Sunday, 27 March 2016

Woodstock for Dogs



            On Saturday I finally took all of the liquor and beer bottles that my neighbour left behind when he moved out to the Beer Store. I had previously brought them into my apartment from the deck but felt the need to dump out all the cigarette butts from the beer bottles. Every other beer bottle had between ten and twenty butts in it. For all I know the Beer Store doesn’t care, but I find cigarette butts disgusting and so I cleaned out every single bottle before storing it in my place. I filled my backpack and two large cloth grocery bags with bottles and managed to sort of keep my balance with them slung over my handlebars on the way to the Beer Store but I was like someone with enormous and unwieldy barely supported breasts trying negotiate the street on roller skates. I got a little over seven dollars in exchange for the empties, and bought a couple of cans of Creemore, one for later that night and one for Sunday. I went to the supermarket to get a few non-vegetarian supplies, since Easter Sunday would be my first day of eating meat and dairy for almost a month and a half.
            In our most recent Short Story class we had discussed Daniel Clowes’s graphic story, “Gynecology”. Andrew Lesk had made the story available for us a on a site called Drop Box, but since I already had a digital copy of the comic Eightball #17 in which “Gynecology first appeared I didn’t bother with Drop Box. It turned out though that Andrew had also posted an essay on the Clowes story by Daniel Raeburn. I tried to find it on Drop Box but perhaps I went about it the wrong way. I ended up downloading Drop Box and opening a Drop Box account and so now all I see when I access it is an inbox with one file telling me how to get started with Drop Box. Maybe there was a way beforehand to access the file without opening an account but it seems that now that I have one it’s not possible. Andrew answered my email to say that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about and that the files are there. He said it appears that I’m the only one that couldn’t find it. I said that it appears that I’m the only one who can and can’t do a lot of things. I have found an essay on Daniel Clowes by Raeburn, but Andrew had said specifically that the essay is on “Gynecology”. I’ve asked him for the exact title so I can search for it. I really hate these sites like Drop Box that make one jump through hoops to access them and then are impossible to use.
            In the evening there was a guy across the street improvising on the electric guitar. He also had two large off-leash dogs playing with one another while he played with his guitar. The brown one kept on mounting and humping the black one. Despite being unleashed and running fairly wild within the boundaries of the sidewalks, they seemed to be trained to respect that edge and to not cross it. Their caretaker seemed to trust them implicitly because he continued to be absorbed in his guitar playing no matter what the dogs were doing. At one point it appeared that someone from upstairs came down to talk to him about the noise, but he kept on playing while the guy was talking to him and didn’t stop after he went back into the building.
            I watched a couple more episodes of Father Knows Best from the first season. One of them started off as a detective story as Jim was investigating whether or not Kathy broke a window with a baseball, which she said she didn’t do. Then it turned into a court battle when Jim parked his car in front of a driveway, which he said he didn’t do. The complication was that it was something called “Boys Week” in which young students were given all the big government jobs for a week. Jim’s son Bud ended up as the court judge. He found Jim guilty and when his mother got up to protest he charged her with contempt of court.

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