Chiaroscuro

            I had to work early on Monday so I rushed through most of song practice. I wolfed down some yogourt with honey and bananas but I had to leave a full cup of coffee I’d just made when it was time to go. It hadn’t snowed for a while and so lately I’ve been able to wear my Blundies, which are easier to slip on and off, instead of the Kodiaks when I ride.

            The sign-in sheet for that week hadn’t yet been put into the sign-in folder at the security desk, as is often the case on Monday mornings, but since I’d be in on Tuesday as well I could sign for both days next time. But because the sheet wasn’t there I had to dig my planner out to find out which room I’d written down.

            I worked a full day for Greg Damery. I think that Greg is a very good teacher because he knows a lot about what he’s teaching and he explains it well. But Greg never stops talking and moves, sometimes in mid sentence, from telling a student about anatomy or how to paint or draw to some other topic that has suddenly come to his mind, and then he makes a comment or asks a question about something else followed by a short conversation on the subject before seamlessly returning to where he left off in the instruction. It might sometimes go something like, “Chiaroscuro was developed during the Renaissance and it’s the treatment of contrasting light and shade that has fallen unevenly from a particular direction on the model. How long have you been modeling, Christian? Me: I started in 1982. Greg: Wow! I graduated from here in 1982. Me: I did take five years off though. Greg: What did you do? Me: I moved furniture mostly, bussed tables and became a waiter for a few months, but I also tried to work as a photographer’s assistant for a year. Greg: When I was sixteen I worked for a moving company and on my first day the driver told me to get out of the truck on Bloor Street and stop traffic for him. I was terrified! So, Chiaroscuro uses strong tonal contrasts to dramatically model three-dimensional forms.” And all this time he would be demonstrating the technique on the student’s drawing pad.

            When I took a break we talked a little more about furniture moving. I told him that nobody can swamp furniture for very long without developing a bad back. I related the story of a middle aged French Canadian guy that I’d worked with who had to take so many painkillers that he was always high. One time we were following a woman up her stairs as she was showing us what to move. He reassured her we’d take good care of her stuff and gave her a pat on the behind at the same time. Greg laughed.

            I posed for one long portrait for the day with just my shirt off, but I found myself feeling drowsy almost from the start. For the most part I was able to nonetheless maintain the pose, but every now and then my eyes would shut and my head would drop forward for a split second. Mostly though my head stayed in position while for brief moments my eyes would shut before I caught myself and opened them again. Greg didn’t seem bothered by it and he even seemed to have worked out my rhythm, so that when he was with a student and working on my eyes and they close, he’d just say, “Wait a second … Okay, he’s back.” At every five-minute break I tried a couple of different things to counteract the sleepiness. Splashing cold water on my face sometimes does the trick, but this time it didn’t help. I tried lying down for a four-minute sleep and I actually did sleep a bit and even once had a dream about the grey haired, red-faced, schizophrenic woman that I used to see a lot at the food bank before it moved up to Queen last year. There was no story to the dream though, I just saw her wearing a polyester coat with a hood tightly tied over her head, that I only revealed her face.

            It was only during my one-hour lunch break that I was able to get enough sleep so that I was able to, for the most part, hold my eyes open for the afternoon session.

            On the way home it was starting to snow. I stopped at Freshco where I bought cherries and yogourt. They still had chicken drumsticks for sale but I decided not to buy any because I still had some I’d cooked, which would be enough for that night and since I’d be out Tuesday and Wednesday nights there would be no time to cook more. When I got home I defrosted a Black Forest ham that I’d gotten from the food bank.

            I watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory. The second one had Amy and Sheldon begin a project together of using neuroscience and quantum physics to disprove the theory that consciousness causes collapse in the process of quantum measurement.

More Than Two Sexes

            I spent a lot of time on Sunday writing my journal, but I also argued with a woman on Twitter about the sex chromosomes that combine outside of the normal XX and XY combination. I was suggesting that the additional Ys or Xs like the XXY of Klinefelter's syndrome might be a different sex. She insisted that Klinefelter's only affects males, and that is the same phrasing that geneticists use, but the language seems wrong to me. If the chromosomes create the sex, where is there a male to be affected? To say that males are “affected” implies a chronology, as in, the male was there to be affected and then the other X came along. It seems to me what they mean by the XXY “only affecting males” is that everyone with the XXY combination is born with a penis. I hold that each of these combinations might be a different sex, but I distinguish this from someone being transgender. Gender may be more about brain structure than chromosomes, since transgender women tend to have brain structures similar to those of cisgender women, and transgender men tend to have brains like men even though one may be XX and the other XY. Down the road though maybe they'll find chromosomal combos to explain the brain differences.

I watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory. It turns out that Raj, despite having a salary from his work as an astrophysicist, has never paid for anything. His rent, his car and his credit cards have always been paid for by his rich father in India. Raj decides to cut the strings and support himself, but immediately has to struggle and move out of his apartment. Something the writers overlooked though is that if Raj has never paid for anything he must have amassed a fortune of savings from his unspent salary.

Paramedics Should Have X-Ray Vision

            It was a mystery to me why I felt so tired on Saturday morning. I had gotten more sleep than usual and some days when I’ve slept less I’ve had a lot more energy. I had to work that morning and since I didn’t want to conk out while posing, after song practice I skipped memorizing the latest French song that I’ve been working on and went to bed. The plan had been to sleep for an hour, but after thirty minutes I was awake and decided that I’d better have breakfast before work. I had a couple of pieces of cinnamon-raisin toast, a toasted slice of Bavarian multigrain bread with peanut butter and a bowl of granola with milk.

            When I got to the Artists 25 studio only Colin was there so far. By the time I started posing a woman who’d been there the week before had arrived and she helped me get my hands in the right position. I’d almost had them right except for having put the right hand under the left instead of the other way around. A middle-aged woman from Korea was the third member. After about six minutes, Tom came shuffling in. He was having difficulty getting his easel set up and so the woman that had verbally helped me got up to move things around for him. He told her, “My leg isn’t behaving itself this morning.”

            A few minutes later Sol came in and approached Tom to ask him for a cheque. Sol said he could wait until the break and went to sit down. Tom decided out loud to write the cheque while it was on his mind. He struggled to his feet and started making his way to where he’d left his cane, which was at the opposite end of the studio from where his chequebook happened to be. He supported himself on his easel at first and then ventured out to cross a part of the floor without vertical furniture. That’s when he fell and I shouted “Whoah!” A couple of people went to help him up. He seemed all right. Someone retrieved his cane, gave it to him and he said he’d be fine. He took two steps, and each time he put his weight on his right foot it trembled uncertainly. On the third step he collapsed. People rushed to him.

Tom was able to sit up but he couldn’t get up. His left foot was twisted all the way to the left. Sol observed that it looked like Tom’s shin might be broken. Both his pant legs were pulled up and we could see that his right leg had a red wound about the size of thumbprint. Tom explained that injury had occurred when he’d taken a spill two days earlier. Colin got behind Tom to support his back while he was sitting there. I suggested we call an ambulance. Colin called 911. At this point I was still posing and there were three minutes left till my first break but Colin told me to take a break. That made sense, since it might be uncomfortable for the paramedics to walk in and see a naked man.

While we were waiting I told Tom that he should have left his bad leg at home.

Sol said he felt guilty and I didn’t say so but it seemed to me that he should. He could have brought Tom his chequebook and a pen and kept all this from happening. But then again, if Tom’s leg was that weak that day, his tumble could have happened at any time that day. It was actually a surprise that it hadn’t happened in the driveway on his way in or coming down the stairs.

The Korean lady went out to wait for the ambulance and to let the paramedics in when they arrived, which was ten or fifteen minutes later. They were a man and a woman in their 30s. He had short, sandy brown hair and she had long blonde hair that was tied back in a high ponytail. The man did most of the talking and he seemed to be in charge. He was very personable and had a calming manner. He informed Tom that they’d definitely have to take him to the hospital and decided that Western had the best facilities for case a case like this.

They brought a chair and a “yellow splint”, which was a sheet of yellow cardboard in shrink-wrap. He removed the plastic and folded it into an open, foot and leg-shaped box, into which Tom’s foot and leg was placed while the blonde paramedic wrapped white tape around Tom’s leg and the splint.

Tom asked him if his leg was broken and he answered that it looked like it might be but unfortunately he didn’t have x-ray vision. It seems to me short sighted of the city to not require at least one paramedic out of every pair of paramedics to have x-ray vision.

Tom was lifted into the chair and wheeled away. We said our goodbyes and I advised him not to go skating anytime soon.

There was still an hour and a half left in the morning. With Tom gone there were four members.

I related how back in the mid-eighties I had posed one Saturday at Artists 25 when it was on Bathurst, south of Dupont, and during the lunch break I went with Tom to look at lawn sales. I could barely keep up with him as he rushed from sale to sale, looking for electronic equipment to tinker with.

At 12:30 I went home to take a quick nap but I really cut it close. I woke up at 13:20, which meant that I had ten minutes to get back to the studio. I made it with a couple of minutes to spare.

I got paid $100 in cash at the end and I rode over to No Frills where I bought grapes, garlic, cinnamon bread and cheese, as well some of my usual purchases. 

I didn’t bother to take a siesta when I got home.

That evening I cooked the frozen ground chicken I’d gotten from the food bank a while ago in some organic chicken broth. I added basil and garlic tomato sauce to that and cooked some spiral pasta, which I ate with the sauce and a beer while watching two episodes of The Big Bang Theory. The only thing that stood out was when Raj arranged to have all of his ex-girlfriends get together for a focus group to talk about why they broke up with him. Howard was there taking notes and all the women wondered why Howard and Raj weren’t a couple. After the girls left the two guys speculated about what kind of relationship they would have if they were Gay. Howard said that if things didn’t work out with Bernadette he’d consider it but Raj said he’d be all over Bernadette. Howard told him Stewart has already called dibs on Bernadette in that case.

            

Torontoshima

            I was scheduled to work at 8:30 on Friday so I rushed through song practice, made some coffee, got ready, wolfed down a thick slice of ham, drank the gulped the coffee and headed out. When I got to the sign-in sheet though I saw that I was booked from 9:00. When I checked later I saw that I had just assumed it started at 8:30 and written it down that way but the email said 9:00. I’m glad I didn’t give the instructor, Rae Johnson a hard time about it like I’d thought about doing.

            Rae’s name and face seemed familiar. She told me she remembered me from when she taught at OCADU before and that she’d just started again after a long time. She said she starts at 9:00 to give her students time to set up. I'm sure they all have other classes for which they have to be ready by 8:30. Maybe Rae just doesn't want to start that early. She told me they'd only need me till 14:00, so that was good news.

            She was interested to hear that I was working on an essay comparing sexuality in the Wasteland and Howl. She commented that those were sexually different times compared to today's “Me Too” movement. I said that, especially in the Wasteland, things didn't go very well for women.

            I did two sets of two ten minute poses and then one long pose for the rest of the class, with a one-hour lunch break at noon.

            The only windows in the studio are translucent. On the ledge outside of one of them were the silhouettes of two pigeons. The male was doing his cock walk to catch the female while she would keep walking away, sometimes fly away and then return.

            I took a nap at lunchtime so I wouldn’t fall asleep in the afternoon. I only had to work for one hour after lunch. On the way home I didn’t bother to stop at Freshco, since I’d already gone the day before.

            I didn’t take a siesta after getting home that afternoon, even though I was a bit tired. I didn’t want to be awake in bed all night since I had to work on Saturday morning as well.

            I watched the last two episodes of the 21^st season of South Park.

            In number 9, the Canadian comedy team of Terrence and Philip have just been given a Netflix show, with nothing but fart humour, as usual. All the kids love it but suddenly Kyle doesn’t like it anymore. His friends tease him that he’s turning into a Jewish mother. Kyle starts a group called Millennials Against Canada and has a televised debate with the Canadian Minister of Streaming who tells Kyle that he sounds like a Jewish mother. Kyle asks President Garrison to do something about all the hate coming out of Canada and so Garrison drops an atomic bomb on Toronto.

            In the final episode we learn President Garrison’s approval rating has dropped to 3% and he’s now hiding out in the woods outside of South Park and living on rodents. His nuclear attack on Toronto killed a million people. Kyle’s adopted little brother, Ike is Canadian and wants revenge. He dresses up as a Mountie and is determined to hunt Garrison down like a dog. Kyle convinces the other kids to help him look for Ike, but the route they take has along the way landmarks that remind Heidi of everything she’s been through since she’s been in a relationship with Cartman. She also realizes that Cartman tried to kill her on Halloween. Cartman says, “Yeah baby, but that was only because I was pissed off that you made me late for the pumpkin patch!” Ike captured Garrison and drags him bound and gagged into town. Bob White helps Garrison escape. Heidi breaks up with Cartman. Cartman threatens to shoot himself, but nobody cares.

Tardigrades On Television

            On Thursday I was out of yogourt and since I wanted to have some for lunch, at around midday I rode down to Freshco. I locked my bike not far from the frozen, beige dog turd with the black stripes.

            Inside, cherries were on sale, though they weren't all in great condition. I looked through several bags till I found three bags with the firmest ones. I would be embarrassed though to ransack all the bags to make up a perfect bag of firm cherries just for myself. That's something nobody could get away with in Europe because the fruit is always behind the counter and the market employee or owner always picks your fruit for you. In my experience though the fruit was excellent every time. Though there are plenty of thieves in Italy nobody ever ripped me off on something they sold me.

            I bought a pack of drumsticks and a few other things. “Something So Strong” by Crowded House was playing while I was shopping. That song and “Don’t Dream It’s Over” always catch my attention because they were being played a lot on the radio when I was in Italy in the summer of 1987. I find that the songs one hears while travelling stay in the memory more vividly. There were a lot of songs that I heard during that trip to Europe that remind me of my journey.

Other hitchhiking trips that I took across Canada at various times of my life have similar musical landmarks. I was on my way back to New Brunswick from Toronto during the summer of 1974 to pick up the inheritance my mother had left me when she’d died a year and a half before that. I had spent the night in a hostel in Quebec City and I was crossing a big bridge heading east out of town. A red sports car with the top down pulled over and the driver asked where I was going. I told him New Brunswick and so that’s where we went. He said he’d just started his vacation and what he does every year is to stop for the first hitchhiker he sees and wherever the hitchhiker is going, that becomes his destination. We smoked hash all the way there; he had me wear the headphones and played music for me. What stood out in my memory was the collaboration between Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin, “Love Devotion and Surrender” and “Concerto Pour Une Voix” by Yves Saint Preux.

I was travelling to Vancouver in the spring of 1978 and the car that had picked me up was caught in a traffic jam for two hours on a mountain highway while a crew a few kilometres ahead were dynamiting a passage through the mountains. The driver played Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” while we waited. It was the first time I’d ever heard Bob Seger and I was impressed at the time.

As I rode home I saw a tiny pair of shoes dangling from a power line.

That night I watched two episodes of South Park.

In the first, we begin with Heidi having once again broken up with Cartman and him on the phone bawling his head off and begging her to take him back. He insists that his mood swings are caused by his diet and so Heidi suggests once again that he join her as a vegan. He agrees, but hates it right away. He figures a way out. There’s a company called Beyond Meat that makes plant based imitations of meat that are supposed to taste like the real thing. Cartman slaps a Beyond Meat label on a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and then tells her that it’s the latest creation from Beyond Meat. She tries it and loves it.

Everybody sees that Heidi is in an abusive relationship but her.

Then we switch to the White House, where Paul Ryan, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell try to convince President Garrison to be more presidential. His response is to violently rape all three of them. Next we see Paul Ryan with a black eye and a journalist asks him, “Is that semen in your eye?” Ryan insists that he ran into a door and the semen is actually “door cum”.

Heidi breaks up with Cartman and it looks like she’s going to begin a relationship with Kyle, but she misses Cartman and goes back to him. Then he manages to radicalize her and convinces her that her feelings of doubt about their relationship are part of a larger conspiracy. She goes to tell Kyle that it’s not personally his fault that he’s sneaky and conniving, but that of his people. Then she leaves and Kyle asks himself, “Did she just call me a dirty Jew?”

In the second one, Heidi has transformed into a female version of Cartman, perhaps even worse. Every year she has volunteered to judge the Special Ed Science Fair but suddenly doesn’t want to. Since it’s too close to the event. Mr Mackie makes her do it. Jimmy and Timmy have a project with Tardigrades that looks like it’s going to win. They’ve managed to train their water bears to dance to Taylor Swift music. But Nathan and Mimsy had hoped their lava volcano would win so they could get all the chicks. Nathan decide they are going to sabotage Jimmy and Timmy’s project. He dumps lye into the bowl containing the tardigrades and then puts a curling iron in to electrocute them. But it causes the tardigrades to evolve so they can follow the dance instructions of the hokey pokey. A little later a black helicopter arrives full of men in black suits. They say they are going to put their resources behind the experiment because it just might save us all.

Meanwhile Heidi threatens to sue the school for discrimination because it is funding Special Ed. “Aren’t we all special?” she asks.

Back in the lab everyone finds out that the men in suits are not from the government but from the NFL. They want the evolved tardigrades to replace people in the stands since people have stopped coming. Mr Mackie and Heidi come into announce the science fair is cancelled but the NFL men pull guns. Heidi grabs the bowl of water bears and runs. They chase her but when she’s cornered she drinks the 10,000 sentient tardigrades.

What was it with tradigrades lately? They were both on Star Trek and South Park.

            

Pocket Signals

            I was going to post my blog before leaving for class on Wednesday but the wi-fi was down again. Lately it seems to go off for a few hours every day but not at the same time.

            I left half an hour later than the week before because I figured there’d be a prior class in the lecture theatre anyway. I was at first surprised at how much darker it was outside than the week before, but then I remembered that I had left later. At the Dufferin light I turned on my flashers.

            I was right about there being another class, but I only had to wait about five minutes.

            When Scott arrived I noticed that he had what looked like a brown strip of rope or yarn sticking out and dangling down from his back, right pocket. I wondered if this was part of the Gay pocket code, but I’d always thought those signals involved different coloured and different patterned bandanas in the right or left back pocket. When I looked it up though I couldn’t find anything about a rope or yarn. I found something about fur in the pocket having something to with being into animals. Maybe it was a hanky after all, just twisted and looking like a rope. Since it was in the right pocket it might mean he’s a bottom and the colour brown is supposed to indicate poop sex. But maybe there is a rope symbolism there that’s new and hasn’t yet been written about and it means he likes to be tied up. Then again maybe it means absolutely nothing and he just accidentally had a rope dangling from his pocket.

            We spent the class talking about “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams. Scott said he’d been reading “When Blanche Met Brando” but he said it’s just Hollywood trash. Vivian Leigh only cheated on her husband because he was Gay.

            “A Streetcar Named Desire” is the most produced play ever written by a US playwright. But Williams never saw himself as being part of the US theatre scene.

            The movies have had different approaches for representing the rape scene near the end. The Kazan film switched immediately from Blanche’s reflection in a broken mirror to a hose blasting water down the street. In the version featuring Treat Williams and Ann Margaret the cameras were on the rape scene for ten minutes. There was another version with Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange. The Kazan movie has Stella leaving Stanley because of him raping her sister “because rape must be punished”. But in the play Stella chooses not to believe her sister’s story because then she would have to leave. She doesn’t care what Stanley does. This is evidenced by the scene outside the apartment after he had struck her and then was calling desperately for her. Her descent on the stairs into his arms is slow, seductive and highly sexual. Stella may have no choice but to stay with Stanley, with a new baby and no family to run to, but she wants to stay anyway.

            For film audiences of the 1950s, Brando standing there in just a t-shirt was shocking. It was like seeing a man naked. Scott asked us why it was important for Stanley Kowalski to be portrayed at muscular and handsome. I said that it empowers whatever Stanley says and does. No one is looking at anyone else when Brando is in the frame.

            Streetcar begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy.

            Blanche bathes all the time because she feels dirty from her past. “I can’t turn the trick anymore” is the language of prostitution.

            The ending reflects a reality of modern society that those that threaten to speak the truth must be declared insane. The same thing happens in the Williams play, “Suddenly Last Summer”.

            Blanche is in control when the young man comes to the door but she’s not in control with Stanley.

            The film censors didn’t want to have Blanche retell the story of her young husband having shot himself after she’d told him he disgusted her after she’d walked in and seen him with another man. They wanted to change the other person to a Black woman.

            She tells Stanley, “I hurt him the way you want to hurt me.”

            Homosexuality in the plays of Tennessee Williams is everywhere but nowhere at the same time.

            The fact that we can hear what Blanche is hearing inside her head renders her more sympathetic.

            Stanley asks, “Are you boxed out of your mind?”

            Blanche’s fate of being taken to the insane asylum is a type of death.

            Eunice and Steve serve as a comic parallel of Stella and Stanley. 

            Scott talks about Stanley having been a war hero but I pointed out that he is depicted as having been in the engineering corps and so he would not have seen any action during the war.

            The GI Bill wanted to give free university education to veterans of the war and so women were discouraged from going to college because it would mean taking a spot that was meant for a man.

            During the break I approached Scott and said, “Scott” but hesitated (I’d addressed him as “Scott” once during our test in the fall to ask him a question but I’d never actually asked him if he’d prefer Dr. Rayter), “I can call you ‘Scott’ can’t I?” He nodded nervously and motioned for me to go ahead. I told him that there are transcripts available online for all of the Voices and Visions films about poets that we’ve been watching. I told him that I found it useful. I thought he might want to share that info with the students but I didn’t say that. I just put it out there. I also told him that I’d found an interview in which Robert Frost is asked about Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and he dismisses it as the type of writing any poet could do. Scott said he’d have to look for that interview.

            After the break:

            Why is Stanley depicted as being Polish? Blanche comments, “That’s like being Irish, isn’t it?” I assume the association has to do with both Poles and the Irish tend to be Catholic. Stanley was Polish because he needed to be other but the way Williams describes him it’s as if he were a Black man.

            Blanche and Stella’s ancestral home is a plantation that the family lost after the end of slavery. During that time the way slave owners saved money that would be spent on buying new slaves was to have sex with their own female slaves and to get them pregnant, then when the children were old enough, to put them to work. The male owners of Belle Reve frittered the property away. Without slavery a plantation had a hard time surviving. Whiteness became unhealthy in the south, especially for women. There has always been a link in literature between femininity and illness.

            The play’s depiction of New Orleans where the races are more freely mixed would have been shocking to audiences. New York was split into Black and White neighbourhoods but there was no segregation in New Orleans.

            Blanche is presented as being like a moth.

            Mitch, on finding that Blanche is not worthy of replacing his mother is both disgusted and turned on at the same time.

            Blanche, though she is a liar, is the only one in the play that admits it.

            Tennessee Williams saw psychiatrists his whole life and he was very much influenced by Freudian imagery.

            Since Belle Reve means “beautiful dream”, I wondered if it was a reference to Stephen Foster’s song “Beautiful Dreamer”. Foster, though a northerner, tried to write southern songs.

            I watched a couple of episodes of South Park. One began with the overdose death of Chuck E Cheese. Stan goes to visit his grandpa in the retirement home and it’s depicted as being exactly like a prison. The head bitch is an old lady that continuously lets out quiet but overpowering farts. She became the head bitch by having collected the most German Hummel figurines. Chuck E. Cheese and other costumed characters have been trading Hummel figurines (which for some reason they hide in their rectums) in exchange for old people’s medication. Finally, Stan helps grandpa get all the figurines, then the old man beats up the old lady and becomes the head bitch.

            In the other episode, it’s the week leading up to Halloween and Randy Marsh, Gerald Broflovsky, Stephen Stotch and several of the other fathers have a tradition of dressing up like witches, going out to the woods and smoking crack while performing fake magic. But one of them gets hold of a spell book and becomes a real witch that flies around and kidnaps children. Cartman sees this as a perfect chance to get rid of his girlfriend Heidi, so he pretends they are going to a costume party and they dress up like Hansel and Gretel, so Heidi is taken by the witch. The kids call up Mr Garrison, who became the US president last season. It turns out that he used to be part of the coven of Halloween week witches. They tell him what’s going on with his old group and so to stop this from coming back to him he arranges for a sattelite to take out the bad witch with a laser. The children are all rescued from a bag of souls, including, much to Cartman’s disappointment, Heidi.

           

           

           

            

Fog

           On Tuesday morning my guitar was in tune when I started playing and stayed that way through two-thirds of song practice. If no tuning is required the whole session only takes an hour but often it goes on for an hour and a half. There’s a certain level, when my humidity meter reads 40, where it says in tune, and that’s where it was this time. The heat was on in my apartment but outside there was a heavy fog that I imagined was serving as a protective cone against the demons that attack string harmony. The fog got thicker after 7:00 and turned white as the sun was rising.

            DuJuan walked across the street, waved and shouted up at me, “Happy New Year!” I’ve hardly seen him for the last few months and I assume that’s because he’s been getting a ride to work and that he only takes the streetcar now if his colleague is sick or otherwise indisposed.

            The wi-fi was down for a few hours in the afternoon. I worked on my essay a bit and tried to find connections between T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ginsberg had mentioned the three Fates and Eliot brought up Belladonna. The poisonous plant is called Atropos Belladonna and that’s where the drug atropine comes from. The Fate that rules over death is Atropos.

            I read most of Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith”, from the point of view of a Jewish army sergeant just returned from the European theatre in 1945. The war is still going on and he’s training new soldiers. Three of those soldiers are Jewish too and they keep asking for special privileges from him, like kosher food and passes to go to a seder when no passes are being granted to anybody. He keeps giving in to them out of guilt.

            I watched the third and fourth episodes of the 21^st season of South Park.

            In the third, Randy Marsh is on a campaign to eradicate all references to Christopher Columbus from North American society, including trying to get British Columbia to change its name to British. Evidence surfaces though that Randy is a hypocrite, because Randy used to be obsessed with Columbus and even dressed up like him for his wedding. He decides that his only chance is to get DNA tested in order to prove that he’s part victim, but he wants to make sure so he gives Native guy some money and then French kisses him just before giving the saliva sample. But the Native guy falls in love with him and starts giving Stan flowers and bringing his parents over to meet him. Stan’s saliva swab was inconclusive so they came back and gave him an anal test. He found out that he was 2.8 Neanderthal, which is the ultimate victim, since the entire species was wiped out.

Also, Randy misunderstands the term indigenous, and thinks that it means to be unfair, as in “Why are you being so indigenous to me?”

The fourth episode features the Coon and Friends superhero team plotting their movie franchise. Their plan is to start with Netflix because they’ll take anything. But their arch-nemesis, Professor Chaos has sabotaged their Facebook page by posting lies about them, like that they sneak into kids’ bedrooms at night when they are sleeping and poop in their mouths. Everybody believes it because it’s on Facebook. The adults of the town invite Mark Zuckerberg to come and speak but once he’s invited he won’t leave. He raids their homes and eats their food and when they protest he acts like he’s in a kung fu movie in slow motion, makes sound effects for invisible energy beams and declares, “You cannot block me!” In exchange for $17.50, Zuckerberg begins working for Professor Chaos to further undermine the efforts of Coon and Friends to start a movie franchise. The kids all attack Zuckerberg at once on the street and they have him on the ground while they surround and kick him. But Zuckerberg throws them off and begins beating up Jimmy, Token and Kyle. But that’s all part of Coon and Friends’ plan. The capture on Facebook Live, Zuckerberg attacking, a disabled person, an African American and a Jew. Zuckerberg is defeated and is forced to shut down Facebook.

Neal Cassady

            There are 7.6 billion cases of secret madness on the planet Earth. Each possessor thinks that theirs is sanity.

            On Monday morning it was warm outside for winter and hot inside but a lot less dry than usual.

            I worked on my journal and puttered around with my essay on The Wasteland and Howl. I wrote about how, in Howl, Neal Cassady is presented as a superhuman sex god, continuously seeking pleasure with an endless stream of women.

            For the last several days, since around the time I was blocked for 24 hours by Facebook, whenever I try to post a text consisting of several paragraphs, it won’t publish. I found though that if I post the first paragraph of my journal, Facebook publishes it. Then I click on “Edit post” and in the editing window I can add all of the text that I wasn’t able to publish in the first place and when I click “Save” it’s all there. It’s kind of inconvenient to have to jump through that extra hoop though. Maybe it’s just a glitch and it has nothing to do with Facebook’s recent censorship of images of nude women that I’d posted, like one of Josephine Baker that showed her nipples.

            I downloaded and watched the 12^th episode of Star Trek Discovery that aired on Sunday night. It was revealed that one of the main characters is actually one of the evil humans from the parallel universe. I didn’t see that coming.

The Three Fates

            I was groggier than usual when I got up on Sunday, though I’m pretty sure I slept a good four hours. Some of the fog diminished gradually during yoga but it didn’t really shake away fully till song practice. I had to take an early siesta in the late morning though.

            I worked on my journal.
            I fiddled over the last couple of days with the concept of the three one-eyed shrews of Fate from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to try to line them up with the three Fates from Greek mythology. By calling them “one-eyed shrews” Ginsberg has melted each Fate down to being a different unruly vagina.  The shrew of fate “of the heterosexual dollar” must be Lachesis, who determines how long someone lives. Perhaps the idea is that one needs money to keep going and a gay man like Ginsberg couldn’t make money without pretending to be heterosexual or else at least keeping quiet about being gay. Advertising (especially in the mid 50s when Howl was written) emphasizes products that enhance heterosexual relationships. We want “kissing sweet” breath to appeal to the opposite sex as depicted in the image of a man and woman; the one eyed shrew “that winks out of the womb” would have to correspond to Clothos, the one that spins the thread of life in the womb and Atropos, the one that cuts the thread of human life at the end, in Ginsberg’s depiction snips and tames the wild glory of an artist’s endeavors. It could be that Ginsberg is negatively sexualizing editors and critics here by effectively calling them unpleasant cunts. But each of these shrews of fate interrupts young homosexual love. So they must be the female icons that Ginsberg thinks pulls a young man into the heterosexual world, even if his first experiences with sex were homosexual.

            The sirloin tip roast that I bought a few days ago was approaching its best before date so I salted it, seared it and rubbed it with garlic, oregano, basil, black pepper and hot pepper flakes and slow-roasted it for about four hours. It was a little too well done.

            I watched the first two episodes of the 21^st season of South Park.  These kids went into Grade 4 in the fourth season and they’ve been there for 17 years. They should do an episode in which it’s discovered they are in a time loop but then forget. A time loop would also explain why Kenny has died so many times and yet turned up in the next episode.

            In the first story Randy and Sharon Marsh have a show called White People Renovating Houses; meanwhile the working class rednecks of South Park have all lost their jobs to computerization and so they start marching, protesting and waving Confederate flags (Colorado wasn’t officially on any side in the Civil War but there were sympathizers and regiments for both the north and south).

            The story arc for this season seems to be the relationship between Cartman and Heidi in which Cartman is unhappy because Heidi is not subservient to him and so he’s cheating on her with his Amazon Alexa, which always does what he wants. At the end he breaks up with Heidi.

            In the second story Cartman is back together with Heidi and explains to his friends that he had to take her back because she’d threatened to commit suicide. It turned out though that it was Cartman that had threatened to kill himself if she didn’t take him back. The boys got hold of the voice recording and were laughing about it together. This compelled Cartman to try to create a movement at the school to raise awareness about the possibility of him committing suicide but nobody cared. They were more interested in the real issue of distracted driving. About ten kids got killed by cars during the episode.

            Running parallel with the Cartman story is one about the bating of North Korea by the president of the United States. Tweak decided to try to resolve the issue by sending some cupcakes to Kim Jong UN. It helped until the president tweeted that Tweak probably took a dump in the batter. From then on all of North Korea’s animosity was directed at Tweak, encouraged by Trump, to the point that they sent a test missile over Tweak’s house.

            

The Universe is Held Together by Tape

            I didn’t sleep that well after going to bed just past midnight on Saturday. That wasn’t good because I had to work Saturday morning and afternoon at Artists 25 and I didn’t want to doze off while posing. I think I’d made a mistake to take a one-hour siesta on Friday evening because it screwed up my sleep when I officially went to bed. So at 9:00 I went to bed for twenty minutes. I actually did go to sleep for a while and got up a little later than I’d planned but there was still plenty of time because I’m always early.

            Only Colin, the Saturday coordinator was there when I arrived. After getting set up for my pose I went to the washroom. When I came out a woman I recognized had just come in who’d drawn me many times. When she saw that I would be the model she exclaimed, “Oh! Wonderful!” It’s nice to be appreciated. Then again, maybe she says that to all the models.

            I had been posing for four minutes when Tom Phillips hobbled in with his cane. I called out to him, “You’re late! We’ll have to dock four minutes off your pay!” Tom countered, “Fifteen brush strokes!”

            On one of my five-minute breaks I looked over and saw Tom struggling with a sheet of plywood. I went over to help him and found he was trying block the southern light that was coming in through the window behind him. I put the sheet over the window and then went back to work.

            They had a pretty good turnout that morning, with seven artists drawing or painting me. At lunchtime I left most of my things, including my laptop, in the studio and rushed home to jump into bed with my boots on and get a bit more sleep to recharge me enough to get through the afternoon session. I managed to nap for almost half an hour, which was enough.

            Tom was napping in his chair when I got back. If he’d been running the studio like he used to he would have gone to bed on the model’s stage. He must have been sleeping with one eye open because as soon as I was back at work, he woke up and started painting.

            At one point his painting fell off his easel and he exclaimed, “Oh, fiddlesticks!”

            Five of the seven morning session members were there for the afternoon. Usually some people just come in to draw in the afternoon but not this time.

            A woman that was standing and painting at an easel was complaining about bursitis in her right shoulder. I suggested an exercise that I learned in physiotherapy and which I do with a bicycle tire tube. I tie each end into a loop and hook one over a doorknob and grip the other in my hand. Then I pull my arm back at an angle that goes into the pain. It’s helped my bursitis tremendously.

            To mark the model’s position Artists 25 has a different coloured tape designated for every session. The prison uniform orange tape is for Saturdays, but they often don’t remove the tape from previous Saturdays or for other sessions and so the stage is often a riot of tape. Not only the stage, but also the floor to mark the position of the light stand; some members’ easels, and even on the walls because some models like to have the spot they’d been staring at marked for next time. I commented to Colin that one of these days the studio might collapse from the weight of all the accumulated tape. He countered that maybe the tape is the only thing holding the studio together.

            As I was getting dressed, Tom was sitting in his chair looking a little flustered. He said he couldn’t find his insulin pen. It was under his chair and so Colin got it for him. He put it in his shirt pocket by it fell out again when he bent over to pick something else up.

            I was surprised that I got paid $100 for the session. The rate had gone up since the last time I was there. That brings the pay rate at Artists 25 closer to par with other places. Artists 25 has been so notorious for being the lowest paying studio that one model remarked that working for them is an act of charity.

            I decided that since I was already at Dundas and Brock that before going home I’d ride over to the No Frills at Dundas and Lansdowne. I bought a couple of bags of grapes, some whole milk yogourt, honey, old cheese and mouthwash.

            I watched the 11^th episode of Star Trek Discovery, which brought me up to date. Since it’s so current, I won’t reveal much of the story, other than to say that a major character turns out to be surgically altered Klingon with a layer of consciousness superimposed to even make him believe he was human. He meets his unaltered counterpart in the parallel universe, where Klingons, though still a fierce warrior race, actually get along with other species in the rebel alliance against the humans.

            

Parallel Universe

            On Friday morning I was typing out my hand written ideas for my essay on Sexuality in The Wasteland and Howl, but by 9:30 I got so sleepy that I had to take a siesta. I got up at 11:00.

I just spent the day inside. I finished typing my notes in the afternoon, editing and adding thoughts as I went along. I’ve got a little less than a page and a half of ideas to expand and organize into a six to eight page essay.

When I was washing dishes I broke my French press, but fortunately I had a back-up that’s been sitting on the shelf since I found it a couple of years ago. Maybe when I start riding my bike long distances in the summer I’ll find another one, so I’ll have another back-up. The one I’ve been saving is much nicer, kind of art deco model anyway.

In the evening I lay down again and almost immediately had a dream about my late cat, Jonquil, which died in the fall of 2016. She was my least favourite cat because she was so noisy and nervous. I was lying in the same position in the dream as I was in bed except that I was more elevated. Jonquil wanted to jump up to where I was but I was trying to keep her away. She managed to make it up but when I tried to grab her she put a claw against my forehead. It wasn’t digging in but I knew it would if I got hold of her the wrong way. I tried various grips including gripping her head in my hand until I finally got her to let go and I woke up. I vaguely recall that I recently had another dream about that stupid cat but I don’t remember it.

I watched the winter premier of Star Trek Discovery. Because Lieutenant Stamets went into shock in the middle of a jump, the Discovery has ended up in a parallel universe where there is no Federation but rather a ruthless Terran Empire. From the data they uncovered in a ship’s wreckage they found that there are nasty versions of everyone they know here, but the versions of themselves and Discovery probably traded places with them and are now in their universe. I probably shouldn’t give away any more, but it’s certainly getting interesting. 

Sex in the Wasteland

            In the late morning, since the wi-fi signal from the donut shop beneath me was down, I made use of the time and rode down to Freshco to buy yogourt. Cherries were also on sale so a got a couple of bags and picked up a sirloin tip roast along with a few other things.

            When I got back the internet was still down, so cleaned up in the kitchen while listening to the chapter on Sidney, Australia from the audio book of David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries. By the time I was done with that the wi-fi was back up. A few hours later it was down again, so I sat down and used stream of consciousness to throw down some ideas for my essay on The Wasteland and Howl.

            The topic I’ve chosen is to compare and contrast the representations of sexuality in The Wasteland and Howl. These are the ideas I’ve thrown down so far:

            The sexuality in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is far more subdued, cloaked in symbolism and limited by the inhibitions of the day than the raw, elemental sexuality of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”.  There is no foreplay in Howl. The poem takes place in a world where everything, whether sex, war or spirituality are all approaching climax. Sex in Howl is personal and overt. Women do not appear in Howl except for the icon of the vagina that is called “the snatch”. But the snatch is also the snatch of the sunrise or the crack of dawn and even that is sweetened by fucking. Sex is presented as a positive and healing force or as the thing that healed people do. Fucking sweetens and makes one scream with joy. To blow and be blown by sailors is indistinguishable from breathing. Sex is indistinguishable from love. Sex is the doorway to samadhi but also the rocket fuel that shoots the body and mind through. 

            In Howl, women’s genitalia are filled. It is the only part of a woman that appears. In The Wasteland women’s genitalia is not described. Women appear as characters that are symbols of age and men’s disappointment, with withered breasts and bad teeth.

            In Howl there is much that is negative, but sex is the cure for all of them, whereas in The Wasteland sex is presented as part of the problem. Sex is desired but uncomfortable. No one is satisfied in The Wasteland.

            The enemy in Howl is sexual repression. The enemy is defeated by free, exploding sexuality. The enemy is the wasteland of the American dream that has been ravaged by psychiatrists, soldiers and businessmen. Howl wants to seed a new, world dream in which insanity annexes all of the states of mind. In a sense, Eliot’s Wasteland is also a Howl, but a less joyful one. A howl of mourning.

            That night I watched the fall finale of Star Trek Discovery. The big landmark of the episode was that it featured the first Gay male kiss in 50 years of the Star Trek franchise. The first Gay female kiss happened decades ago. Lieutenant Stamets, the creator of the spore drive and the one who injects the tardigrade DNA in order to guide Discovery through the instantaneous jumps throughout the universe, is one of the main characters in this episode. The jumps are causing strange side effects in which he seems to start seeing past, present and future blended. He is being asked, for the sake of mapping an algorithm that will help Discovery detect Klingon cloaked ships, to guide Discovery through 133 jumps. While this is happening, Burnham and Tyler infiltrate the Klingon Ship of the Dead to plant special devices to help with their mission. They discover the admiral is still alive and imprisoned with her torturer, who was also Tyler’s torturer. Tyler goes into posttraumatic stress shock on seeing her. She had been apparently not only his torturer but at the same time his lover. Burnham deliberately reveals herself to the Klingon Leader and challenges him to a duel. The fight is unrealistic because Burnham is presented as trading blow for blow. It would have made more sense to show her holding her own by being quicker. When they are beamed off the Klingon ship the torturer hitches a ride by grabbing hold of Tyler. The mission is a success but because of all the jumps, Stamets goes into shock.

            

Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois

            On Wednesday evening I made sure I bundled up for my ride to 20^th Century US Literature class. I left home at 17:00 but when I got to University College there was another class in room 161. A young woman looking at her phone was selfishly stretched out on the only cushioned bench and so I had to sit on the hard stairs.

I started reading Toni Morrison’s “Ricicitif”. It was about a young Black girl who had to live in a group home because her mother preferred dancing all night to being a parent. She made friends with a White girl whose mother was too sick to take care of her. The group home mostly served as an orphanage and so all the other girls hated Twyla and Roberta because their parents were alive.

Twyla had grown up and was working as a waitress when the other class let out. I’ll get back to the story next time I’m sitting and waiting for something or in March when we get around to Toni Morrison. All of the other texts we have to read are digital until then.

When our instructor, Scott Rayter arrived he put the information for our upcoming (in two months) essay on the screen and then started roll call. It has to be six to eight pages or 1500 to 1800 words long. There are several topics listed for one of which we must compare two or more texts. Usually I have to go through all of the required reading before I can choose a topic that I think fits with my talents, but the one on comparing the sexuality of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” hit me right away as being the one for me. I can’t wait to start writing about it. We’re to use MLA citations and our TA is Ira Halpern. I’ll go to see him once I’ve got a first draft.

On plagiarism, Scott said, “Don’t fucking cheat!” He retold a story that he’d related at the beginning of the course about a student who’d copied an online essay word for word, but had simply switched the sentences around. She explained to him that for some strange reason, when she went to print the essay all of her reference notes accidentally fell into it.

I asked if it would be all on paper, meaning, is there an option to hand it in online, but maybe I wasn’t clear because he kind of made fun of the question and asked another one, “Can you do a painting?” I see now from the syllabus that email submissions are not permitted.

We were about to watch Elia Kazan’s adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Scott said that the film is important because of how it was done. Marlon Brando had already played the part of Stanley for two years on Broadway along with Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois, but the producers decided that Vivian Leigh would have more box office appeal than Tandy because of Gone With the Wind. She was good but I’ll bet Tandy would have been better.
            Scott commented that the Hollywood southern belle is a British construct.

Streetcar was one of the first films with a mostly jazz score.

The bar scene is the set of King Kong.

Kim Hunter, who played Stanley’s wife and Blanche’s sister was later blacklisted during the Red Scare because Elia Kazan named names. He ruined a lot of careers. He had been a member of the Communist party for a year and a half and then quit and so he was asked to testify. Refusing would have ruined his career. When he was given a lifetime achievement award in 1999, Marlon Brando refused to present it.

The character Stanley Kowalski was a war hero and a bowler. He bowled when he was angry. The scene in which Brando was crying for Stella was a new thing in cinema because men did not emote.

William’s at first did not think that Brando was right for the part because he was too young. But when Brando went to privately audition for the part, Williams’s pipes coincidentally exploded. Brando knew how to fix them and so he won Williams over.

The movie was different in many ways from the play. In the beginning of the movie, Blanche goes to find Stella in the bowling alley where Stanley is playing. But in the play, Blanche waits for Stella alone in the two-room apartment. Enclosed scenes are meant to create tension so it’s a betrayal of the playwright’s vision to restring an important point like that. They did the same thing in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”. The entire play is supposed to take place in George and Martha’s home but they ruin it in the film by having them go out to a roadhouse.

In the play she says to Mitch, “Je suis la dame aux Camillias. Vous etes Armand”. She’s referring to the 1948 novel, La Dame aux Camélias” by Alexander Dumas, which later became the play “Camille”. The lady in the play is Marguerite, a courtesan. There is a parallel between the two stories as Marguerite also loses love, is abandoned by everyone and her story ends tragically. But after Mitch tells Blanche he doesn’t speak French, in the play she asks, “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?” perhaps they took it out of the film because the original was too risqué.

They had apparently tried to cut the rape scene but Williams and Kazan threatened to remove their names from the production unless it was kept in.

In the play, Stella doesn’t leave Stanley but she seems to at the end of the movie.

The end of the movie in which Blanche is taken to the asylum teared me up a bit, but thankfully Scott didn’t turn the lights on and so I was able to leave with less embarrassment.

It was nasty cold when I stepped outside and the ride home was very uncomfortable. I stopped at a light near Queen and Palmerston and let the green come and go again as I struggled to find the strings to tighten my hood over my ears. It was very much a relief to get home.

I watched an episode of Star Trek Discovery in which Burnham, Suru and the new security officer are on a planet called Pahvan where the trees sing. There is also a natural tower made of crystal that they hope to use as a transmitter to utilize the unique sonic properties of the planet as a means of overriding the cloaking capabilities of Klingon ships. The problem is that they encounter a swarm of energy beings that turn out to be the life of the planet. Since they turn out to be sentient, the Discovery crew needs to follow the rules of first contact. They can’t use the transmitter without permission. The universal translator does not pick up the Pahvanian language but Suru forms an empathic bond with the creatures. Because the constant noise from the trees was driving Suru crazy, the Pahvanians bonded with his mind so that he could feel peace. The nature of Suru’s species is that they are at the bottom of the food chain on their native world. They are designed to evade predators and so they never know a moment of their lives without fear. But suddenly Suru had experienced peace for the first time and it affected him adversely. He tried to use violence to stop Burnham from using the transmitter because he didn’t want the Klingons to destroy the Pahvanians. In the end the Pahvanians allowed Burnham to use the transmitter but the Pahvanians, thinking they were helping resolve the conflict, sent a signal to the Klingons to tell them where Discovery was. I wonder what happens next.

Time Loop

            It was very hot in my apartment on Tuesday morning but fully opening both of my living room windows almost made it tolerable.

            I worked on my journal and I also spent some time tracking down poems by Sylvia Plath. I had them on PDF but it wasn’t the kind of PDF one can copy. I have software for transferring image to text but it was too much of a hassle to use it for a few poems.

            I watched an episode of Star Trek Discovery with the inevitable time loop story. I think that every Star Trek show starting with the Next Generation has had one script about multiple recurrence. I thought that the first time it happened in a show was on the X-Files in the story “Monday” in 1999 but that’s only the first one I’d seen. It was first done in a Japanese movie called “Beautiful Dreamer” in 1984 but in western films it happened in “12:01” in 1990. Star Trek first did it in 1992 with the story, “Cause and Effect”. Fringe, a show that started off as an X-Files rip off but was better than the X-Files, also did it in 2011 with “And Those We’ve Left Behind”.

            This particular episode of Discovery wasn’t that interesting. It seemed a bit gratuitous, like in shows in which the star meets his or her double but they have an opposite personality.

Spock

            The heat was on full blast when I got up on Monday morning but when I opened the window the wind blew the frigid air directly into my room. The only way to balance out the heat inside and the cold outside was by closing the window to a knife edged crack.

            Because it was the 15^th of the month I had to send in my income report to social services, so I went online and printed my pay statement from OCADU. I filled out the form, put everything in the postage paid envelope and put that in my backpack.

            Since I was wearing my last clean pair of un-ripped briefs, it had to be a laundry day. It would be the first time I’d be washing the khakis and the wool socks that I bought on Boxing Day so I went online to see if there were any special instructions to keep them from shrinking. The pants are 98% and 2% spandex, so people generally advised that they shrink in the dryer but stretch out again when worn. So the caution for both items was to wash warm but not dry too hot. I think most people just put a few items in the dryer at a time, whereas I put everything in and though I put it on hot, I suspect that, because so many clothes are in one machine together, they cool each other off so that, even if I’ve got it on high it’s like drying at a lower temperature. I splurged and spent $2 on washing my sweatpants by themselves in cold water. The last time I’d washed them in the sink in cold water and then tried to dry them in the machine at low temperature but it was like no drying had taken place at all. This time the spin cycle from the washer half-dried them anyway and I just took them home and hung them up until they were fully dry.

            The older guy that manages and perhaps owns the Laundromat is Korean, I think. I nodded a greeting to me for the first time in the years that I’ve been coming there. I heard him saying something about being attacked there recently by a Chinese guy. He added that some of his customers have stooped coming, “But I don’t care!”

            During the wash cycle I rode down to the No Frills at King and Jameson to see if there was any better fruit available than what I’d gotten from Freshco the day before. Their 88 cent sale was going on, which meant that I got a t-bone steak, a kilo of caviar and one of the cashiers, all for 88 cents each! Just kidding. It was just that a lot of items had prices that ended in .88, but they were marked down a little more than that on the dollar side as well. I got Becel margarine at $1.88, a half pint of raspberries at the same price and red grapefruit were three for $1.88 so I got six. I splurged on a mini watermelon for $2 and I also bought sea salt and old cheddar.  When I was buying these items I noticed a nearby, but out of reach from where I was, section had large cans of Maxwell House coffee for $4.88, so after I’d put everything in my backpack I went back into the store and got a can. It doesn’t get cheaper than that.

            I had been following the incident about the little girl that had said that someone had come up and clipped her headscarf with a scissors but it was revealed by the police that the story was not true. The backlash against an 11-year-old child on right wing social media was horrifically appalling. Up until today I’d only thought these people that follow pundits like Ronny Cameron were merely ridiculous, but their reactions and comments consisted of often grotesque bullying because they believed the kid was an equal player in some elaborate Muslim plot to make Islamophobia worse than it is. The ironic thing about that is that if this had really happened it would have been the least violent hijab attack that’s ever been reported. Also the notion that the lie was made up by adults that were controlling her is also bizarre because if adults were to make up a hijab attack there would have been violence injected into the lie to match that which has accompanied actual attacks, such as screaming, name calling, spitting, punching, grabbing and ripping. By contrast, the little girl’s made-up story was surreally innocent: a weird Asian man in glasses, sneaking around with a clicking pair of scissors to snip off little bits of a girl’s headscarf. Only a child would have made up such a non-violent and cartoon like fantasy, so I doubt very much if she was coached.

            I watched the sixth episode of Star Trek Discovery. There are some interesting connections with the original series. The lead character, Michael Burnham was raised by the Vulcan ambassador and his wife, Amanda Grayson and so she is the foster sister of Spock. According to the nerds who follow these things closely, Spock would be 26 years old at the time of the Discovery events and he would be serving as science officer for Captain Pike on the Enterprise. This is ten years before the first original Star Trek episode. There is a flashback to when Michael Burnham was the first human to apply to enter the Vulcan academy. But the academy gave Sarek a choice: either to let his half human son, Spock, enrol or to let his foster daughter, Michael. He chose Spock and so Michael had to settle for Star Fleet Academy. But when the time came, Spock rejected the Vulcan school and chose Star Fleet as well. Take that Sarek!

           

The Better Mudd

            I spent a lot of Sunday writing about my most recent food bank adventure and didn’t go anywhere.

            I got a shout out by gmail from George Elliot Clarke in response to the profile I’d recently set up on Google+. It was the first response I’ve gotten since I started it. He noticed it because I’d selected his account to “Follow” along with some others. He titled his message “Dude!” and he always writes my name as “Xn Xn”. I had set up pages to mirror my Facebook fan pages for Serge Gainsbourg, Boris Vian, Josephine Baker and Gisèle MacKenzie. George said, “I also like Serge, Boris and La Baker! Had never heard of Gisèle Mackenzie. Thanks for filling in the details, presenting her bio and song. I’d no idea you’re such a Francophile! Bon homme!”

            That night I posted my blog and then pasted the link on Facebook. After that, as usual, I pasted the text into the “What’s on your mind” window” but it wouldn’t post. I tried several times for the next half an hour and then gave up and had dinner.
            I watched the fifth episode of StarTrek Discovery. The captain got captured and tortured by the Klingons. Also in his cell was a younger version of the character Harry Mudd, who appeared a couple of times on the original Star Trek series. He was a bit more sinister than the original version, who was kind of a comical sleezeball villain. He was played in this series by Rainn Wilson but I thought Roger C Carmel’s version was much more interesting because he was likeable and contemptible at the same time. Mudd betrays the Captain and so when Lorca escapes he leaves Mudd at the mercy of the Klingons.
            Discovery needs to use the tardigrade’s cosmos jumping abilities to find Captain Lorca but using the beast may kill it. Michael Burnham and the spore engineer isolate the tardigrade’s DNA and he secretly injects it to guide the ship. The tardigrade is released.

            

Taking off the Ex-Lax Glasses

            I got up to pee on Saturday at 2:50 and on my way back to bed I heard someone pounding on the front door downstairs. Thinking that it might be one of my fellow tenants having lost a key, I stuck my head out the window. A man was down there but not from our building. I called out, “Yes?” He looked up and told me that someone that he’d just dropped off at our address had just left their passport in his cab. I went down to the front door wearing nothing but a towel. I asked the driver to show me the picture on the document, so he brought it to me. It was a young woman with long brown hair. She certainly did not live at this address and so she must have been visiting. Since I didn’t recall seeing her visiting anyone in my building before, I started to think that she might have been a prostitute. The African driver shook his head in disbelief on hearing that suggestion. I told him that the best I could do was to leave the passport on top of the mailboxes, since I certainly wasn’t going to go knocking on apartments doors at that hour just in case the woman was behind one of them. He didn’t think that leaving it on the mailboxes was a good idea, and on reflection, I agree. It would be safer for the cab company, which was Beck, to hold onto it. He told me that he’d given her a receipt, so she should be able to track it that way.

            It was 3:00 when I got back to bed. I still had two hours before it was time to get up and I normally have no problem getting back to sleep, but this time, in the back of my mind I was concerned for the woman and her passport. I didn’t consciously try to stay awake, just in case she came out again, but that seems to have been what was going on. After an hour with no one leaving, it became less likely that she was an escort. I narrowed it down to my upstairs neighbour, David, or his third floor neighbour, whom I’d seen but never spoken with. At 4:30 I heard someone go down the stairs and so I got up to look out the window and if it was the woman, to call to her, but it was David on his way to work. I went back to bed, but did not sleep before my alarm went off.

            I didn’t feel very tired at all during yoga or song practice, but at 9:06, when I was doing some writing, exhaustion suddenly caught up to me and I had to lie down. I wanted to get ready to go to the food bank at 9:30 and so I planned to rest for 24 minutes. Usually I’m pretty good at willing myself to sleep for limited periods of time but I woke up at 10:10, feeling disoriented at first until I realized that I was late for the line up.

            I rushed to get ready and arrived about half an hour later than usual, but the line didn’t seem very much longer than it had been when I’d gotten there at my usual time of 9:45.

            As I was locking my bike, the young woman from Latin America said hi to me and commented about how it had suddenly gotten cold again after having been so warm for the last few days. I agreed that it was very cold and offered the view that it was a good thing after that the mayor had opened up the armoury for the homeless. At first it had seemed too little too late because they’d only made the armoury available after the last cold snap had ended, but now that the temperature had dived again it was a good thing people had a place to go.

            Last Saturday had been very cold but today it was mean-cold with an added wind chill factor. As I stood waiting and the freeze began to eat into my toes and bite the tip of my schnozz, I started considering it to have been a very good thing that I’d slept through the first half hour of standing around in this hellish weather.

            Wayne was between five and ten places ahead of me, but hanging around near the entrance. He stepped out onto the sidewalk holding one of the coffee mugs that people bring out from the Parkdale Activities and Community Centre next door. Although the meals are free at PARC, it apparently costs 30 cents for a cup of coffee, perhaps because of the habit of smoking PARC members taking their mugs outside so they can enjoy both a coffee and a cigarette. One can sometimes find up to five abandoned mugs in places where they’ve been abandoned. Wayne tossed the contents of the mug he was holding and a cylindrical chunk of frozen coffee came flying out. He kicked the dark brown javsicle under a parked van.

            The food bank doesn’t seem to have been making coffee available lately. I never tried their coffee because I just assumed that it probably sucks but I know that a lot people in line look forward to it, especially in the winter.

            A little later, Wayne was looking at me with his holographic green eye sunglasses and he declared, “Somebody’s got to steal me some Ex-Lax so I can cross the border!” I puzzled over that one for a second and then asked if he was referring to Donald Trump’s recent comment about immigrants from “shit-hole countries”. Wayne nodded and added, “Ya can’t talk about people that way!”

            I wonder if Trump was really referring to immigrants from countries that might exist up his own shithole. I’ve seen pictures taken of his fat butt while he plays golf, and it looks like there’s room up there for a few small nations. Anyone that calls less fortunate countries “shitholes” is looking at the world through Ex-Lax glasses.

            The food bank opened pretty much on time. The co-manager, Valdene Allison came out for a smoke and was complaining about lack of appreciation on the part of food bank clients for what volunteers do for them. She told someone while pointing east that if they didn’t like it, “There’s another food bank that way!” I don’t know to which food bank she was referring, but food bank clients are encouraged to go to the one that is in their neighbourhood. The nearest food bank in that direction would be the Fort York Food Bank.
            I strongly disagree with Valdene’s attitude. It shouldn’t be “If you don’t like it take a hike”. It should rather be, “If the people we are serving are unhappy, maybe we are failing in some way.”

            By the time I got to the front of the line, Jack Frost wasn’t just nipping at my nose. It had latched onto my honker like a piranha and was in the process of giving it a hickey. The cold was seeping deep into my body to the point that I didn’t know if I could stand much more. They kicked the ones out that had been waiting inside and said that people could take turns standing in the entryway for five minutes at a time. I didn’t partake of that offer because I didn’t feel like being a temperature yo-yo.

Around 11:00 I was third in the next group of five to go downstairs.

As I was waiting in a short line to show my card I chatted with Bruce, who used to volunteer on a regular basis at the old location but I only recently started seeing him at the new place over the holidays. I said, “Long time no see.” He explained that he’d had to move out of the room he’d been living in and it took him quite a while to find a bachelor apartment. He said the decently priced ones are very scarce nowadays.

There were three volunteers rotating as they helped clients shop the shelves and it was just lucky that Bruce ended up as my helper.

They had crackers on the first shelf and I was attracted the box of red Good Thins until Bruce said, “You want the beets?” I’d thought the red colour meant that they were spicy. I took the sea salt and pepper ones instead. From the bottom, Bruce gave me a selection of granola and fancy trail mix bars.

Of the various canned goods that were available I selected a can of beef gravy, one of pineapple tidbits, two cans of tuna and a tin of peeled fava beans. I picked up another carton of free-range chicken broth. I’ve accumulated about five of those, so I’m due to make a big soup soon. I grabbed a bag of chocolate chunks from a shelf containing odd items and among all of the regular types of cereal I found a box of high fibre meusli.

Bruce passed me over to Angie, but before she could serve me, the young woman from Latin America came over to thank her and to say goodbye to her. I was surprised to hear Angie respond briefly in what sounded like very competent Spanish.

Angie gave me four quarter litres of milk; a half-litre of 18% cream; 750 grams of vanilla Greek yogourt; five eggs; two bags of falafels; 1.65litres of real orange juice; a frozen chicken with oven roasted chicken and peppers; and a box containing six cups of lemon gelato of all things. She’d also offered me the usual tube of frozen ground chicken, but I turned it down. I also didn’t take any of the spicy processed cheese slices that she had to give because they really don’t taste much like cheese except for a little bit when melted.

From Sylvia’s vegetable section I got a red cabbage; a net bag containing three sweet potatoes; a handful each of potatoes and onions; two apples; and two black krim tomatoes that looked beautiful when Sylvia put them in my bag but when I got them home they were too squishy to use. I guess they think tomatoes like that are still okay for cooking, but I figure that if they are too rotten to put on a sandwich they are too far gone to cook with.

I would have had a look at the bread this time, but I totally forgot about it. In the previous set-up, before Angie and Sylvia moved their sections to the end, the shelf volunteers would usually direct clients to the bread after the final shelf. But there seems to be a finality about the sections at the end that are presided over by personalities and one feels like one is done after dealing with them.

I had planned on riding my bike to the supermarket after the food bank but I was so chilled to the bone that I had to go home to warm up first. While putting my things away it was clear that the food bank continues to be well stocked almost a month past the holiday season. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an empty shelf. There’s a plethora of canned protein with fish, meat and beans; and there is still a fair amount of dairy on offer.

If only they could do something about the inhumane practice of making people line up in the extreme cold. It is not healthy for the human body and a lot of these people are not dressed properly for these temperatures.

Once I was warmed up I rode to Freshco with the main intention of buying fruit. They were selling grapes in sealed bags and so I had to rip them open to feel if they were firm enough. I took a couple of bunches that weren’t too bad and a pack of blackberries too, but this is a sad time of year for fruit. I bought a whole chicken and some old cheddar, as well as milk and yogourt.

My cashier was distracted with amusement by the little girl screaming unsuccessfully for a Kinder egg in the check-out lane behind her. She explained to the mother that she was laughing because she has two at home. She said that as soon as the Kinder toy is assembled it becomes essentially garbage because it’s never played with again. A lot of these Portuguese supermarket cashiers seem to be too young to have children but I turns out they do.

For lunch I had the roasted chicken and peppers pizza that I’d gotten from the food bank and it was very tasty. Much better than the goat cheese pizza I’d gotten the week before. 

That night I watched the fourth episode of Star Trek Discovery. It’s starting to get more interesting. The monster that they captured because the captain had hoped that because of its power, near indestructibility and ability to tear through the hull of a ship could somehow be channelled into a weapon, turns out to be non-aggressive but valuable for much more important reasons. Michael Burnham discovers that the beast has a symbiotic relationship with the energy spores they are using as a means of transport. They can jump anywhere in the galaxy but they have no control until Michael finds that the monster is actually a living supercomputer that they can use to direct their jumps. It’s interesting but it seems pretty implausible. The creature is also a macrocosmic version of our microscopic tardigrades or water bears, which are apparently the most resilient animals on Earth.