Do Potholes Lead To Another Universe?

      

       When I arrived at the food bank on Wednesday there were two volunteers smoking in the doorway near a little girl. It seemed like a big line up and I was thinking to myself that maybe I should push myself to get down there before eleven. One of the volunteers was telling someone that he learned how to manage things because he had four sisters and he was the oldest so he did all the work while they just sat around. I ended up with number 14, which is the lowest number I’ve gotten so far.

      Afterward I went to the Bank of Montreal because I thought I had seven dollars of available funds and because I wanted to buy a battery for my guitar tuner, which is starting to fade out. It takes a while to warm up when I turn it on and it’s harder to see the display. There was no line up at the bank, but my pin number didn’t work. I’d gotten a new card the day before because the old one was starting to get rejected by some machines, but at the branch where I got it the manager had confirmed for me that my pin was already on it. It turned out that it was a new pin and that I had to change back to my old one. There wasn’t enough in my bank account for the battery and there were also not enough empty beer cans at home to cash in to get more than a dollar. I guess I’ll have to live with my tuner as it is until I have some money in a week.

      Once I was home I tried to log on to my online bank account only to find a message that told me I had to contact the bank. That led me to a new problem, which is that after I make a call on my new smart phone, the keyboard disappears and so when an automated system asks me to key in additional numbers, I can’t do it. I had to wait to talk to a bank worker, who told me that I had to put my new bankcard number into the system before I can do online banking.

       On my way back to the food bank on Cowan I had to swerve around a pothole that wasn’t just a depression in the concrete. It looked more like the gateway to another world. There was a kid playing with the cardboard box his father had brought in which to carry away food. First he was walking around with the box on his head and then he climbed into the box. Later I saw that his dad had put the box up in a tree, beyond the child’s reach. The boy first got a chair and carried it over to the tree. He got onto the chair but still couldn’t reach the box. Finally he threw a rock, which knocked carton to the ground. His father was very impressed with his son’s resourcefulness, but told him also that he shouldn’t be throwing rocks. The boy continued playing with the box in various ways until he hurt himself and began to cry.
       I got a half a kilo of Starbucks coffee beans (which is a major score) and a large package of frozen cheddar smoky sausages in addition to the regular provisions. There was also a plastic bag with Whiskas cat food inside. I learned my lesson last time that the cats can smell the kind of cat food they are nuts about right through the bag and so they got to it by chewing through the plastic. This time I put the bag high on top of the kitchen shelf where it would be impossible for them to reach, but Daffodil could smell it up there even if she couldn’t see it and in following her nose she was looking straight at it. I put the bag inside of an empty Maxwell House coffee can, so I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be smelt any more.

      I’ve been listening to the Mel Blanc radio show from 1946. So far it’s the least funny radio show I’ve ever listened to. It actually could probably work as a Saturday morning kids show if they were to just take all the voices and animate the story. I find the commercials a lot more interesting. The sponsor was Colgate Tooth Powder. I guess toothpaste hadn’t been invented yet. Also the term bad breath doesn’t seem to have been invented by 1946 either. The term they used was “unpleasing breath”. Another sponsor was Halo Shampoo, which I remember using when I was a kid. They said it didn’t need a lemon or vinegar rinse. I don’t remember ever using a shampoo that needed that.

       There was also something about there being a fat shortage and so people were encouraged to sell cans of their left over kitchen fat to the grocer so that things like soap and nylons could be manufactured.

       I rode toward towers of soft luminous clouds. I took St Clair to Yonge and rode north past the Mt Pleasant cemetery to Merton and then across to Mt Pleasant and down to Moore. There’s a weird street set up between the south side of the cemetery and St Clair. One can’t travel directly south to St Clair because there are two sets of streets divided by low concrete barriers that one can step over but not drive across. All southbound streets curve east at the barrier and so one can only get to St Clair via Mt Pleasant. I’m not sure what the purpose is unless it’s some sort of calming traffic thing.

       I was listening to a French version of “Sealed With A Kiss” and later while I was riding, it occurred to me that parts of Paul Simon’s “The Sounds of Silence” are almost identical to “Sealed With A Kiss”, though Simon’s song ventured off into more complexity from the basic melody they share and of course the lyrics are far more poetic.