No Matter How You Vote, At $163,700 a Year, You're Voting for the Rich

           

            On Sunday at 5:30, when my alarm went off, I did not reach it in time to turn it off and so it went into snooze mode for five minutes. I would normally have gotten up at that point but somehow my brain thought that I needed to turn off the alarm before getting up and so I went back to sleep. Even when it went off again, after shutting it off, I only got up because I had to pee. Then I walked back into the bedroom with the intention of lying down again until I realized that it was actually time to get up.

I spent most of Sunday working towards finding a topic on which to write my essay. I started by sitting down and hand writing a page on each of the eleven topics and whatever popped into my head when I thought about them. Then I began to type out each page and added more thoughts as I wrote to see which topic inspired the most ideas. I only got up to topic seven before I took my evening bike ride, but so far I’ve had more to say on the subject of sea voyages as they are used in the stories of Swallows and Amazons” and “Where the Wild Things Are”. I might though have quite a lot of thoughts when I start comparing Max from “Where the Wild Things Are” to “Peter Pan”.

            I rode up O’Hara, past a building blasting Soca music and as I was turning on Maple Grove there were a couple on the corner embracing tightly and the girl, who might have been drunk, was biting the boy’s shoulder. The neighbourhood is swamped with political posters, most of them NDP because that’s the party this part of town voted for last time. South of the railroad bridge it’s “Re-elect Peggy Nash”, who looks like a hillbilly in her photo and north of the bridge it’s “Re-elect Andrew Cash”, who betrayed Punk Rock to become a politician and who looks like a smiling dork in his picture.  With $163,700 a year you’d think he could afford to get his teeth fixed. On Brock Avenue the sound of a recording of a Portuguese crooner was coming out of a house. I was overdressed in a long sleeved shirt with my leather jacket on top, so once I got to St Clair and Dufferin I stopped a few doors east of the first panhandler I’ve ever seen on that corner and removed the shirt so I just had my undershirt on beneath my jacket. I rode to Yonge Street, singing my translation of “L’accordéon” and then down Yonge, singing my translation of “Le Moribond”.

I stopped at Freshco but before I shopped for anything I had to pee very badly. One has to get the key from the express counter and it’s the heaviest key I’ve ever carried. It’s attached to a piece of rectangular pipe about five centimetres long by a thick chain about a third of a meter long. I guess they’re very afraid of losing it.

I watched Buster Keaton’s “The Haunted House”. A ring of counterfeiters dress up as ghosts, skeletons and ghouls and rig their place of operations to make it appear haunted so that people will stay away. Keaton works as a teller in the bank but he clumsily spills glue on the money and so it becomes very difficult to handle neatly and it sticks to everything. People are sticking to the floor and to each other. Then robbers come in but the money they are given is sticky. They put down their guns to unstick themselves from the cash and Buster picks up the guns to chase the bandits away. But when the owner rushes in to see Keaton alone in the bank with guns he thinks that he is robbing it and so he runs away to avoid capture. He runs straight into the haunted house. It takes him a while to figure out that it’s all trickery. He ends up capturing the bad guys.