The Paradox of Being Both Behind the Future and Ahead of It

           

            On Friday when I went to PARC to teach my yoga class, Shelly was downstairs in her Halloween get-up, singing her head off near a guy who was playing the piano. It was a bright green costume with a cape and animal ears but I couldn’t quite recognize what she was supposed to be. Maybe she was a green cat.

            As I was sweeping the floor of the Healing Centre, a guy with a Germanic accent who introduced himself as Eduardo came to inquire about the yoga though he didn’t seem all that interested in taking my class. He said that he does yoga someplace else on Saturdays anyway, plus he was wearing restrictive jeans. He told me he’d come to PARC looking for the drawing class and since he couldn’t find it he was considering the yoga. He went away and didn’t come back, so I think he found his drawing class.

            Shelly came, but only stayed for half an hour because she wanted to tell everybody her “bat story” downstairs. So maybe her costume was meant to be a green bat.

            After the class, the weather was nice, with lots of big clouds in the blue sky, so it would have been a good time for me to take a bike ride to continue exploring southern Rosedale. But I had a prose analysis writing assignment for Children’s Literature class that had to be handed in electronically by Saturday at midnight and I didn’t know at that time how long it was going to take me to finish it. I worked on it till I had almost twice as many words as required and then I started whittling it down. I was fourteen words over the limit by dinnertime.

            While eating dinner, I watched the Buster Keaton directed silent film, “Battling Butler”. It was a bit difficult to follow though because the story text of my copy of the film was in Spanish. However, I was able to figure out the main plot. Keaton played, Alfred Butler, a spoiled rich guy who still lived with his parents. They decided that he needed to get out of the house in order to learn how to be a real man, so they sent him off on a hunting and fishing trip. So he leaves with his trusted valet in his expensive car, pulling a large trailer full of amenities. We next see him in the wilderness but in an apartment sized tent full of all the luxuries of home. There is a stove with an oven, an icebox, a four-poster bed and even the canoe that he brought with him serves as a nice big bathtub.

            While he’s bumbling around in the woods, trying to hunt, he shoots his gun backwards and almost hits a local girl who is out for a walk. She’s pissed off at first but begins to like him over the next few encounters and they begin to court. She has however two very large brothers who don’t approve of the union. Meanwhile there is a major sports story in the news about a boxer known as “Battling Butler” who has a big fight coming up. To impress the girl’s brothers, Alfred’s valet tells them that Alfred is the battling Butler. So to maintain the ruse, Alfred has to go to the city while the fight takes place so the girl and her brothers won’t think it’s not him. They listen on the radio to the fight and the Battling Butler wins, and so when Alfred returns to the mountains he gets to marry the girl. But then the brothers read in the news that the Battling Butler is going to the city to train for the championship bout and so Alfred has to leave again. His bride however follows him. Meanwhile Alfred meets the real battling Butler, who decides that Alfred can do all the training and he will just come in and do the fighting at the end. Alfred proves himself to be comically inept at both sparring and training. But on the night of the fight, the real Battling Butler comes to Alfred’s dressing room and starts picking on him. He knocks him all around the room for a while until some heretofore internalized instinct for fighting in Alfred breaks through to the surface and he beats the crap out of the Battling Butler.

I finished my prose analysis of a section of “Tom’s Midnight Garden” just before bed and sent it to my professor. Here are the main points:
            “There is also a paradox for someone visiting the past that they are both behind their future and ahead of it.

This section holds a convergence of extremes. They have reached the top of the tower, at the end of the file, at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of Tom’s holiday, at the end of Hattie’s childhood, and at the end of Tom’s time travelling.

Looking down from the tower of Ely, which is unaffected by the stream of time, they reflect on both their journey from Castleford and their travels through life so far. They can see both the past, upstream from whence they came and the future, downstream, simultaneously. The river winds out of sight toward the unseen, unfrozen, unknowable future of the sea. The river disappears into three obscurities: distance, mist and evening. Tom, for Hattie, has also been gradually disappearing from her perception. Where the river has not disappeared it is gleaming in the sunset, promising illumination and understanding at the end of the story.

The river’s flow is frozen, mirroring Tom’s desire to be able to freeze time and stay in childhood.

The only sounds coming from below: the wind’s breath and the train’s puff suggest that these elements are alive. Trains follow schedules in linear time, while the wind is less predictable. Just as there exists a river of time; there is also the wind of time or change. Though the river of time is frozen, the wind of change is not, as Tom can hear it breathing. This heralds the changes that will soon occur.

The wind is bending the smoke from the home fires, which are symbolic of warmth, family and life continuing. The fact that the wind is only slightly bending the smoke suggests that change will occur, but familial warmth will continue.”

Getting Rid of Old Batteries

           

            On Thursday I finally remembered to take all my old batteries to the battery disposal unit at the northwest entrance of the Ramsey-Wright building on my way to class. I had at least ten years worth of batteries that I’d been holding onto and they filled two sandwich bags.

            We spent the whole hour of class talking about Philippa Pearce’s “Tom’s Magic Garden”. Tom has three elevated view of the past life of the area where his aunt and uncle live in the present, each view more elevated than the last. And each time his friend Hattie is considerably older. The more one can see, the bigger one’s world becomes, and if one can know it, there is a sense of being in control of it.

            The area where the story takes place is real, and not far from Cambridge.

            Tom climbs the tower of the cathedral of Ely in the past near the end of the story, while he could not go in the present because he had been placed under quarantine.

            A garden is a reliable gauge of the passage of time. Tom’s garden is compared to the Garden of Eden. I would say that the metaphor could be carried forward. Adam and Eve are portrayed as almost childlike before Eve gains knowledge. I think that Tom and Hattie and be compared to them. Hattie, as she matures, becomes tempted by forces unsympathetic with the garden.

            Tom’s time travelling jumps over world war two and returns to a peaceful time.

            After class I headed home as quickly as I could because I wanted to lie down for a while before leaving for work. I wasn’t really sleepy but I knew I probably would be later on.

            I worked at OCADU for Yang Cao’s drawing class in the Design department. He’s about thirty, all business, wears a poor boy cap and constantly looks at his watch. He’s also the first teacher at OCADU who I’ve heard talk to Chinese students in Chinese. Peter Mah, who retired a couple of years ago, would never have done that.

            After work I rode up to Bloor Street and across towards Yonge. The wind was so strong at Bay and Bloor that all the metal frames that hold the traffic lights were clanging out percussion.

            On Queen Street, a cyclist ahead of me moved onto the sidewalk and just started ringing his bell to get people to get out of his way.

            I watched the Buster Keaton directed silent film, “Seven Chances”. Buster gets notice that he will inherit seven million dollars if he gets married by 19:00 on his 27^th birthday. The problem was that day was his 27^th birthday. He went to ask Mary, the only woman he’s ever loved and she said she’d marry him, but when she asked why it had to be that day his words didn’t come out right. He said he had to marry somebody by 19:00 and it could be anybody. She turned him down. His partner coaxes him to keep asking women and he half-heartedly does so, and they turn him down. Then his partner runs an ad in the paper that causes hundreds of brides to show up at the church. Meanwhile Buster gets word that Mary will marry him after all and so there is a very long chase scene as hundreds of brides stampede after him through various urban and rural landscapes. He makes it to Mary just in time.

View from the Sixth Floor

           

            Wednesday was my first day of missing the foodbank, since I started going last April. I had to work at OCADU from late morning to early afternoon, which covers the time that the foodbank is open, so I’ll have to go on Saturday instead.

            I got pretty wet riding my bike through the rain to downtown, though not as slopping soaked as I have been in the past and I was glad it wasn’t freezing rain. For part of the ride I kind of zoned out in thought, so time passed a little quicker.

            At OCADU, I knew from reading the models sign in sheet earlier in the week that my old friend and band mate Brian Haddon was working that day at the same time and in the classroom next to mine, so I waited in the lobby for him. Everyone tends to arrive much later than I do though, so I went upstairs. I was working for Sarah Sniderhan, who is someone new for me. She kind of reminds me of the characters played by Sara Gilbert, on Rosanne and The Big Bang Theory. She has that same kind of frowny face that can make one think she’s unfriendly. She didn’t need me right away, so I went to the washroom and on the way back, ran into Brian, as I thought I might. We chatted for ten minutes but them we had to work.

            I posed shirtless for a painting class, gazing out the raindrop jewelled sixth floor north window, looking along McCaul Street’s slow sometimes orange leafed tree-lined slant to College Street and at the further north high-rises on Bloor Street, with their tops disappearing in the mist. There’s a nice view from that window of a colourful little stretch of old attached houses at the corner of D’Arcy and McCaul, just north of Dundas. One has to ignore the ugly top of the AGO building, which obviously was not designed to be seen from above.

            On my breaks I read George MacDonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin”. The princess herself is annoyingly sweet but the timeless all knowing magical great grandmother holds my interest whenever she pops up, so far.

            After class I stopped by to chat with Brian, since he was scheduled to work for another shift. It seems he’s gotten quite a bit more work than me at OCADU this year. He suggested we get together sometime soon for beers.

            Though it was still raining just as hard on my way home, since I was still wet from the morning, I didn’t feel that much wetter by the time I got home. I was glad to peel everything off though and get into something dry.

            That night I watched Buster Keaton’s silent film, “Go West”. This seems to be the first feature length film that he both wrote and directed. It begins with him dragging all of his possessions on top of a bed on wheels into a store to sell them. The owner offers him $1.20 for everything. After the transaction, Buster prepares to leave, opening up the drawer of a dresser to take a few personal items, but the storeowner indicates that he’s already bought it all, so if he wants those things he’ll have to pay for them.

            Buster goes looking for a freight rain to hop. He stops and looks at the Canadian Pacific car, but moves on to take the New York Central. He arrives in New York but the bustle of the streets is so chaotic he immediately goes to catch a freight train going west. After the jostling though, he ends up in possession of a ladies purse, containing a tiny purse sized gun. He is in a boxcar full of barrels of potatoes and he’s in one of the barrels, but they all start rolling and falling out of the train. He ends up in the middle of the desert and wanders onto a ranch to get a job as a cowboy. He’s wearing a cowboy’s outfit, complete with gun holster, so he puts the tiny gun in it. He’s not much of a cowboy but one cow befriends him when he removes a stone from her foot, so she follows him everywhere. When the rancher insists that she has to go to the slaughterhouse, he first tries to buy her but doesn’t have enough money, so he enters a poker game. He catches one of the guys cheating and accuses him. The man says, “Smile when you say that!” By this time, Buster Keaton was already famous for not smiling, so he is shown trying his best to smile. He even tries to lift the corners of his mouth with hands and can’t do it. To save Brown Eyes, he sneaks onto the train. Meanwhile a rival rancher has arranged to ambush the train, to stop the cattle from reaching Los Angeles. There is a gunfight and in the end the train heads on with only Buster and the cattle on board. In Los Angeles, the train stops on the other side of town from the stockyards. To keep the rancher from being ruined, Buster gets the thousand cows to follow him through downtown LA. For some unexplained reason though, in the middle of the city, they stop following him, so he contrives to put on something red to attract them. He finds a red devil costume, complete with horns and tail, and all the cows chase him as he runs to the stockyards. The rancher is so grateful he lets him keep Brown Eyes.

Why We Love and Dream of Talking Animals

           

            On Tuesday in Children’s Literature class we were officially at the beginning of the second half of the term.

            Professor baker talked briefly about Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”.  About how it combines the oral tradition with written narratives; how it blends mythic and specific time.

            I pointed out that all the Europeans are portrayed in the artwork with patches on their clothing and their ships, whereas the indigenous people are all portrayed with no patches. I wondered if it was meant to represent the Europeans trying to cover up holes in their logic.

            As we were about to move on from one story with talking animals to another, she asked us to think about what it means to have talking animals in a story. I would say that it relates to what we have common with all mammals, which is emotionality, ruled by the middle brain. The brain stem, or lizard brain is what we have in common with all vertebrates, including the ability to dream.

            She asked how many had read E. B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” or had it read to them when they were young and most of them raised their hands. I don’t think I’d even heard of it until I was an adult, even though it was written in the 1940s. The book deals with the insecurities of the era immediately following world war two.

            It contains one of the most highly charged first lines: “Where’s papa going with that axe?”

            The drawing of Fern feeding Wilbur the pig evokes paintings of the Madonna with the baby Jesus.

            There is the continuous backdrop of non-hateful violence against which Wilbur’s salvation is contrasted.

            Wilbur, more so than all the other animals in the barn, is dependant on others, even in adulthood.

            A lot of E. B. White’s ideas about writing are metaphorically contained in the idea of Charlotte’s web and the description of how she weaves it. White also co-wrote a literal book on writing entitled “The Elements of Style”. The main advice is to revise and rewrite over and over again. Advertising techniques are used to promote Wilbur and he begins to live up to his own hype.

            During the break, the professor and I were both agreeing that for White to give Fern an interest in boys seems a bit early for an eight year old.

            After the break, she made all of us stand up and sing, “I’m a little tea pot.” I stood up, but I didn’t sing. Apparently there is a difference in one line between Britain and North America. They sing, “When the tea is ready”, while we sing, “When I get all steamed up.”

            The use of lists as narrative tools can emphasize abundance and gives text a swing and rhythm.

            We moved on to Philippa Pearce’s “Tom’s Midnight Garden”, a text which she said shows how the mind can hold multiple contradictory things at once.

            At the end of class, I told the professor that the idea of living up to hype reminded me of a quote from Salvador Dali. I thought he said, “If the painting doesn’t look like the model, the model isn’t trying to live up to the painting”, but he said “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the subject grow to look like his portrait”, which is the same thing anyway.

            After class, there would have been time to home before work, but not time enough to take a siesta. So I went to the models lounge at OCADU and dozed for almost two hours.

            I worked in the late afternoon for Sylvia Witton, who has been a faculty member at OCADU since it was OCAD and OCA before that. She had been an instructor for many years but then languished in a non-teaching position until she finally got to give classes again. Last year she went on sabbatical and said she painted, travelled, thought, tried a little sculpture and even wrote some bad poetry. I asked her if she got paid and she told me she got a small percentage of her regular salary while she was off.

            Sylvia is a very nice person. She’s also one of those old school instructors who are very conscientious about the comfort of models. She had two heaters ready before I was even there. I thanked her for that and told her that some of the new instructors just say, “Oh! You need a heater? Well, okay, I’ll try to find one!” She said those instructors need to be “mentored in”. She’s about my age. She had long hair for many years, but now that she’s cut it she kind of looks like a taller and calmer version of Alice, from The Brady Bunch.

            After work I took a short jaunt up to Yonge and Bloor and headed home from there.

            That night I watched Buster Keaton’s silent film, “The Navigator”. Buster is a filthy rich dumb guy, but “every family tree must have its sap.” He suddenly tells his valet one morning, “I think I’ll get married today!” He immediately books the honeymoon cruise and then decides to go and ask someone to be his bride. He goes to a wealthy woman he knows to ask her and she says, “No.” and so he leaves for his honeymoon cruise alone, while she leaves with her father for the docks because he’s left some papers on a boat. Meanwhile, some spies have decided to sabotage a big ship called The Navigator by setting it adrift. Buster gets onto the Navigator by mistake and so does the woman while looking for her father. They both end up adrift on a big ship alone in the middle of the ocean. Since they’ve both been served their food by others all their lives, they have no idea how to cook anything. There’s plenty of food but they don’t even know how to make eggs and coffee, so there’s a comical scene of them trying. After several weeks of bumbling they become fairly competent but then the ship gets damaged and Buster has to put on a deep diving suit to fix it. A swordfish attacks him and while he is wrestling with it another swordfish attacks, so he uses the one swordfish to fence with the other.

Wheelchair Parking At The Dollarama

           

            On Monday I had to work at OCADU in the afternoon, so I tried to take an early siesta for an hour around noon so I wouldn’t doze off while I was working. I don’t think I really slept, but the rest probably helped. I left for work about twenty minutes earlier than I normally would because I wanted to drop by the Faculty of Information library on St George to take out James Marshall’s “George and Martha”. I had already found a Korean download the night before, in English, of Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad are Friends”. I worked from 15:10 to 18:10 for Keiran Brent’s drawing class in the design department. He says “kinda like” a lot when he is talking about what something exactly is. I read “George and Martha” before class started. Those hippos are dumb and rich. The rest of the time I read the first few chapters of George Macdonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin”, from an e-book I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. It seems that “princess” is a metaphor for the ideal little girl.

            After work, the sun was just setting, so I decided to get in a short bike ride before going home.  I rode up McCaul to College, up St George to Bloor, then across to Yonge, down to College, west to Bay and down to Queen. I stopped at Freshco and saw a deal on Sponge Towels, but didn’t want to carry them around while shopping, so I got everything else first. After I’d bought my stuff at the express counter I remembered about the Sponge Towels, so I went back in.

            When I got home there were two more boxes of cans of cat food from my upstairs neighbour sitting in front of my door. On top of them was this horrible little book called “Cat Letters to Santa”. I don’t want the book but I know David won’t take it back. He’ll expect me to find a home for it.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s silent film, “Sherlock Jr.”, about an amateur detective who works in a cinema. His rival for his sweetheart is a thief, but Buster gets blamed. He falls asleep while projecting a movie and then he dreams he walks into the screen. He appears later as master detective, Sherlock Jr., who pursues and is pursued by a gang of jewel thieves. There are a number of chase scenes, but the most hair raising is one where Sherlock Jr. is riding on the handle bars of a motorbike driven by his assistant, Gilette. But Gilette falls off very early on and so Sherlock careens through several scenes of traffic and other obstacles without knowing there is no driver.

            Before bed, I looked out the window and saw that there was yellow tape across both ends of the Dollarama parking lot and that there is a new parking space closest to me with the blue and white wheelchair symbol freshly painted.  I assume they were required by law to put that in.

The Moon Has Cut Off Its Ear

           

            I spent most of Sunday reading the e-book I downloaded of Louise Fitzhugh’s “Harriet the Spy”, and finished it a little after 16:00. It was hard for me not to identify somewhat with Harriet, given that she keeps a journal of everything that happens to her. We’re different though in that she writes things in her notebook about people that she wouldn’t say to someone’s face. For me, anything worth writing is worth saying. Harriet is eleven in this story and that’s close to the age that I was when I started writing. I think though that everything I wrote back then came out as poetry. Only certain cultural references indicate the era in which the book is set. Ben Casey and Dr Kildare are mentioned as television shows, so it had to take place in the mid-sixties, plus one of the other eleven year olds said, “That’s not a scene I can make!” It turns out that the book was published in 1964, so if Harriet had been a real person she’d be two years older than me now.

            The story involves her writing down in her notebook everything she thinks about anything and everybody, some of which things are negative, because, of course, that’s how the mind works. We think negatively and positively about the same thing and then when we act, we tend to pick the positive unless the situation demands something darker. She marked her journal “Private”, but some schoolmates found it and there was something negative about every one of them, so they were all pissed off. In my view it was none of their business unless she’d decided to publish what she’d written about them with their real names intact, which wasn’t her intention. The moral of the story is, yes, if you’re a writer you have to write about everything and everybody, but you have to make sure no one reads it. If they do read it, you have to do two things: apologize and lie.

            I took a short bike ride in the evening. As I rode east on Bloor, the smiling moon looked like it had cut off its right ear and mailed it to a prostitute.

            I had planned on riding to Yonge and then down to Queen, but I thought I’d take St George instead, because I wanted to see if Robarts was open. It turns out it’s open till 20:30 on Sundays, so I checked to see if I could find two of the books that are on my course reading list: “Frog and Toad are Friends” and “George and Martha”. They were both available at the Faculty of Information, but that was closed. As I rode south toward College, I passed a couple of young women. One of them was saying, “It’s not like a spinning class at a regular gym. The place is packed with people and they are all so focused!” As I rode west on College, what was left of the sunset looked like an Orangina stain on pale blue linoleum.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s 1923 silent film, “Three Ages”, which is basically three intertwined short comedy films on competition between men for the love of a woman, each set in a different age. In the prehistoric age, Buster is riding a dinosaur. Two cavemen are competing for a woman and the father determines which one is a proper husband by clubbing them both over the head and picking the one that’s still standing. In the Roman era Buster and another guy compete in a chariot race. For some reason though, it’s a very snowy winter in Rome, so Buster equips his chariot with skis and has huskies pulling it. Since he’s winning, the other guy’s accomplice has a cat run in front of the dogs and out of the coliseum, so the dogs chase it. Buster’s solution is to tie the cat to the end of a long pole and dangle it in front of the dogs. I think the animal cruelty rules were much laxer in those days because I’m pretty certain it was a real cat tied and squirming at the end of the pole. Buster wins the race, but the loser has him tossed into a pit where there is a lion. The lion wasn’t real, but looked about twice as much like a lion as the lion in the Wizard of Oz. Buster gives the lion a manicure and they part, the best of friends. In the modern era story, the comedy was more centred on Buster being chased by the cops. At the end of all three stories, Buster won the girl, as usual.

What If Love Is A Substance?

            

           

            Back in the 70s a musician I knew on the streets of Vancouver told me “love is glue”. He meant it as a metaphor, but what if love actually is a subtle gluelike substance emitted by the human mind in order to connect with others. If that’s the case, then, like all substances, it can be used positively or negatively, depending on the web spinner’s intentions.

            It seems to be that what smells so bad about my cat Amarillo is his saliva. He cleans himself but doing so just puts the smell all over him. On top of that he drools almost constantly.

            I didn’t go riding on Saturday because of the rain, so I had time to finish reading Philippa Pearce’s “Tom’s Midnight Garden”. It’s a British summer holiday story about a boy named Tom, who is forced to leave home for a couple of weeks to avoid catching his brother’s measles. He goes to stay with a boring uncle and aunt in their boring home, which is a flat in an old house. In the entryway of the house is an old grandfather clock that keeps perfect time but counts out the wrong chimes. At midnight it strikes thirteen times. Tom is having trouble sleeping in the new environment and sneaks downstairs and in looking out the back door discovers a beautiful garden, even though the next day he sees that there is no garden in the back. Every night he wanders out at midnight and can spend hours or even days in the garden, which turns out to have been the garden for that house, but about a hundred years before. He meets a girl his age there and they become friends, but he’s like a ghost in that world and only Hattie can see him. At the end of the story, it turns out that Hattie is still alive in his own time and that she is the old woman who owns the house where he’s staying. It’s not an earthshaking piece of literature, but it’s a charming and well told story.

            I listened to two episodes of “Amos and Andy” from 1944. There was a stuttering barber character similar to a character later created by Mel Blanc who would usually start saying something while he was stuttering and change the story several times before finally spitting out the simple truth. For example, when asked if he’s had any good looking manicurists working for him he said, “I had a lot of good looking ones! There must’a been fifty, ahh nine, ahh six, ahh, well there was one that was fair!” I can’t find a cast list for the episode, but I think it was probably Mel Blanc himself playing the character.

            I watched the Buster Keaton silent film, “Our Hospitality”. Keaton played the only surviving McKay, who had been sent away from the south to be raised in New York City to avoid a long-standing feud with the Calfield family. McKay lives at the corner of Broadway and 42^nd street, which in 1830 is made to look like it’s out in the middle of the prairie. He gets word that he’s inherited his father’s estate, so he takes a ridiculous train ride on what was apparently a state of the art train back in 1830. On the train he meets a girl with the same destination. They fall for each other but it turns out that she is a member of the Calfield family. Most of the movie is spent with her father and two brothers trying to kill McKay. There’s a great scene though when she is about to go over a waterfall but McKay swings out on a rope and rescues her just as she goes over. Keaton did his own stunts.

            My upstairs neighbour, David knocked on my door twice. He came once in the afternoon to give me twenty-four small cans of cat food, and then again that night to give me four bottles of Bud Light and a litre of milk from the States. David must have an African name. I’ll have to remember to ask him what it is. I find it very annoying when immigrants change their names when talking to English speaking people.

An Old And Spooky Toronto Neighbourhood For Trick or Treating

           

            On Friday, I finished reading Sherman Alexie’s  “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”. It’s a well-written, even sometimes poetically written, but very simply written story. It’s sometimes funny but mostly sad, though it does end hopefully. The most powerful part is the basketball game in which Arnold Spirit comes forward as the most valuable player for the team of the white high school he is attending but against the team of his reservation. He felt like both a traitor and a hero at the same time.

As I was getting ready to go teach my yoga class, I was looking for the fifteen dollars that I had left after buying coffee the night before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I could only conclude that I’d been in such a rush that I’d been careless. I told myself that I must not have shoved my change very deeply into my pocket, and admittedly, the pants I’ve been wearing don’t have very deep pockets. I figured my phone, moving next to the money as I pedaled my bike might have caused the money to shimmy up the fabric and drop to the street.

            At PARC, I saw Shelly downstairs in the drop-in, and she said she’d be coming. In the healing centre at PARC, I was getting the room ready for yoga when Shelly’s friend Mario hobbled in. He sat down for a while in a chair, as I dragged furniture around to make more space. Finally though, he got up and left. Shelly came in a little after start time. She just wanted instruction on one particular exercise. The Sun Salutation has both standing and floor parts and she has trouble making a smooth transition between the two. So I divided the exercise in half and gave her a series to do while standing and another to do on the floor. That took about half an hour and she was satisfied with that, so I ended up leaving at the same time I would have left if no one had come.

            I went home briefly to take another stab at looking for my money. I usually take my money out of my pocket and put it on my dresser before I change into my home clothes, but I thought that maybe I hadn’t. Perhaps I’d put my pants in the kitchen as usual and the money had fallen among all the clutter of the bedroom and living room things that I keep out there while I’m waiting for the bedbugs to be gone. I couldn’t see it there. I thought that maybe it had fallen behind the dresser, but it hadn’t. I shrugged and resigned myself to having accidentally given fifteen dollars to a stranger, and just hoped whoever it had been had needed it.

            I rode along Bloor to Sherbourne and then started exploring the streets just north of there. As I crossed the bridge over the Rosedale Valley, the autumn colours were spectacular in the sunlight. I explored the streets between Sherbourne and Castle Frank, south of Elm Avenue. Holy cow, south Rosedale is a rich area! There are some very nicely designed modern homes, but there are mostly a lot of beautiful houses of many designs but they looked like they might be some of the oldest in Toronto. It seemed to me that this would have been the perfect neighbourhood to have taken my daughter trick or treating when she’d been young. Though ritzy, I could tell that these nice old buildings would be quite spooky after dark. The only thing that took their scariness away was the cheap Halloween decorations some of them had on display.

            When I got home, I was getting ready to change out of my away from home clothing, when I suddenly remembered that when I’d rushed out to buy coffee the night before, I hadn’t changed my clothes. I had put my money in the track pants that I wear around the apartment. Sure enough, the money was there in the right pocket.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s first feature film, “The Saphead”. Keaton hadn’t started directing at this point, but he was the main star. It was a comedy but not slapstick like a lot of his later work. He played, Bertie, the bumbling son of a Wall Street tycoon who was in love with his father’s adopted daughter and she with him. His natural sister’s husband was his father’s number one man in the company but it turned out that he was cheating on his wife with a dancer named Henrietta. The dancer became ill, but her dying wish was to expose her ex-lover by giving his wife her husband’s love letters. But in order to save his sister from a broken heart, Bertie claimed the letters were his own and threw them in the fire so no one would know. Bertie’s father disowned Bertie. Meanwhile the brother in law bilked Bertie’s father of all his securities by causing the shares to drop on a mine called Henrietta. Bertie had bought a seat on the stock exchange but knew nothing about it. All he knew was that everybody was shouting “Henrietta!” and he wanted them to stop. He was told that all he had to do was say, “I’ll take it!” to anyone who shouted the name and they would stop, so he bought all the stock and it went up in value till he’d saved his father from bankruptcy.

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle

           

            I had been very proud of myself for waiting much longer than the required four hours for the insecticide fumes to settle down or dissipate or whatever they do after the bedbug treatment. But as I was lying awake for a short while at the beginning of Thursday, the odour of poison coming from the baseboards made me feel like I was in a race with the bloodsuckers for who was going to be exterminated first.

            It was good on Thursday morning to have song practice. I had had to skip it for two days in a row because of the coincidence of my essay and the bedbug treatment turning up next to one another in the same week.

            On the way to class, along College Street, I stopped at the light at Dufferin. After it turned green, as I was building speed, a woman who already had momentum because she’d only still been approaching the light when it changed, whizzed past me. I passed her before Dovercourt, but at that light she edged up past me and sat out over the edge of the pedestrian crossing, to wait impatiently for the green to arrive, while her left leg jerked nervously on her left pedal. She took off just before the red light ripened to green. I passed her again before Ossington. Before Bathurst I had to slam on my breaks when a car suddenly decided to do a u-turn in front of me. At Spadina, where College shifts south by one lane’s width, if no cars behind me are encroaching too fast, I always stay on the same horizontal from the right land west of Spadina to the centre lane east of Spadina, so that I’ll be positioned to make a left turn on Huron. While I was waiting to turn, the nervous young woman continued on to wherever east she was rushing.

            At the Ramsey-Wright building, there’s a disposal unit for batteries just inside the entrance that I take. I’ve been saving batteries for years, not wanting to throw batteries in the garbage, I’ve been saving mine for years, with the intention of disposing of them there, but I keep forgetting to bring them in. Id forgotten again on Thursday, but I’m just writing this here to remind myself to bring them in when I come into class on Tuesday.

            When Professor Baker came into the lecture hall she complained good-naturedly that there was very low attendance that morning. I said, “Isn’t that the way it always is after the mid-term?” She mock pounded her fist on the podium and said, “That’s not an excuse!”

            We began the lecture with a little more about Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”. In the book, Arnold Spirit’s white study mate tells him that one should read a book three times. The first time one should read it to catch the rhythm of it and ride the narrative like a river; the second time one reads it for the meaning of the words and to grasp the history behind the book; the third time one should read it for the “metaphorical boner” it gives you, that is one should try to grasp the message of the book.

            This reminded me of what George Gurdjieff advised his readers in the introduction to “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”. He said that they should read his books thrice: “Firstly: at least as you have already become mechanized to read all your contemporary books and newspapers; secondly: as if you were reading aloud to another person; and only thirdly: try and fathom the gist of my writings.” I wondered if Alexie had ever read Gurdjieff, but I couldn’t find any connection in a search. That doesn’t mean anything though, as often people treat their involvement in Gurdjieff studies as if they were part of a secret society.

            We were told that Alexie’s book is very body focused, with the “metaphorical boner” being just one of many examples. The book also stands out from most young adult novels in that it doesn’t make everything all right in the end.

            She discussed some of Thomas King’s ideas about American aboriginal writing, as he presented them in his essay, “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial”. He says that Canadian literature may be post-colonial, but Native literature is not. He divides Native literature into four categories: Tribal literature is essentially private to the tribe and kept in the tribal language. It is virtually invisible to outside cultures; polemical literature refers to literature in Native languages, or in colonial languages, that deal with conflict between Native and non-Native cultures; interfusional writing blends oral literature with written literature, the only complete example of which is Harry Robinson’s “Write It On Your Heart”. We studied a story from that book called “Coyote Tricks Owl” last fall in my Canadian Literature course; associational literature tells stories based in the Native community but that avoid serving as literary tourism.

            Then we began talking about Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”. King was asked to write something to that told the Columbus story from a native perspective, to commemorate the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in America. He found that pretty ironic, but he did it. The result was “A Coyote Columbus Story”. He used Coyote as having created Columbus by mistake because the oral tradition often presents Coyote as creating people and creatures that she can’t control.

            When he finished the book, the people who had asked him to write it, hated it. They also said that it was inaccurate because Columbus never took Native people back to Europe as slaves. Thomas King thought that was hilarious because it was the only thing in the book that was historically accurate. On the return from Columbus’s second voyage, he brought back 1,200 natives as slaves, 200 of which died on the way to Spain. To be fair though, the taking of slaves wasn’t exactly something that Native people didn’t do to each other.

            The illustrator of “A Coyote Columbus Story” was William Kent Monkman, who is half Cree and half Irish. He has a drag queen alter ego that he uses for some of his artwork, named “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle”.

            Around this time I noticed there was a wasp flying around the lecture hall.

            In “A Coyote Columbus Story”, one of Columbus’s machine gun wielding henchmen is an Elvis impersonator wearing high-heeled pumps.

            All the publishers to which he shopped the book hated it, until finally a small Canadian publisher took it on and now it is considered a classic.

            After class, I rode up to Eglinton and Mount Pleasant and went east to Bayview, dipping down the southern side streets as I went. There is construction all along Eglinton that narrows the street and also the entrances to some of the side streets. Some of the middle class houses already have their Halloween decorations ready. Mostly it’s that white, spray-on webbing that looks nothing like webbing in the daylight, but rather like some garbage that blew onto someone’s bushes. A couple of the houses have cool looking big black spiders attached to the outside. Only one house has a big, plastic enclosed “contaminated area” for kids to enter, full of spooky stuff, although most of it looks pretty typical.

            I needed coffee and so I took twenty dollars out of the grant money I’m saving for January, but then when I went to the supermarket, I spent the twenty dollars on other things and totally forgot about the coffee. I didn’t realize that until I started making dinner, and so I headed back out to go to the bank for another twenty and a quick trip to Freshco. As I was coming out of my door, an elderly homeless woman was walking by, albeit with a fairly nice haircut. She was pushing a shopping cart. I stopped as she was going by because I couldn’t get out. She saw me and I guess she thought that I was rushing her because she repeated, “Okay, okay, okay …” several times until she’d passed. The most striking thing about her was that she was in her sock feet and the socks were white, dirty and so torn that they could be mistaken for old bandages wrapped around her feet.

            I watched a very good short film by Buster Keaton called, “Grand Slam Opera”. This was not a silent film, but rather one that even began with Keaton doing a musical number. He’s on the back of a train, leaving his Arizona town for New York City and all the townsfolk have gathered to sing about how glad they are that he’s leaving.

            The story in New York is centred on him trying to get onto a radio talent show. When he finally gets on it turns out that he’s a juggler who describes what he’s doing to the radio audience while he’s doing it. They only allow him one trick and then the orchestra starts playing but he keeps on trying to do his act, which involves balancing a broom, but he ends up hitting the conductor of the orchestra, who hits him back with his baton. The most hilarious part is when they are hitting each other back and forth while the orchestra plays along to the beat of their battle.

Cigarette Sandwich

           

            Wednesday was another day to get the place ready for the exterminator. The best I can say is that the last two or three months has shown an ebb in the bedbug infestation. It’s hard to be satisfied with that though. There is another spraying already booked in exactly two weeks, so I remain hopeful.

            The Orkin guy usually comes around 11:00, which is the same time on Wednesdays that I go to the foodbank. I went a little earlier than usual in hopes that I would be home when the technician arrived. The line-up was already fifteen people long when I got there. My place in line was a cigarette sandwich. The red faced lady was sitting and amicably saying things to people she recognized, though most people didn’t respond. She suggested that maybe there would be treats for us here for Halloween, then she gleefully repeated the word “Treats!” two or three times. She said that she told someone that the bus drivers need to control their emotions, especially around Christmastime, with the RIDE program, then she added, “I was only joking, but it might be true!”

            I rushed back home with number 16 and found the exterminator still in the building, but he’d already dome my place. The smell of poison is usually confined to the bedroom and living room, but this time it was barely breathable even in the hallway outside my apartment.

            I took a large load of empties, discarded by my two neighbours, to the Beer Store and scored a little over six dollars. Then I needed to take my bedding to the Laundromat, but I wanted to stay there, so I wanted to take some reading along. My copy of Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian” is an e-book, so I needed to copy it to my flash drive so I could read it on my laptop, but I didn’t want to breathe the fumes in my living room. So I held my breath, came in and stuck my usb stick into my computer and then went back outside to take a breath. Then I took another breath and came in to open up the file, then went back out to take another breath. After several trips like that I had what I needed and carried two bags of laundry on my bike to the Laundromat. It was being managed by a Tibetan couple. The woman was sewing a quilt and listening to a Tibetan video of someone talking on her smartphone. I got through half of the Sherman Alexie book before my laundry was done.

            So the teenage indigenous American, Arnold Spirit Jr. has done what no other Indian on the reservation has ever done: he’s transferred to a white school. He gets psychologically bullied almost from the start. He tells us that fistfighting is part of the culture on the reservation and even if one loses almost every time, one has to fight. So when the toughest kid in the white school tells him a very rude joke about Indians, Arnold shrugs and throws the first punch, expecting to be beaten to death afterwards, but nothing happens. The kid is shocked and treats him with respect afterwards. It turned out that white kids didn’t get into fistfights.

            I took my laundry home and headed back to the foodbank. I had brought along E. B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” to read while I was waiting. It was kind of embarrassing though because the first few pages brought tears to my eyes when the little girl saved the baby pig and started bonding with it. When they called my number, I was glad that they had packages of sliced ham. It was either that or flavoured yogourt with artificial sweetener. There was a new bread person. I reached for a package of multigrain buns but she told me that was for families. Then she gave me a loaf of bread, which was pretty much the same amount of bread as the buns.

            When I got home I sat out on the deck for a while because of the poison in the air. After an hour or so I moved into the hallway. Even five hours after the spraying, the smell was too strong. I went inside quickly to open the windows and then went back to the hall. After a while I was able to sit and read by the window in the kitchen but couldn’t go into the living room. I finished reading Charlotte’s Web. It was interesting how the little girl could understand what the animals were saying and the animals understood what humans were saying but the girl didn’t communicate with the animals.

            It was early evening by the time I could go into the living room.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s “The Love Nest”. Keaton writes a letter to his ex-fiancée that reads, “Since you’ve broken off our engagement, I’ve decided not to marry you.” Then he used his tears to wet the glue on the envelope and sailed away to a bunch of seafaring slapstick.

"Indian" is taken and anyone born here is a native, so Aboriginal Canadians is probably closer

           

           

            As soon as I was done with my yoga on Tuesday morning, I sat down for the last available three hours of working on my essay before I had to submit it in class. Most of that time was spent in working out the Modern Language Association requirements for formatting my in-text citations. With half an hour left, I read it through again, and made a few quick changes. I settled on the title, “The Sad Freedom of Peter Pan”. Here was my thesis: “For children to grow up in a balanced manner requires that they have responsible adult role models, that they be raised in a loving environment and that they be allowed the freedom to develop as individuals. Without all three, children can either stumble into becoming damaged adults or remain in a state of immaturity.”

            I printed up the essay twice because the first time I hadn’t put my name on every page. I also had to submit a second copy electronically before I left for class, fifteen minutes later than usual. I rushed through Little Italy, but still was able to enjoy the perfume of the wood burning pizza ovens being fired up for the day. I was five minutes early for class, but a lot of people were late because of their essays. I handed mine in, fairly satisfied with my argument, but I could have used an extra day to refine the writing. The guy behind me said he could have used another day as well, because he’d wasted five hours on Monday watching the election results.

            In the first half of class we finished our discussion of M. T. Anderson’s “The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing”. The deliberate holes in the narrative correspond to the blank spaces in the story of the American Revolution. The book is a Bildungsroman, a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education.

            I commented on a powerful play on words in an exchange between Octavian and his fellow slave and mentor, Bono. Octavian argues that “a man is known by his deeds!” but Bono says, “Yeah, and so is a house!”

            In the second half of the lecture we began to talk about Sherman Alexie’s, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”.

            There was a discussion about the use of the term “Indian” by aboriginal peoples of the American continents to refer to themselves rather than “Native”. I said that most of the aboriginal people I’ve known, including girlfriends have referred to themselves as “Indian”. It turns out that my TA, Christina, is a student of Native Studies. She said she always says “Native” and that Native people have the right to call themselves Indian but we don’t have the right to refer to them in that way. It sounds a bit like white liberal pretentiousness to me. Technically, anyone born in America is a “native American”.

            Reservations are equated with death camps.

            The book also features cartoons, one of which is a split figure of someone on the left side as being white and on the right side, “Indian”. Various aspects of differences of accoutrement are displayed on either side, such as “the latest air Jordans” on the white side and canvas sneakers from aisle 7 at the Safeway Supermarket on the Indian side. I commented that my Cree ex-girlfriend had told me that Safeway is owned by the Catholic Church. Later though, I looked this up and found that it’s an urban myth. Safeway is actually now owned by Sobeys and was never owned by the Catholic Church.

            In the cartoon, the white person has an expensive watch but on the Indian side is the expression, “It’s skin thirty!” I’d always remembered, “It’s a hair past a freckle!” Here, a joke is used to ease the discomfort of poverty. On the Indian side, the discount prices of items are listed, whereas on the white side there are no prices.

            On the white side is the statement, “bright future” but on the Indian side, “vanishing past”. I wonder about the idea of a vanishing past being unique to aboriginal peoples. In fact, it seems to me that aboriginal peoples have a firmer grip on their past than most European descendants here in Canada. I, for example, know very little and care very little about my Scandinavian heritage.

            There is a line from the book: “Poverty doesn’t give you strength or lessons. It just teaches you how to be poor.”

            After class I rode up to Soudan and Mount Pleasant and then across to Bayview. As I turned the corner I saw a children’s clothing store called “Never Grow Up”, which was an interesting coincidence, considering the essay I’d just turned in. That whole area, south of Eglinton, on both Bayview and Mount Pleasant, is full of children’s clothing stores, children’s book stores and toy stores.

            That night I watched Buster Keaton’s “The Balloonatic”, but it wasn’t as good as one would expect from the title.

            I read about a fifth of Sherman Alexie’s, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian”. It’s both funny and sad at the same time and the story is engaging. It’s written in simple language and it’s from the point of view of an adolescent aboriginal American growing up on a very poor reservation in Washington State. His white math teacher comes to see him one day and tells him that he’s the only one on the reservation with any hope of surviving but he has to leave in order to do so. He immediately tells his parents that he wants to transfer to the nearby white school. They ask him if he’s sure, but when he says he is, they say “okay” like they’ve been waiting his whole life for him to ask for this. I left off with him about to leave. He tells his best friend that he’s leaving and right away his friend becomes his worst enemy.

Proof of Address Voting Frustration

           

            I was visiting a friend in his second floor apartment when I looked out his south-eastern window to witness the curious sight of two thin men, one white and one black, walking east together on the street, both of them so tall that they were eye level with the second story window of the building across the street. I was still thinking about how that was possible when I walked to his kitchen, and while standing in front of his north facing window, somebody walking by outside punched me in the balls. It didn’t really hurt but it was just enough for me to know that I’d been punched in the balls.

            On Monday I went out to vote. I don’t remember a previous election when proof of one’s address, other than the card that is sent out by Elections Canada, was such a big deal. I was asked for identification with my address on it. I have never had or needed a piece of identification with my address on it. The only piece of official identification that a person can have containing their address is a driver’s licence, which is something that I don’t and have never had. It comes across as somewhat biased in favour of people who drive to have this expectation. I was asked if I had a bill from Bell Canada to prove my address, but I don’t receive any bills by mail anymore, and besides, why would a utility bill prove my address any more than an Elections Canada card with my address printed on it? I had two pieces of picture id with my name, plus the voter’s card, which had my name and address on it. These in combination should have been enough. I started raising my voice and saying that I had an essay to write and if I had to go home to dig up a letter with my address on it, I wouldn’t be coming back to vote. The woman finally just grumbled and gave me a ballot. They really should try to make voting a smooth and pleasant experience so people aren’t in a bad mood while trying to make their choice.

            I spent the entire rest of the day struggling with my essay, and finally finished a first draft of it before midnight.

When You're Voting, Don't Worry! The Cat That Comes In Second Can't Do You Any Harm!

           

            I was part of a homeless Jewish family that lived in a van. There was an elderly father and I was among the adult children, of which there was at least one sister. We were being experimented on by Nazis, though it wasn’t forced upon us. They were giving us pharmaceutical drugs and testing our reactions to the side effects. We were allowing this to be done to us because we were double agents working for the Canadian government, who would also test us after the Nazis did so in order to figure out through our bodies what the Nazis were up to. It wasn’t always easy to tell which were the Nazis and which were our government though.

            I spent the whole of Sunday working on my essay. I wrote a thesis paragraph and started organizing my ideas according to the arguments of my thesis. It’s closer to being an essay now but it’s still pretty choppy.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s short silent film, “The Frozen North”. Buster lives near the last subway stop, which turns out to be in the Arctic Circle. He arrives home to see his wife in the arms of another man. He pulls out his gun and shoots them both, then realizes it wasn’t his house or his wife. The rest of the movie had a lot of the usual slapstick and climbing around with additional skits relating to snow and ice.

Spooky Skeleton

           

            I was just leaving an outdoor dinner party where the guests were mostly middle class, middle aged women and the food had been served on disposable plates, some of which seemed to have a life of their own, as they and the leftovers they were holding started sliding off the benches where they were sitting beside the ladies. I was carrying mine to find a garbage can and caught one plate that was about to slide off the bench from beside one woman who was chatting with another. I found a trash basket on the corner, where a dark street began. I had an appointment and went looking for public transit. I walked up the steps of a pedestrian overpass, similar to the one that goes over the railroad tracks north of Bloor and Dundas. I was at the top but turned around. In addition to a little of my own money, I had $200 in my pocket that I had to give to someone, but there was someone else, a young blonde guy in good shape that also needed the money. It didn’t seem to matter which person I gave it to and they could work out who owed what to whom between them. I looked down to the streetcorner near the foot of the stairs and saw that my bike was locked there, though it was a different bike than the one I usually ride. I was about to descend to unlock it because I could get to where I was going quicker that way, when my phone rang. I dug it out of my pocket but it looked like the spooky green skeleton of a smartphone, with the circuits exposed. I didn’t even know which side to talk into but when I put it to my ear and said hello, a desperate voice said, “Christian! It’s Nancy! I really need to see you! Can you meet me?” She didn’t have the voice of my daughter’s mother but I recognized her particular flavour of panic and said, “Okay” and then she hung up. There was no when and where attached to any meeting though. Around that point I woke up.

            On Saturday I needed to wash some underwear and since they wouldn’t be able to dry properly at home I decided to splurge at the Laundromat. I considered washing them first and then taking them to be dried, but figured the extra quarters I’d have to spend to get soaking wet clothing dry would amount to about as much as paying for a washer, in which case, because of the final spin cycle, they wouldn’t be dripping when I put them in the dryer. So I took a small load of things that needed to be washed, but not my bedding, since I’d be washing that next Wednesday when the exterminator comes again.

            On my way to the Laundromat, I was waiting near Lansdowne and Queen and waiting to cross south when someone called my name. It was Michael Fraser, pushing his son in a stroller for the purpose of getting him down for a nap. He was already halfway nodded off, but still holding onto the box of Triscuits he’d been snacking on.

            Michael is featuring at the Plastiscene reading series this Sunday. I told him that because of the essay I have to finish before Tuesday I might not be able to make it out that night. I think I’ve been going to Plastiscene every month for about five years now, and I’ve only missed it one time, which was because I had to study for a French exam. In this case I really can’t see myself being able to sacrifice the four hours of writing time I’d lose if I went to Plastiscene on Sunday night. I would have to make miraculous progress with the essay before the evening for me to be able to go.

            So, after my laundry I spent the day writing. I finished the required seven pages of text and came up with a thesis, but I still have to refine those seven pages of ideas into arguments that support my thesis.

            While eating dinner I watched Buster Keaton’s short silent film, “The Electric House”. Some diplomas get mixed up at graduation and Keaton ends up with one that says he’s an electrical engineer, so he gets hired to electrify a house. This takes place in 1922 when a lot of houses still didn’t have electricity. The family returns from holiday to fin all kinds of modern innovations have been installed. This film was mostly interesting only because of what would have been considered at that time to be innovative. The house had an escalator that sometimes went too fast and catapulted whoever was ascending out the window and into the pool, which could drain or fill in a matter of seconds. There was a pool table that racked its own balls. The bookshelf had an arm that would extend to pass you whatever book you wanted. The dinner table had a train track that ran to and from the kitchen and went around the edge of the table to deliver or take away dishes. There were a few more gadgets as well but things went most wrong when the real electrical engineer snuck into the electrical room of the house and started switching the wires.