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.