White Face

            They called them eels, but they were as thick around as oil drums. In order to store them to be used later for food they had to be first sawed in half and then buried in long graves. Once they were halved though they looked more like lizards than eels. I was leaning over the edge of the pit when one of them reached up and tried to grab my leg to pull me down. I stepped back just in time so it wasn’t able to get a grip.

            Over the last couple of weeks they’ve been renovating the apartment at the top of the stairs. On Sunday September 11^th the landlord was doing the wiring for the outlets and so he was switching the breakers off and on. The problem is though that the fuse box for apartment 2 handles the power for the western half of my apartment, which includes my computer. So while I was in the middle of working, the computer got shut off at least three times over the day.

            That evening while I was putting my bike out into the hall, my neighbour, Greg stepped out of his apartment with his face covered in a whitish brown cream, which was striking because Greg is Black and looked like he was in a Whiteface minstrel show or one of the members of the African tribes that paint their face white. I think that in Greg’s face it was just a treatment. He went out o the deck and did some chin-ups from beneath the fire escape that leads to the third floor.

Riding east along the Bloor bike lane, I had to deal with a couple of pedestrians stepping out from the sidewalk to get to their parked cars on the other side of the lane. It just doesn’t register for them that there could be vehicles moving along that two-meter wide strip that separates them from their chariots.
            I also had to edge past people getting out of their cars and lingering on the path as they waited for the other passengers to disembark, because that’s what they are used to doing.

            I rode to Cosburn and Coxwell, and then back west along the Danforth, down Bay, across College to University, down to Queen and west again.

            On Queen there is construction on the right side, so when there are lots of cars, there is no room to pass another bicycle. One guy ahead of me stopped to use his phone, so I had to calmly tell him, “You’re holding up traffic there, guy.” so he edged into the construction area and out of my way.

            At 20:00, I started chopping up some onions and garlic to sauté. I was going to add some ground beef to that and after it was browned, add it to the lentil soup I’d started, along with some chopped peppers. But when I turned the stove on, nothing happened. I tried changing the fuse, but still nothing. I went to the fuse box in the hall and switched all the breakers with number three beside them, but the stove still did not work.  I concluded that this had something to do with what the landlord had been doing to the wiring in apartment two, so I called him. He said he’d have Sundar come over and switch the breakers on the fuse box in number two, and if all else failed, maybe I could cook my meal in that room.

My upstairs neighbour, David came home and asked me if I wanted some detergent. I said I would, so he gave me a package containing three different kinds of Sunlight dishwashing liquid: cucumber-melon; green apple; and orange.

While I was waiting for Sundar, I went once again to the hallway fuse box. David had pointed out to me that one of the switches was off, but that was for number two, so I didn’t think it had anything to do with my kitchen stove. But I decided to turn the switch on anyway and I got the power back for my stove. What a crazy building!

            Because of the delay, there was once again no time to fix up my lentil soup, so I just cooked the ground beef with onions and garlic and wrapped it in a big, soft tortilla.