldon rented his room to out of spite after he moved out and after they had an argument with Leonard over the division of property. I didn’t even know Christopher Lloyd was still alive.

Playing Possum in Canada to Escape Trump?

            On Sunday, before the morning was over, I got sleepy and took a siesta much earlier than usual.

            Since I was four books ahead in my reading for my Canadian Poetry course I spent a lot of time working on writing poems for the final project in April. The poetry is supposed to be influenced by poets we’ve covered in the course. Sometimes though I find that I start out trying to be inspired by one of those Canadian writers but my piece takes on a life of its own until the end result bares no stylistic relationship with the work of the other author. Of course it’s not supposed to be an imitation but it should show in the process where the influence was derived. So far I’ve only got one that looks like it was inspired by another poet, and that’s one called “The Rat”, which can be seen, if I explain it, to be in conversation with E. J. Pratt’s “The Shark”:

            The Rat

A rat ran across Bathurst

making its nightly rounds

nose like a dagger

spotted like a heifer

belly to the ground

Its back was so much higher

than its scavenger’s beak

had that rat-slant forward

but was much bigger

than any rat I’d seen

When I got home I wondered

“Was it really a rat?”

On a search engine

I wrote, “Large rat shaped creature”,

with remarkable result

It was a deep southerner

escaping politics

Had crossed the border

to play possum up here

and avoid the rednecks

            I started working on a long autobiographical poem inspired by “Autobiographical” by A. M. Klein. I’ve got a feeling that one will work out okay, but after writing two first draft verses in the afternoon I got tired again and took another nap.

            That night I remembered that it was the fifteenth and that I had to send in my income report to social services. Since I had nothing to report I just signed it, sealed it and mailed it.

            I met my neighbour Greg in the hall and he wished me a happy new year. He’s living upstairs now while a guy who I think is a friend of his but whom I hardly ever see is living in his old place. Greg always had his door open and one could often hear him singing, usually along with Whitney Houston songs, but this other guy is extremely quiet and almost invisible. Since he’s living down the hall from David, I asked about him. He said he thinks he took a trip back to Ethiopia to visit his mother.

            I ate the rest of the ribs with some fries and a beer. I watched two episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Rajesh has hooked up with a cleaning lady at Cal Tech but he was embarrassed to tell his friends about her profession. When she found that out she was insulted but he managed to save himself by telling her things about him that she would be embarrassed by, like the fact that he likes to let his dog eat from his mouth.

            

Posing Naked

            Since I was scheduled on Saturday morning to start the last half of my ten hour pose at Artists 25, and since I didn’t want to doze off during the morning session, I took a twenty minute nap before getting ready to leave. That worked out great because I felt pretty much fully awake until 12:30, when I recharged again with another siesta during my lunch break.

            In the afternoon a young woman came to the studio for the first time and told me she recognized me from when I posed for art classes at her high school ten years ago. I told her that after two girls at Earl Haig complained that they were traumatized by having to see a man take his pants off, I was asked to start wearing a robe. When I refused I didn’t get any work there anymore. Wouldn’t it be more practical for schools to employ therapists rather than to make everybody else alter their behaviour around students with emotional disabilities?

Colin was surprised to hear that they actually had nude models in high school art classes in Toronto. I remembered some high schools in the 80s that made the men wear a jock strap but wanted the female models to be completely naked. She said that after she graduated from Earl Hague she took Fine Arts at U of T and now she works in the arts for a small start up company.

            Tom Phillips was there for the whole day and mentioned that he’d fallen down in his room the night before, bruising his ribs.

            I was in a pretty good mood when the job was done. I rode west two blocks to the No Frills where I bought grapes and oranges; I splurged on some expensive cheese, but then again ‘d gotten some good deals on chicken drumsticks and Black Forest ham. They also had Danone yogourt on sale.

            At the bike stands there was a strange, expensive and light looking bike with very short handlebars that were an almost impossible extent lower than the seat. I wondered if it was meant to be that way or if the rider had simply set it up wrong. I couldn’t imagine it not causing back pain that way.

            I went to the liquor store before going home. There was a panhandler standing in the middle of the sidewalk directly in front of the entrance. They usually stand further back without crowding people. He asked me if I could spare eleven cents. The penny has been out of currency for a couple of years now, so I wondered how he would have felt if everyone he’d asked that question actually gave him eleven cents.

            After buying a couple of cans of Creemore, I was unlocking my bike when some guy asked if I was fixing my chain. I looked at him and he extended his fist for me to bump, and so I did so. He said, “Sorry for bothering you!”

            For dinner I grilled the ribs I’d had in the freezer, made gravy and boiled a potato. I watched two episodes of the Big Bang Theory.

Tom Jones is Black?

            I spent a big chunk of Friday reading and finishing “Live From The Afrikan Resistance!” by El Jones. I really don’t find her to be a very good poet. In fact I think she’s the worst poet we’ve had on the extensive reading list that I’ve read so far, and there are only six more to read. Additionally I think Jones is a bit of a loon. She implied in one poem that Shakespeare was Black. She doesn’t go so far though as to claim, as some nuts do, that Shakespeare was a Black woman. I found a YouTube video of some guys in the States called “The Black Israelites” who claim that not only was Shakespeare Black, but so were Beethoven, Mozart and all of the Vikings. They show an old drawing of some Vikings in a Viking boat and their faces are sort of grey. A drawing is not a photograph. DNA testing of populations in Scandinavia clearly shows who descended from Vikings. Oh, and they also said Tom Jones is Black. What else is new, pussycat?

            Jones made a lot of claims and I fact checked them all, finding that some that seemed like they might have been conspiracies actually turned out to be true. Like the CIA involvement in spreading crack cocaine in Black communities in Los Angeles. This seems like it was not a direct, planned involvement but they were aware of it being a direct result of their actions. This was in the 80s when the CIA was running guns down to Guatemala to aid the Contra rebels. The return trips carried cocaine, which was sold in LA for money to buy more guns and on it went until there were half a million Black people in jail that had been busted for possession of small amounts of crack.

            Another one was a study of syphilis in Black people in a town in Alabama. The study started before penicillin was discovered but even after the cure was found they continued the study without treating the subjects because they wanted to find out how syphilis affected people all the way till their death. Yeesh!

            On a more positive note, it turns out that long before there was a National Hockey League there was in Nova Scotia a “Coloured Hockey League” that contributed a lot to the way hockey is played today.

Katey Sagal

            I spent a good part of Thursday reading “The Thunderbird Poems” about Norval Morriseau by Armand Garnet Ruffo. The title of every poem is the title of a painting by Morriseau, so before I read the poem I searched Google images for the painting. I was able to find most of the paintings. Much of the artwork is imaginative and there is Ojibway symbolism contained throughout all of them. I find the work often to be overly simplified and I think it’s because of a lack of painterly skill that he relied heavily on colour and symbolism. That being said, there are a lot of the images which I like and find to be well designed even though I don’t think they are great works of art.

            As for Ruffo’s poems, for the most part they seem amateurish to me. The very first poem, “Life Scroll” is actually pretty good but everything else in the book consists of editorial descriptions in verse of paintings of Morriseau’s circumstances at the time of production. I find this kind of writing to be extremely contrived and uninspired.

            I started reading “Live From The Afrikan Resistance” by El Jones. Each poem is about a different important figure from Black history, especially Nova Scotia Black history. The subjects of the poems are interesting but unfortunately the poems are horrible. It was a much more fulfilling literary experience to just look up each name on Wikipedia and read the article. Jones seems to be almost saying that it doesn’t matter if her poems are lousy because she is honouring Black history. Personally I would rather read a good poem about a child rapist than a bad poem about Ghandi.

            I watched the first two episodes from the tenth season of the Big Bang Theory. In the first one, since Penny and Leonard had originally eloped they decided to include all of their families in a ceremonial renewal of vows. Katey Sagal plays Penny’s mother and she’s even more gorgeous now than she was when she was on Married With Children thirty years ago. She’s a year older than me. What makes our generation so good looking? 

Thanks for Letting Me Rent Your Apartment While You're in Prison

            On Wednesday morning I didn’t have any bread but I had a bag of pancake mix that I’d gotten months ago from the food bank and so I decided to make that. It just called for water, so it obviously already had powdered eggs or some equivalent but I added two eggs anyway so as to feel like I was actually making something. They turned out so well I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have been horrible without added eggs.

I needed to go out to the bank and then the supermarket, but I waited till evening when my boots and clothes were finally dry after coming in from the rain the night before. I rode down to the bank machine at King and Dufferin and then up to Freshco. My stomach seems to be coming back on line after the cold, though I still have an aversion for bananas. I bough some grapes, raisin bread, no meat because I still have lots of baked beans as well as some ribs in the freezer. I think I can handle yogourt again and I decided to try 2% milk in coffee instead of 3.25%. I bought a six-pack of Lifebuoy soap, a bag of peanuts and a can of peaches.

            The grocery store was packed and I wondered why. Maybe the weather on Tuesday held people off from their shopping or maybe Wednesday evening is just a busy time. I never noticed it before.

            The line-up for the express checkout was long but I figured it’d be faster than the other ones. After I’d taken a place in line another guy turned the corner and laughed as he saw how long it was. Then he looked at me like I was someone he knew well but hadn’t seen in years and said enthusiastically, “How’s it going?” I said I was okay. Then he told me, “Nice haircut!” “Thanks.” “What do you think of mine?” He looked like he was in his early thirties but he was bald from his forehead to just past the very top of his head where the bald pattern made a perfect semi-circle at the back of which was a rich crop of wavy hair. “Ah, it’s okay.” “Thanks!” Then he added, “It’s difficult when you wear a hat!” “Yeah, in the winter.” I agreed. A stock person came down the aisle pulling a palate of produce. The guy behind me read his nametag and said, “Hi Alex!” “How’s it goin?” “My name’s Tyrone!” “Hi Tyrone!” “I’m gonna own this place some day!” “Well, that’s it!” “My picture’s gonna be right up there!” “Okay!” “Ya never know! Anything is possible!”

            A woman in line for the other cash was holding all of her items in her arms instead of a basket and she dropped her package of pita bread. I waited a few seconds and saw that she wouldn’t be able to pick it up without putting everything else down, so I shifted my basket to my other hand and stooped too pick it up for her. She gratefully accepted it into her hand and it became once again part of her carefully balanced armful.

            I noticed that all of Tyrone’s items were packaged items, half of the salty category and half of the sweet. He had to return the cherry turnovers though because he only had $15.00.

            I rode to the liquor store. The gravel voiced panhandler was singing David Bowie’s “Star Man” acapella while dancing to the rhythm of a much faster song.

            There were two tall guys standing in front of the bike stands so I had to say, “Excuse me”. One guy needed to make it clear to the other that he was in my way. They moved aside. For some strange reason I was having difficulty locking my bike. Twice I unlocked the lock and wound the chain so one end ran under the frame at the front of my bike and the other end over the top, because I find that way keeps the wheel from steering out from the stand and thus causing the bike to collapse like a handcuffed drunk. But this time I wrapped it and locked it, only to discover that I had locked my bike to itself and missed the stand entirely. Then, embarrassingly it happened again. Maybe I was distracted by the conversation the two tall guys were having. The guy with the beard asked the other guy, “I thought you and Rudy were gonna get a place together.” He answered that Rita is going to go to jail for at least a year so they were going to take over her apartment and have a place to live for a year. But he added, “Rudy better watch his spending!” Then the bearded guy inquired about this: “I heard you’ve been sleeping eighteen hours a day. What’s up with that?” I didn’t hear the answer because I finally got my bike locked and went inside. I bought a can of Creemore and went home.

            I heated up some more of my baked beans and in the last 15 minutes threw in a couple of the pancakes I’d made, but they burned to a crisp so I had to heat up two more. I watched the last two episodes of the ninth season of The Big Bang Theory. It looks like Sheldon’s mother got it on with Leonard’s father.