Ungratified

            I was very low in energy during song practice on Tuesday morning, perhaps because of caffeine and protein withdrawal or maybe it’s just a cycle. I’ve been pooped before for no particular reason. I got through it this time though and then I worked on translating a Serge Gainsbourg song for three-quarters of an hour. I usually do some writing from 8:45 to 9:30 but I went to bed instead and slept for two hours.

            My wifi got crowded out later that morning when I was just about to post a tweet on Twitter. I guess I could have piggybacked the wifi network from the café across the street but that often involves several minutes of trying to connect, and I didn’t want to be bothered. I can post it later.

            I did the dishes and took out the garbage.

            I had planned on reading a story at the Shab-e She’r poetry reading that night but with two weeks before my essay deadline I decided that I couldn’t afford the time. I had wanted to send Banoo Zan a message to let her know I wouldn’t be coming but the wifi was still off past the time that sending it would have meant anything.

            I still didn’t have the umph to do any writing so I went to bed for an hour, then I heated up some soup for lunch and watched some sketches from the Ernie Kovaks show. They weren’t rip roaringly funny but they were certainly innovative, and influential.

            In the early afternoon I finally had the energy to work on my essay and after a couple of hours I got it into a shape that I can present to the TA and get some advice, if there are any appointments left.

            After that I rewarded myself with a half hour siesta. I woke up to what sounded like a woman screaming as a result of being attacked but it looked like it was just an ungratified child expressing disappointment.

            I made an appointment with my TA for Wednesday. He has a system that involves students accessing a site with which he has an account. The available are already laid out so he doesn’t have to keep returning emails. That’s easier for him I guess but it’s very impersonal. The only day with openings was February 28, so I picked the earliest. That way I’d be able to get home and sleep before class.

            I watched The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. A grouchy millionaire named Howard has a young wife named Eve who has hired her widowed friend Addie to be her personal assistant. But Addie also has a son named Gillie living with her and Howard does not like kids. After Gillie accidentally breaks a priceless clock Howard fires Addie but gives her a few days to move out. Every night Eve brings a glass of warm milk up to Howard before he goes to bed, but that night Addie puts poison in the milk and before morning he dies. Addie had thought the cause of Howard’s death would just be put down to his poor health but it was determined that he’d been poisoned and Eve is charged with murder. During the trial, investigators working for the prosecution uncover that Gillie is actually not Addie’s son at all but Eve’s. This was considered to be damning evidence because the reason she had hired Addie was so she could be near her son and so when Howard fired Addie, which meant Eve would be separated from Gillie. Now the prosecution could claim that Eve had a motive to kill Howard. As it began to look like Eve would be found guilty, Addie wrote a note confessing to the murder and then poisoned herself.

Caffeine Withdrawal

            Maybe it was because I hadn’t had any caffeine since Saturday night, but on Monday morning I conked out at around 8:45. I couldn’t keep my eyes open while trying to do some writing so I went to sleep for an hour and a half. When I got up I decided to go to the supermarket to replenish my fruit supply. I rode down to the No Frills at King and Jameson. They still had their $1 sale going on and that included seedless red grapes for a dollar a pound. There were red mangoes for a dollar and packs of strawberries for $2 as well. I got some bananas and a bottle of mouthwash. I also needed dental loss. They had two sizes of the same brand but the larger one, that had 182 meters of floss, was fifty cents cheaper than the one with 60 meters of floss, because the smaller one was “easy flow”, which I guess means that the one I bought will savagely rip all of my teeth out.

            I had some of the grapes for lunch. There’s a reason why they were so cheap. About a third of the grapes from the bunch I ate were bad. I also had some canned peaches with coconut milk.

I finished writing my journal entry for Sunday and then felt sleepy again, and so I took a one-hour siesta. When I got up the wifi was off, which seemed to make me feel unenergetic, because shortly after that I went to bed for another half an hour. On rising once more I really wasn’t sure I didn’t want to go back to bed again, but after eating some more grapes it looked like I’d be able to keep going without any more sleep.

The wifi came back up at 18:41 and then down at 18:47.

I worked on the opening paragraph for my essay:

Sexuality is an elemental force in the human psyche, and so poets will inevitably write about it in some manner. Often it is approached indirectly, although rarely is it dealt with overtly, because sexual repression is a common affliction of human society. Poems dealing with sexuality that become known to the world tend not to come entirely from beyond accepted sexuality, but rather push the limits of society’s sexual norms. T.S. Eliot’s Modernist poem, The Wasteland (1921) and Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poem, Howl (1955) each push the limits of sexuality of the eras in which they were created. Sexuality as it is expressed in The Wasteland is subdued, cloaked in metaphor and limited by the inhibitions of its day, while “Howl” is uninhibited, attempts no subtlety and rather than being represented by symbols, sex is presented as the very symbol of human freedom in the poem.

I chopped about ten onions and sautéed them in olive oil. I added one and a half cartons of chicken broth, two large yams that I’d cubed and a little cayenne. I had the soup for dinner while watching the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

A man whose wife had died from tumbling down the basement stairs and breaking her neck has returned to work after a two-week leave of absence. Someone is manipulating his desk calendar to show February 4, which is the day that his wife died. They are also leaving love letters in her hand to another man on his desk and his house is ransacked. He suspects everyone at his advertising company, including his boss. His work suffers because he is obsessed with finding out who is behind it and finally his boss gives him a leave of absence, which he reacts to by quitting. When he goes home he finds his wife’s favourite song playing on the hifi, the same meal she had been cooking the night she died and the basement door was ajar. He goes downstairs and sees a body on the floor. He flips and begins to strangle it, but it’s a mannequin. A police detective steps from the shadows. He is the one that has been playing all of the tricks and now he believes he has the proof that the man killed his wife. But all of the cop’s mind games have driven the man insane so he’ll never really know.

The cop was played by Robert Conrad, who in the 70s had the detective show “Cannon”. One of the advertising executives was played by Bob Crane, who later became Colonel Hogan of “Hogan’s Heroes”.

Old School Darkroom

            I hadn’t noticed it when I got up on Sunday morning but just as I was about to start song practice I realized that the continuous sound of the robot cowbell coming from the walk signal outside my window had stopped. I guess they fixed it overnight. I wonder how they found out about it. Did someone call to complain, do they drive around looking for problems like that, can they tell if something is wrong from a central location or do they just reboot the system every 24 hours?

            I was a bit dizzy sometimes during yoga but it wasn’t extreme like it had been when I went to bed. Later on, just in case it was an earwax related problem, I did a flush. Quite a bit of wax came out of my left ear. I’ve never had vertigo like I had when I went to bed earlier. I don’t know if I fixed the problem but at least I cleaned my ears out.

            The wifi went off at the beginning of the lunch hour, as things must have gotten busy downstairs in the donut shop. It stayed off for eleven hours.

            I finished reading, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Ten years after writing my essay on the topic, I still think the play is about the unfulfilled American dream.

            I finished making notes on “The Wasteland” and “Howl” for my paper comparing the sexuality of the two poems. I started for the first time thinking about formally writing the essay and fiddled with the opening paragraph.

            I watched an Austin City Limits concert by Arcade Fire from 2007. Not all of their songs are great but their performances of them are outstanding. Every member of the band is dynamic and there’s something tribal about the way everybody sings together.

            The Alfred Hitchcock Hour story was about a guy named Barney that tells his best friend and company colleague, Peter that he’s leaving his wife, Beatrice for a woman named Laurie. Peter meets Laurie and immediately arranges anonymously for his Barnie to be sent away for a two-week executive training course. Barnie goes to see Peter, who’s developing some prints in his darkroom (which is way too well lit for what he’s doing but I guess they figured not enough people in the audience would notice) and asks Peter to entertain Laurie while he’s out of town. He also notices Peter using a poison called “altropeine” in his developer for sharper prints. He asks Peter if it could kill someone and he answers that it would do so quite effectively and it would look like a heart attack. Barnie goes out and buys some and that night at dinner he tries it on the dog, which dies almost immediately. While Barnie is away, Peter moves subtly in on Laurie and tells her things that cause her to doubt her relationship with Barnie, one of which is that Beatrice has a weak heart and that losing Barnie would kill her. She does have a weak heart but she also has a lover that she’s considering running away with. When Barnie returns from his business trip he poisons Beatrice’s stomach medicine and leaves, thinking he’ll never see her again. But when he goes to Laurie she tells him that she’s decided to end their relationship. Realizing that he’s poisoned his wife for nothing he runs to his car and drives like a demon to stop her from taking the medicine before bed, but is involved in a crash on the way. He tells the cops about the poison and they arrive in time to stop Beatrice from drinking it.

            There is no such poison as altropeine. Hitchcock explained at the end that he had to let people know that it was fictional so that droves of husbands wouldn’t go out looking to buy it.

            But there is a poison that is used in old school darkrooms for manipulating black and white photographic prints as they develop. In 1988 I worked a couple of months for Madison Photo Murals, which I don’t think exists anymore. It was a father and son business and I was apprenticed to the older Madison, a darkroom technician, who was full of old school tricks. If the dark parts of a print were developing too fast he would put some cyanide on a sponge and rub the dark area to hold the development back. He would also use heated developer to do the opposite, which is to bring forward lighter areas if they needed to be darker. The company specialized in murals and so enormous sheets of photographic paper were pinned to the wall and they had an enlarger that had been invented and built by the senior Madison and it was set up on a short run of train tracks he’d installed on the floor. He told me that he’d also invented a camera for aerial photography. The younger Madison ran the business and was looking for someone to take over in the darkroom so his father could retire. I learned a lot there but I wasn’t learning fast enough for them to keep me on, so after a couple of months they let me go.

            

Robot Cowbell

            On Saturday morning the faulty audio walk signal outside my window was still continuously clanging as if haunted by a metro-gnome that had decided that Parkdale was severely lacking in cowbell. The only way I could get through song practice was to actually use the continuous steady beat as a metronome and to try to time my strumming with the mechanical rhythm that was dully ringing outside. I have been told by more rhythmically adept people than me that I could definitely benefit from practicing with a metronome. Sometimes I was successful in meeting each clang on the downstrokes. Maybe it helped me stay in time or maybe it’s better to let the tempo of my songs flutter around like a butterfly while I’m playing them. My former bandmate, Brian Haddon, a Royal Conservatory trained musician never had any complaints about that aspect of our collaboration.

            I took an early siesta at 12:15 and when I got up I made lunch. Just after I’d finished eating the wifi went off, crowded out again, I assume by the customers downstairs. I read a bit more of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, got tired again and tried to go to bed, but I only stayed down for eleven minutes. I got up and read some more.

            Since it was Saturday afternoon I kept thinking about popping out to buy a couple of cans of Creemore, but then I kept remembering that I’d stopped drinking beer for my annual fast.

            I read some more of Albee’s play and then the wifi came back on. But three hours later it was gone again.

            I wrote some ideas for my essay:

            In Howl, Carl Solomon is drinking the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica. Utica in Africa is a city of ruins. Utica in New York in the 1950s was a sin city with a strong presence of organized crime. But many women that chose not to marry because they were secretly lesbians would have been seen as spinsters. Perhaps it was simply that many of the nurses at the institution were probably graduates of the St Elizabeth College of Nursing in Utica, New York. The nurses are the harpies of the Bronx. Harpies are unpleasant, controlling, monstrous half-women. Women that aren’t the poet’s mother are either grouped into unpleasant generic categories of spinsters or harpies or murdered secretaries. The nurses are contemptible, disliked, the enemy, pitied, but faceless. The tea of their breasts, the medication, the drugs are delivered and administered by the nurses. Nurses play a maternal role but they are false mothers. Tea is comforting and breasts are comforting but tea from a mother’s breast would be a disappointment, lacking substance, sweetness and richness.

Ginsberg refers to Molach as a sphinx. If it is the Egyptian sphinx it is male but if it is the Greek sphinx then Molach is female. Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx and ended the wasteland.

            The Wasteland begins with a quotation that depicts a woman with supernormal powers that is nonetheless a captive of men and who wishes to die. She is a prophetess while the sometimes narrator, Tiresias is a prophet/prophetess. The Cumaean Sibyl was consulted before the descent into the underworld. She also foretold the coming of a saviour. She is a bridge between the worlds of the living and the dead. She was offered a wish by Apollo in exchange for her virginity and she chose to live for a thousand years. Stupidly she had not thought to wish for eternal youth and so her body continued to wither as her life went on and on and it shrunk so much that she was able to be kept in a jar but wishing she could die. And so our introduction to The Wasteland’s depiction of female sexuality is of a woman essentially in hell, suffering from age and restriction of movement, with only the gift of vision. Her situation is echoed later by that of the woman in the bar, who is also a captive of men and a victim of aging.

            The first line of the Wasteland offers breeding as an example of cruelty.

             The women of the Wasteland have faces and personalities. Unique circumstances contrasting with the generic faceless women of Howl whose experiences fit with their profession or category. Carl Solomon’s genericized women are not shown to be happy, while Neal Cassady’s million women are made happy for knowing him in the Biblical sense. The women of the wasteland, although they have faces and personalities are nonetheless unhappy. The nurses and secretaries are not having their snatches sweetened by Neal Cassady or anyone else. And yet they are not presented as tragic figures. Women are victims in the Wasteland. They are raped and punished for being raped.

            I had warm pita bread with hummus and watched the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The story starred Peter Falk as a charming but murderous tent preacher. He had been courting a rich old lady because he wanted her house in order to turn it into a temple. He knew she had a week heart and so he got her excited while dancing with her too fast. When she went into cardiac arrest he kept her pills away from her. But contrary to his expectations she had not left the house to him but rather to her niece. And so when the young woman arrived he courted her and after a few weeks had almost won her over but she decided to sell the house and leave. He strangled her and put her in a trunk, which he dumped into a fire pit that he’d dug for her to burn her aunt’s attic junk. He started the fire and went to preach his sermon but during the service it began to rain. The fire had only managed to burn a hole in the trunk before it was doused. The boy that had earlier mowed the lawn had forgotten to lock the tool-shed door so when he came back he found the trunk, saw the woman inside and called the police. Peter Falk looks like Marlon Brando’s ugly little brother.

            Halfway through, as usual, Hitchcock said they would be pausing for station identification. Just before returning to the teleplay he announced that two of the stations had failed to identify themselves and so they were arrested for vagrancy.

            That night the robot cowbell was still donking away after 24 hours.

            When I went to bed, as soon as I put my head down and turned my head to take the kinks out of my neck I had an attack of vertigo. The room wasn’t spinning all around but rather spinning partly around back and forth. I also felt motion sickness in my stomach but not enough to throw up. No matter which way I turned I was dizzy but then I shifted again onto my left side and the dizziness subsided.

Lorrie Moore

On Friday morning I did a little bit of writing ideas towards my

essay. I’d forgotten how short that February is so I fooled myself into thinking I have more time to get this paper done, but there are only 18 days till the deadline.

            I wrote about some of the references to Carl Solomon:

Ginsberg is with mother finally. The only desired woman for the poet. She is a finality something that’s been waited for held away from him and so being with her brings a sense of relief. Carl Solomon imitates the shade of Ginsberg’s mother. He serves as a maternal figure. A personage of comfort. He offers compassion. Solomon has murdered his twelve secretaries. Besides references to the poet’s mother, only Solomon and Cassady have contact with females in Howl and there are no individual women, only generic groups of them. But Solomon has not actually killed any women. Secretaries of course are not necessarily women but the association of secretaries with the female sex is very common. But secretaries serve the purpose of organizing the superficial aspects of someone’s life, including their appointment calendar, which consists of twelve months. And so Carl Solomon murdered his own sense of organization and time upon entering the mental hospital.

I lost wifi reception in the late morning.

            I adjusted the connection for my left speaker at the back of my new receiver because it had been fading out every now and then. I think there was less light when I’d originally set them up, because after taking the wire out and screwing it back it seemed fine.

            Since there was no internet and my journal was up to date I spent several hours finishing up most of the reading for my Early 20^th Century US Literature course.

            I re-read all of Pat Parker’s poems that we’d been given to read. They seemed better the second time around but they still didn’t seem that innovative. It’s the kind of poetry one hears a lot on the open stages of poetry readings.

            I finished reading the first act of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which I read a few times ten years ago when I wrote a research essay on the play and earned my first A.

            I read Bharati Mukherjee’s short story, “The Lady from Lucknow”, about a woman from Pakistan living in the States, who cheats on her husband with a white guy. When the man’s wife walks in on them in their bedroom she treats her like the affair and she is nothing.

            I re-read Thomas King’s “A Coyote Columbus Story”. I’d written an essay on that too but only got a B+. Coyote had been looking for someone to play ball with because the Indians were tired of how she was always cheating. So Coyote danced and tried to think up some playmates but when Coyote thinks something always goes wrong and so she caused Columbus and his men to come. But Columbus wouldn’t play ball either. He just took Coyote’s friends away.

            The last story I read was Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here”. I have never cried so much while reading a story in my life. It was very well written and she throws a lot of humour into the narrative but the story is so sad that the funny parts serve to amplify the sense of despair like nails and glass added to the contents of a bomb increase the weapon’s cruelty. It was the story of a mother that finds blood in her baby’s diaper, calls the doctor and is told to bring him in right away. The child turned out to have a Wilm’s tumour, which is a cancer of the kidneys that only affects male children. Moore’s descriptions of what the baby and the parents go through leading up to and after the surgery put me through two heart-wrenching fits of sobbing before I was done with the story. Lorrie Moore should be shot for causing a man to cry that much.

            In the evening, the audio walk signal at the intersection outside my window was on the fritz and kept on going all night.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Presents teleplay starring Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield. Randall played an alcoholic advertising executive. One morning when his wife catches him sneaking some cooking wine for an eye opener after having come home drunk the night before, she promises him that if he gets drunk one more time she will leave him. The rest of the show bounces back and forth in time. The next morning he gets up and calls for his wife only to discover Jayne Mansfield’s character lounging seductively in the living room. He has no idea who this woman is at first but then slowly recalls having been picked up by her in a bar at closing time. It seemed that they’d just written Mansfield into the part for the sake of having a star on the show, since she doesn’t serve the plot to any great degree. He goes to work to discover that he’d also forgotten about having been fired the day before because he’d been staggering drunk during an important presentation. He comes home, calling again for his wife, only to find Mansfield’s character still there. In trying to throw her out he almost strangles her but then gives her a bunch of money and she leaves. He starts looking for something to drink but can’t find anything but empty bottles. He tears the place apart and finally remembers that there was a bottle he’d hidden in the basement. Downstairs he sees the end of a silk scarf sticking out from closed closet door and then he recalls having bought the scarf for his wife. He flashbacks to coming home drunk and presenting it to her but she tells him she is keeping her promise and leaving him. He tries to make her wear the scarf and see how beautiful it is. Then we return to the present as he opens the closet door and finds the corpse of his strangled wife inside. That was the end. In a rare departure Hichcock’s goodnight was not humorous, as he reminded the audience of the serious problem of alcoholism.

            The wifi came back up for me a little after 11:00; around the time the donut shop closes.

Supermarkets Want Us to be Lost

            On Thursday morning it was nice to be able to listen to Radio Canada during yoga again. The station was clearer than it had ever been, which is good for my French listening and learning.

At around midday I rode over to Freshco to buy fruit and shaving gel. I picked up some cherries and green grapes that were on sale, plus some bananas and a bag of oranges. I also got a bag of snap pea crisps, a bag of cooked chestnuts, a can of roasted peanuts, a carton of soymilk and the gel. I went to get a couple of cans of peaches but since the last time I’d been there they’d moved the coffee and tea to where the canned fruit had been for the last several years. I found out that they’d moved the canned fruit one aisle over.

At the checkout counter my cashier was Cheryl, the middle aged woman of East Indian descent from the West Indies who has been working there since it was Price Chopper. I commented to her, “Just when I was starting to know where everything is, they move everything!” She shook her head to show she shared my disappointment and then asked, “You know why they do that don’t you?” “No.” She seemed surprised. “You don’t?” Jeeze, if she’d been so sure that I should have known, she wouldn’t have had to ask. She explained that they do it to prevent customers from knowing where everything is, because when they do they have a tendency to just come in, grab what they need and then leave. This way, if they have to look around in new places they are more likely to buy other things.

            On leaving Freshco I was walking behind an extremely old woman who had her hands behind her osteoporotic back as she slowly ambled along. Her fingers were all tensed and twisted so that each of her hands formed an odd shape of claw.

            When I got home, my next-door neighbour Benji was burning Indian incense as he often does, but I’d never smelled it so strong in the hallway. I was choking on it even though his door was shut. It must have been incredibly thick with perfumed smoke inside his place.

            I spent three hours that night getting caught up on my journal.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour story called “Ride the Nightmare” about a man named Chris Phillips who’d been involved with three other men in a robbery many years before but had run out on them before the job was finished. They got caught and thrown in prison while he went to California and changed his name to Chris Martin, went on the straight and narrow, married a beautiful woman and settled down. But his partners in crime blamed him for their capture. They’d recognized his picture in the paper that was published when he’d won a bowling tournament and saw his new name and location. They escaped and came after him. His wife had not been aware of his past but when she found out she didn’t want him to call the police because he would be put in prison for his crimes and she would lose him. The first of his old colleagues broke into their house and so Phil had to kill him. They buried his body in the mountains. But then the other two kidnapped his wife and demanded a payoff. He met one of them in the California desert to make the drop but when the guy tried to drive off without telling him where his wife was he managed to catch him, disarm him, beat him up and force him to take him to the shack where his wife was being held. There were two bullets in the gun that Chris had taken from the guy. He kills the guy in the shack but when he tries to shoot the last of them the bullet misses. The other guy takes his partner’s gun and goes after Chris and his wife. Chris starts a brush fire that surrounds the last man and he is burned to death.

Stereo Upgrade

            On Wednesday morning it was so hot when I started yoga, even after opening all the windows that I had to strip down to my briefs. It was more stifling than the hottest days of summer and I was dripping sweat on my yoga mat and feeling very slippery. When I started song practice I didn’t want to stand in front of the window in my underwear, so I had to put on a tank top and some summer shorts and plug in the fan. After sunrise things cooled off a bit and I was more comfortable.

            A little after noon I headed out to try to find a decent set of speakers to replace my old set of thirty years that recently blew out. I first went to the local Salvation Army thrift store and they had a set of Panasonic speakers, about a quarter the size of my old ones. I don’t think Panasonic is a high quality brand, plus I didn’t really like the chubby and kind of bulbous design or the metallic-looking veneer. I wanted to look at a few places in the general neighbourhood and if there were nothing else I’d come back and settle for the Panasonics.

            I rode my bike up to Value Village. They had a larger selection, some of which were a better quality than Panasonic. There was a tiny surround-sound Sony set with a sub-woofer for what looked like $50, but they looked kind of cheaply designed.

            I headed east on Bloor and stopped at the other Salvation Army thrift store. They also had some Sony speakers similar to the ones at Value Village.

            I pedaled to Dovercourt, south to Queen and then west to the Queenglad pawnshop where the day before I’d bought a Yamaha receiver. They had more and better speakers than every place else and some better brands. I had trouble though deciding if any of them were what I wanted or if I should just pick a set and settle. I walked back and forth a few times, looking at everything that they had until at one point I noticed on a floor by the counter a set of black Sound Dynamics RTS-5 tower speakers. The old lady at the counter called the sombre looking guy that seems to run the pawnshop. He came up and immediately told me he’d sell me the set for $100. He asked if I wanted to listen to them and I confirmed that I did. He called an elderly gentleman to help me out.

            Judging from the fact that the staff consists of distinctly different generations of East Asian (probably Chinese or Vietnamese) people, I think that Queenglad is probably a family business.

The old guy, perhaps in his mid 70s walked towards me and smiled. It was the first time I’d ever seen any staff at Queenglad smile at me. He took his time setting up a receiver and hooking up the speakers, then he finally said, “We’re ready …” but the old man surprised me by finishing the sentence with “… to rumble.” He played the music from a few radio stations for me, and they sounded good to me, so I said I’d buy them. I asked if they had any FM antennas. He told me what Nick Cushing had told me, that I could just use any wire and stick it in the hole to make an FM antenna. He showed me that he had put his finger up against the antenna slot while playing radio stations for me. Then he went to look at the shelves where the receivers were on display and looked at the backs of some components. Finally he pulled an FM antenna and an AM antenna from the back of one of the receivers and gave them to me free of charge. I paid for the speakers and he told me that I was, “Ready to make some noise”.

I let him know that I was travelling by bike, so I’d be taking two trips. I decided to walk home with the first speaker. It wasn’t unbearably heavy but it had been a long time since my furniture moving days and it started getting uncomfortable before I’d walked very far. I set it down on a bench in front of a café for about thirty seconds and then continued on, but had to double back after half a block because I’d left the speaker wire on the bench. The fancy people at the window table looked out at me funny on seeing me for a second time. I got the speaker home and then walked back to Gladstone. The trip was surprisingly quicker while walking empty handed.

When I got back to Queenglad I asked for a receipt before taking the other speaker. A second staff member smiled at me. Maybe it was because I’d spent money, but I’d like to think they are friendlier than I’d previously thought. The online reviews for Queenglad are mostly horrible though.

I carried the second speaker to my bike, unlocked it and then set one end of the speaker between the handlebars, the other against the seat, held my right hand on top and steered with my left as I walked home. I should have used my bike for the first speaker too because it was so much easier. While climbing the hill just west of Dufferin I found a five-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The score made me feel like I’d gotten the speakers for free.

When I got home I had some lunch and then switched the wires from the old speakers to the new ones. I’d needed to use a screwdriver for the old speakers but the new ones had knobs that just screwed easily over the wires and when I played Garland Jeffries it was clean and clear, with lots of nice bass. My old right speaker had blown out years ago and though it still produced sound, it was weak and tinny, like the left speaker had recently become. This was the first time in a long time that I could listen to music in stereo and I didn’t remember the old ones ever sounding as good as these. Also, I don’t know if it’s the new speakers or the new receiver, but for the last couple of years I’d been getting, sometimes just from touching or moving a wire on my computer or monitor, or sometimes just because of power surges, a sudden loud hum coming out of the old speakers and each time I would have to unplug the wire that runs from my computer to the receiver, in order to break the circuit and make the humming stop. With the new system, that hum has not reoccurred.

The only problem with the new speakers is that the left one won’t inside my book shelf like the old one did because, though it’s 13 cm narrower than the other, it’s 21 cm taller. I might be able to raise the second shelf in order to fit it in, but that would involve pulling it out from the wall and probably a couple of hours of work. That will be a project for some day after my classes are finished in the spring.

That night I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Presents story about a guy that accidentally pushes his wife overboard from a yacht after hearing her say she is leaving him for another man. The push was intentional but he had not intended it to send her into the water. Once she was there though he did nothing to save her because he knew that she could not swim. He felt guilty but not enough during the investigation to confess. He was not suspected of killing her even when he accused the sheriff of suspecting him. Once the inquiry was over he couldn’t stand the guilt anymore and told his sister that he’d murdered his wife. She didn’t believe him. No one believed him. He tried to confess to the sheriff and he didn’t buy it either. The only one that believed him was his friend the judge, who turned out to have been the man that his wife was leaving him for. The judge’s revenge as for everyone think the husband was insane for insisting that he’d killed his wife. He is being taken away to an institution at the end of the story.

Later that night I hooked up the FM antenna to my receiver and Radio Canada came through crystal clear. Knowing that I’d replaced and even upgraded my old receiver and speakers and gotten my radio reception back was a satisfying way to end the day.

            

Free Hugs

            On Tuesday morning I couldn’t stand the silence of doing yoga without listening to Radio Canada, so I made the decision to go out and get myself another receiver. A little after noon I rode to Best Buy, but before going in I figured that since I was downtown already I might as well look for a Picardie tumbler to match the one that got broken in January.

            At the corner of Yonge and Dundas there was a smiling guy holding up a sign offering free hugs. He didn’t have any takers as I walked by.

I went to Winners first, which was the place where I’d found the first one, though even when I had that one I kept going back to Winners to find more but they never turned up again, and that was the case this time as well. In fact, they seem to have stopped selling housewares at Winners altogether these days.

I went into the Eaton’s Centre, past the guy with the “Free Hugs” sign, still smiling but still with no one taking him up on his offer. I walked south through the mall and it was the first time I’d been in there since Sears closed. It seems that all of the space that Sears occupied has been taken over by Nordstrom, but they’re not really a department store in the way that Sears or Eaton’s were. It’s all clothing, shoes, accessories and makeup but no bedding, appliances or housewares. I went all the way through the mall to the redesigned and much nicer now glass bridge over Queen Street to the Hudson’s Bay Company where I took seemingly endless escalators to the top floor to find the glassware.

Nobody in housewares at The Bay knew what Picardie glasses were at first but a woman in charge of the department walked around with me a while and as we looked around and I made comparisons she remembered that they’d had them on sale for a while but they were gone. She recommended Williams and Sonoma in the mall on the second floor. I walked all the way back up to Nordstrom without seeing it, so I walked south again. I tried playing with the computerized directory and saw Williams and Sonoma further south but I still couldn’t find it. I decided that if I didn’t find it on one more trip north I’d just leave the mall and go back on my stereo hunt. About halfway up I asked the help desk and was told the store was directly above where we were, so I went upstairs and found it.

The Williams and Sonoma salesperson didn’t know what Picardie glasses were either. When I described it as being of a less breakable type of glass she shook her head and doubted that they had anything like that. “Everything that we have is very breakable and made of crystal” she insisted. But then we did find them after all, however their biggest glass was the same size as the one that Nick Cushing gave me. She suggested that I try Homesense at Yonge and Queen, but I put that off till the next time I’m downtown.

Back out at Dundas and Yonge the guy with the “Free Hugs” sign was still there and still smiling.

At Best Buy I was disappointed to see that they didn’t have any Yamaha receivers, even though their online catalogue showed that they had one on sale for $169. The salesperson explained that some of their products are only available on the web. In the future there won’t be any stores and everyone will have to buy stuff on the internet. For a few years the delivery industry will thrive but then we will all have 3D printers and we’ll be able to download and manufacture stereo components almost instantly in our own homes. That will mean they can be hacked and we can even make our own spaceships for free.

The cheapest receiver they had was a Sony for $200. I was willing to pay $200 but this one looked flimsy and cheap. I walked back to Yonge, where the Free Hugs guy remained untouched and headed up Yonge Street because I remembered that it used to be lined with little stores that sold stereo equipment. When I was halfway between Gerrard an College I realized I was being stupid to walk, so walked back to Dundas and considered going over to give the guy with the sign a hug, but I was already getting tired and hungry and not feeling as emotionally generous as I might have been if I’d already found what I’d been looking for. I went west to where I’d locked my bike in front of Best Buy, and then I rode up Yonge.

The only electronic stores on Yonge now are just cell phone places. I think that the stereo shops had all been on blocks that are now giving birth to high-rise office buildings.

I stopped at College Park because I was sure that I’d seen The Brick furniture store advertise online that they had Yamaha audio receivers. It took me a while to find the Brick but this store at least had nothing electronic.

            I pedaled up, across and down to Bay-Bloor Radio. I walked around for several minutes without a single salesperson being anywhere in sight. Finally I asked a woman at a desk and she called for a salesman. He showed me the cheapest Yamaha receiver that they had and it looked like the level of quality that I would be willing to settle for but it was $350 and out of my price range.

            As I was riding back down Yonge Street I remembered when 15 or 20 years ago I’d bought my current Yamaha receiver at the now five years gone Kromer Radio on Bathurst Street. I recalled paying about $250 at the time and so I thought now that if I want the same quality I might have to accept inflation and go back to Bay Bloor Radio to get the $350 Yamaha. I turned right on Wellesley with the intention of going up Bay, but I almost immediately stopped and told myself to stay in my budget. I turned around and continued down Yonge to Queen, then went west towards home.

            I couldn’t think of any other place to look for a new receiver, so I just told myself that this day might be a write-off but I would keep my eyes open and hopefully find something in a few days.

            I stopped at Moog Audio, but it turns out that they just sell professional audio equipment, liking mixing boards and such.

            It occurred to me on the way home to stop and check out the Queenglad Pawnshop at Queen and Gladstone. They had lots of receivers and even had one that was identical to my RX-V350 for $160, but I was interested in the one they had that was more similar to the Yamaha I’d passed up at Bay Bloor Radio. It was a Yamaha RS-300 for $200. I asked the sombre guy at the counter if the receiver came with a remote. He just indifferently shook his head and answered “No”. But then I noticed that the white sticker had the word “Remote” underneath the price. I told him about it and he unemotionally responded, “Then it has a remote.”

            The guys that run the Queenglad Pawnshop are the least glad pawnshop runners I’ve ever run into. I don’t recall ever seeing them crack a smile. In the past I’ve only sold things to them but though they never seem particularly glad to see any customer, they did buy a photo enlarger from me for three times what I paid for it second hand.

            I decided to buy the RS-300. It came with a 30-day warranty and the tax was included in the price. I had brought two large President’s Choice shopping bags to double up in case I found a receiver that day. I carefully rode home with the amp dangling from my right handlebar. I was feeling pretty good about my purchase. I had a sense that I’d found something of good quality for a reasonable price.

            When I got home I had a late lunch of guacamole and chips and then I set up my new stereo. To my surprise though I discovered that the same tinny sound was coming to my ears, which meant that what I should have been looking for that day were a new set of speakers. That also indicated that there is probably nothing wrong with my old receiver. But then again the old one had stopped picking up Radio Canada, which it had always received, though sometimes with a little static. It could have been though that all I needed was my old receiver, new speakers and an FM antenna. Anyway, I decided that I like the new receiver, even though I perhaps didn’t need it, so I probably wouldn’t be returning it unless something went wrong in 30 days.

            I was determined to get back into hi-fidelity and so the plan would be to look for some speakers the next day. That night the headphones worked fine with the new receiver as I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour story about a guy that got hit over the head and mugged in a bad neighbourhood. A cab driver came to his rescue but the blow to the head seemed to have affected the victim’s memory. He told the cabby that it was his wedding day and he was on his way to marry his girlfriend, not realizing that it was 1:00 in the morning. He took the cab to his girlfriend’s place but she’d moved out quite a while ago. The landlady gave him her forwarding address and he arrived to discover that she was married with a new baby and that it had been three years since the day he was supposed to have married her.

            The cab driver told him that someone had said they’d seen him a few times in the neighbourhood where he’d been mugged and so he probably lived around there. He took him back there and the amnesiac checked into a hotel. The next day while he was wandering around a young woman called him David and told him he shouldn’t be out on the streets. Since she knew him he said he needed to talk with her. She said she’d meet him at his place that night. He asked her to tell him where he lived and she gave him the address. Suddenly somebody started shooting at him and he ran. He found his place and he had a key but didn’t know the room number. He had to trick the maintenance guy into showing him his room by telling him that the key was sticking.

            That night the young woman came and it turned out that they had been lovers for three years, though he didn’t remember her at all. He’d worked as a bodyguard for her uncle but there had been a murder of a woman and the police were looking for him. It turned out he had been framed due to his memory loss, which made him a perfect fall guy. 

Tin Can Stereo

            On Monday my stereo was playing loud and clear as I was about to do the dishes with some music in the background. Suddenly the volume dropped and it started sounding like a tin can telephone. I tried reconnecting the speaker wires to the surround sound sockets and actually got both speakers working for the first time in a while, but the same tinny, low volume, monophonic sound persisted in both. When I plugged in the headphones everything sounded fine but I don’t think that means that the problem is with my speakers. On top of that my radio has suddenly stopped working altogether. That’s the one thing that shouldn’t need any connections since it’s inside the machine. It’ll be weird doing yoga without the radio on for the first time in twenty years.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour story that co-starred Billy Mumy, the kid that was in that famous Twilight Zone story about the child that viciously controlled a town with his mind. In this story the boy had no powers other than the fact that he couldn’t swim. He was on the beach one day with his mother, Sally, but he went out too far and his mother couldn’t swim either so she wasn’t able to save him. Luckily there was a man swimming further out that came in to save him. The mother was so grateful that she invited him to join her and her husband John at their place for dinner the following night. They learned from him that he was an out of work air force veteran with a dream of having a little orange grove. They were so grateful to him for saving their son’s life that they offered to help him out. He could stay with them while looking for his piece of land and once he found it they would lend him $5000 to get started. Weeks went by but Ray didn’t seem to be looking very hard for his dream farm. He spent most his time either playing with their son or playing with their pretty blonde Norwegian maid, Kira. One day when Ray was borrowing their car they got a call from him saying that he’d had a small accident and that the owner of the other vehicle needed to meet about the insurance. They met on the highway and it turned out that the couple, George and Eve were on vacation and travelling with a trailer home. The five of them went inside the trailer to have a friendly drink while they discussed the insurance. Sally noticed Ray being inappropriately friendly towards George’s wife while they were there. A day or so later they got a call from George telling them that Ray had tried to make time with Eve when he wasn’t home. Susan and John decide to ask Ray to leave but he refuses but says he go for $20,000. They threaten to call the police but Ray threatens to make up a story that will ruin their careers. He says he owes $20,000 to an old sea captain named Faulkner and he wants to square it, so unless they fork up the dough he’s going to stay. He says he’s going for a walk to give them time to think about his demand but shortly after he leaves they hear a gunshot. They go outside and see Ray on top of George with his hands on his throat. John pulls him off and they begin fighting until finally Ray falls back and hits his head. He’s not dead but unconscious. George explained that he’d come with a gun because Ray tried to rape Eve (well, they didn’t use the word “rape”, but rather “attacked” but I don’t think they were allowed to say “rape” on television in 1962). George says that he’ll take Ray to the hospital but later he calls to say that Ray died along the way. John insists that he call the police but George says the police will think that John killed him and besides, this kind of scandal would ruin his career in the civil service. John goes to George’s trailer and finds that he’s already burying Ray. George says for John to go home and he’ll take care of it. Sally and John think it’s all over but one day a letter arrives for Ray from the sea captain. John goes to meet Faulkner and offers to pay him the $20,000 that Ray had owed him. Sally and John once again think it’s all over but then they read in the paper that a highway is going to be built that goes straight through the quarry, which is where Ray is buried. John tracks down George but George doesn’t seem to be worried, which he finds suspicious. Finally he does what he should have done in the first place. He calls the cops. It turns out that Ray, George, Eve and Captain Faulkner are all part of a team of grifters running a very complex scam and that Ray even staged the rescue of their son to get in good with them.

           

            

Parkdale Rasta

            On Sunday I finally got in touch with my upstairs neighbour, David, whom I’d been trying to connect with since Friday when my friend Nick told me he’d be able to come on Sunday to fix David’s doorframe. A couple of months before, David had locked his key inside and he came to me for help to get into his place. I used a hammer to push a chisel to where the lock catches, partially got it to release and then I pushed it the rest of the way with my shoulder, which caused a bit of damage, though the lock still functioned. Nick usually has several errands to do in Toronto on the rare occasion that he comes in from Hamilton, so he didn’t make it to my place until the early evening. I went upstairs to knock on David’s door but he didn’t answer so I kept on loudly banging for about ten sets of five because I knew he was in there and must have fallen asleep. I could hear the Olympics coverage of a hockey game going on behind his door. After five minutes or so he woke up and I brought Nick upstairs to meet him.

            Nick got right to work on the door with his hammer, his electric screwdriver, some glue and some screws. He told me that he finds curling more interesting than hockey because of childhood memories of his parents curling. He said that it was a pleasant environment for him as a kid and everyone was nice to him. The only person that I knew that curled when I was young was our Anglican Church minister.

It took Nick about ten minutes to get the frame solid again. David gave him two $20s for his trouble, though Nick tried to give him back one of them but David insisted. When I’d sent Nick the pictures I’d taken of the broken door a couple of weeks before he said he’d do it for $25, but when I gave David the quote his response was, “Oh please! I will pay more!” These immigrants just don’t know how to integrate.

Nick and I chatted for a few minutes at my place and then he headed out for his social butterfly destination, which was to have dinner with a friend who lives in a van. I assume the dinner was not in the vehicle, but I imagined a dining room table and lit candles taking up the whole back of the van.

Shortly after Nick left I heard shouting outside my east window. I looked out to see and hear the Rastafarian guy that hangs out with his dogs on O’Hara, telling a woman that was holding a toy poodle under her arm to go fuck herself. He was on the west side of O’Hara and she was on the east. I gathered from their back and forth that what had happened was, she had been walking with her dog on its leash south on O’Hara when his unleashed golden Labrador Retriever charged across the street towards her, though probably towards her dog, with friendly though overly enthusiastic intentions. She was startled and immediately scooped her spoonful of dog into her arms and then told the Rastafarian guy that he should keep his dog on a leash. This was what right away caused him to start repeatedly telling her to go fuck herself. She was trying to reason with him from the corner and then crossed the street towards him, continuing to try to make her point that she had been frightened and that he should keep a dog that size on a leash. “He’s just a puppy!” he argued and demanded to know how old her dog was. She said it didn’t matter. He told her, “This is a working dog!” I was leaning out the window by this time to listen and watch their exchange better and I could see that he’d leashed his dog since the argument began and that it was also wearing a harness. It had never occurred to me that the Rastafarian guy might be legally blind since he obviously has vision but I suppose it might be impaired enough to warrant having a guide dog. I’ve seen him on a bicycle though and he’s had dogs for years. He walked towards her, declaring, “I’ve been here for thirty years!” Frightened of him entering her personal space, she stepped over the knee-high wrought iron fence into the now winter-bare Colonel O’Hara Garden next to the donut shop to get away from him. He walked a little further away from her to the south side of the fence, but it clearly made him angrier that she had been frightened of him. He pointed at her accusingly and shouted, “You think you’re scared of me? I’m scared of you, you stupid white woman!” She stepped over the fence again and walked to the corner and looked up at the pole that holds the street signs for O’Hara and Queen, then she punched some numbers on her phone and told the Rastafarian guy that she was calling the police because maybe they could explain to him why he should keep his dog on a leash. He sat on the fence of the garden where it ran parallel to Queen and told her defiantly that he would wait for the police, assuring her, “They piss and shit just like everybody else!” She nodded and said, “Yes, we are all the same.” He said, “I’m from Africa. I’ve been here for 30 years! You’re a white supremacist! That’s why you have a white dog!” She responded, “You’ll notice I haven’t said anything hateful to you.” At this point a man and woman in their 40s stopped to talk with her. They looked like middle class Parkdale gentry, even more so than the woman with the dog. It kind of looked like it was this couple she’d walked down to Queen to meet. They asked her something but she responded, “I can’t! I have to wait for the police …” and then she proceeded to tell them the story, into which the Rastafarian would angrily interject from time to time, even at one point pointing accusingly at the couple that had just arrived. After a few minutes the woman with the dog walked east on Queen with the couple. The police never did arrive.

I made guacamole and had it with tortilla chips and a beer while watching an instalment of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The story was about a guy named David that was obsessed with a woman named Anabelle. When she married somebody else he went over the deep end and refused to accept it. He continued to call and visit, even calling her “darling” in front of her husband, telling her that she’d just made a mistake to marry him and that it would all work out. He had secretly bought a house in the country under the name William Newmaster and filled the closets with expensive clothes for her and he kept sending her extravagant gifts, like a diamond broach. That present was the last straw for Anabel’s husband, who was poor and couldn’t afford to buy such things for her. He found out David’s secret address and went to confront him with an unloaded gun, just to scare him into staying away. They struggled and Anabel’s husband fell, hitting his head on a corner of the fireplace grating. He was only stunned but David saw it as an opportunity and pushed the man’s head hard several times onto the exact same corner until he was dead. Anabel was in shock on hearing that her husband had died and so wasn’t thinking when invited to the house where her husband had died. She was surprised to find David there, telling her, “We can be together now!” When Anabel told him she didn’t love him he declared, “You’re not Anabel!” and strangled her to death. At the end we see that he has put Anabel’s dead body on the bed and he’s holding her hand, talking about all the places they would go now that they are together, as the sirens get louder and louder.

Carol Lynley

            On Saturday I updated my journal.

            I popped out to the liquor store in the evening to buy a couple of cans of Creemore. On the way back I saw Wayne, the guy who’s always putting on a crazy show of spontaneous antics in the food bank line up. He was standing on the north side of Queen in front of the walk-in clinic. Suddenly he started running across Queen toward the centre of the top of Dunn Avenue as the cars from that one-way street were turning right and left onto Queen. He ran like a quarterback, making sudden but slight lunges sideways to the right or left as he went, except that he wasn’t dodging cars but rather faking movements toward them. He didn’t actually put himself directly in front of any cars but it must have been annoying for the drivers to see him acting like he was about to do so. When he got to the southeast corner a woman that had been waiting for the walk signal chastised him for getting in the way of traffic. She was swearing at him by the time they got to the southwest side and Wayne walked down Dunn.

            I wrote down a few ideas for my essay:

            The “angelheaded hipsters” that Ginsberg refers to are probably men just as all named “Mohammedan angels” are represented as male. The most personality that any woman is given in Howl is to be described as “gaunt”.

            I finished formatting the document of Pat Parker’s poetry. I don’t think it’s great writing but she does tell it like it is.

            The wifi went off in the evening and stayed off for a few hours, so I couldn’t post my blog until around 22:30. It’s always on overnight so I don’t think they are shutting it off, otherwise why not shut it off all night? I suspect that it isn’t actually turned off but that the evening is a peek period of customer use downstairs in the donut shop and so I just get crowded out.

            I watched an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour starring the very pretty Carol Lynley as a novice nun that is having doubts. One of the older sisters is bedridden and she’s just heard from a man she used to teach when he was a troubled boy. He is rich now and has asked her to visit him in Chicago but she is too sick to go and so she asks young Sister Penelope to go in her place. She meets the rich man who gives her a priceless statue of St Francis to take back to the convent. She is carrying the statue in a small, narrow suitcase, but a fast talking young man tricks her into letting him carry it for her and then runs off with it. After notifying the police, Sister Penelope sees the young man in a police line up. Jimmy tells the cops he works at Gramarcy Appliance Company. She says she’s not sure if it’s him and goes back to the convent where she immediately tells the mother superior that she is leaving. We next see her in Chicago applying for a job at the Gramarcy Appliance Company and she gets the job. On her first lunch break she is eating a sandwich outside when she is approached by the same man that took the suitcase. He doesn’t recognize her without her nun’s habit and invites her to a party that night where she discovers the pawn ticket for the suitcase. She goes to the pawnshop and asks specifically for a religious statue. The statue of St Francis is there but the owner is suspicious that she’s a cop because she seemed to already know they had the statue there. He calls Jimmy and when he arrives he recognizes Penelope as the nun that he’d ripped off. They decide that the statue must be worth a fortune and so they keep Penelope there and call an expert named George. George turns out to be the man that gave Sister Penelope the statue in the first place but he pretends he doesn’t know her. He also pretends that the statue is worthless, pays them $20 for it and gives it to Penelope. She takes it back to the convent where she decides to stay. This story was a little too religious for me.

Barbara Dane

            I’d put it off long enough. Friday had to be laundry day if I didn’t want to start wearing my ragged clean underwear. When I do that my genitalia slips through the holes and starts talking funny.

            When I was walking into the Laundromat the Korean guy that seems like he might run the place was walking out and a young woman I hadn’t seen before, wearing a blue smock that seemed to serve as a casual uniform gave me a surprisingly bright greeting of, “Hello, how are you?” I don’t think that I’ve ever been greeted in that way by a Laundromat employee.

            The Laundromat was unusually crowded for a Friday. I wanted to wash my sweat pants by themselves in one of the cheaper top load washers, but half of them were out of order and the other half were being used. I put everything else in one of the big front load washers and once I had done that one of the little washers had been freed up. As I was on my way to the change machine a woman with a familiar face walked in with her two young racially mixed daughters of maybe about 8 and 4 years of age. At first I thought I recognized her from the food bank but later I realized that she’s a cashier at Freshco.  I’d remembered her once smiling sweetly at a customer with a child that had been crying because she wouldn’t buy her a Kinder Egg. She’d told the mother then that she understood because she had two of her own. Now as she started getting ready to do her laundry she almost immediately began to yell at her oldest daughter. She’d asked her to move a chair and to sit down at the table, but when the girl tried to do what she was told I guess she did it wrong or took the chair to the wrong table because the mother shouted, “Oh my fucking lord! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

            Once my stuff was in the wash I rode down to No Frills to correct my mistake of not having bought soap the day before. It turned out they were having a $1 sale. The avocadoes were a dollar each and there was a little elderly lady already picking through them. As I came up to do the same, she commented pleasantly in a Caribbean accent, “These avocadoes looked bigger from afar!” I responded that they were at least a little bigger than the ones that come together in the mesh bags. In the apple section there were three varieties for a dollar a pound. The old lady was beside me when I picked a few from a breed called Pink Lady. She was trying to decide which ones to buy and wondered if those were good. I told her I’d picked them mainly because they were cheap, but would have preferred a more tart apple like Macintosh. I reached over in front of her to see how the macs were and every one I handled was slightly bruised. She wondered about the red delicious apples, which were also on sale, but I told her that I find them too dry. She joked, “I’m following you!” I quipped, “Don’t follow me, you might get lost!” I took a few of the ambrosia apples, a few bosc pears, four red mangoes, a bag of empire apples and a package of strawberries.

I grabbed a bag of garlic naan from the bakery section then went looking for and found a couple of cans of coconut milk. The Maxwell House coffee was on sale for $7.00 and so even though I still had half a can, I took another because one never knows when it’ll go back up to $10.00. I didn’t forget that I needed soap and selected the usual pack of Irish Spring.

When I got back to the Laundromat my wash had been done for four minutes. While I was putting my clothes in the dryer, the cashier’s little girls were sitting and playing at the table nearby. The youngest was playing house with her dolls and giving them voices as they talked to one another. For one of them she said, “Okay, I’ll be right back!”

As I was leaving to go home for twenty minutes the attendant called out, “Have a good day!” I told her that I’d be back but I probably should have just said, “Thanks! You too!” When I returned, the cashier and her daughters were leaving. It’s gonna be awkward using her checkout counter at Freshco now that I’ve heard her yelling and swearing at her kids.

I ate refried beans with jalapeno peppers and chips for lunch.

That night I watched an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour starring James Mason (who kind of looked like my dad, even though I look like my dad but don’t look like James Mason) and Angie Dickinson. Mason plays a successful detective novelist who sends a tape to his publisher revealing a previous identity and life. He’d been married but his wife had died in a car accident in which he’d experienced a major head trauma. Years later, with his new identity he walked into a folk club where he sees Angie Dickinson’s character, whom he’d met before in his previous life. She’s still married to a rich man but she begins an affair with Mason’s character. After a while she begins to ask him how he would write a story about killing her husband. He thinks it’s just a game and so he formulates a plan like he would for a book. Once the plot is put together though she asks him to do it. After some resistance he agrees but when the time comes he can’t go through with it. Thinking that he did, she tried to double cross him by calling the police and saying she heard shots at his apartment. Seeing there’s nothing wrong the cops go away but when James goes to see Angie he finds her cheating on him and so he kills her.

The story had its moments but the highlight was the performer on stage in the folk club. I’d never heard of Barbara Dane and yet it turns out she’s an icon. What an incredible voice! One doesn’t usually hear blonde white women belt it out like that. Even fresh out of high school she had opportunities to tour with top bands of the day but preferred singing at protest rallies. Bob Dylan called her a hero and Bonnie Raitt said there is no one she admires more.

Grab a Bad Banana

            Parkdale was being smothered by an incredibly thick fog when I got up on Thursday. I could barely see the building across the street. It was a ghost in the glow of the streetlamp and the only thing clear was the flashing “LLBO” sign in the window of the A+ Sushi & Bibim. The Dollarama was just a front for a warehouse of mist, as the back had disappeared. An hour later, though the fog was still heavy I could see the back of the discount store.

            I had to work at OCADU in the middle of the day and so at about 8:50 I went to bed until 10:00. I must have had a decent snooze because I didn’t feel tired at all while posing, even though it was a long sitting pose. I worked for a class that was using the figure as landscape. It was a three-part painting and they’d already had two sessions, each with a different female model. Their job was to complete the landscape by painting me into it. Because I was busy working on my journal, I only saw one of the paintings because it was near the plug where I’d set up my laptop. It presented the two female figures with their limbs overlapping. The young man that painted in was tall and slim and wore a baseball cap. At one point while I was posing I overheard the instructor say to him, “This is a chicken breast with barbecue sauce. It needs to be spicy Thai with cilantro.” In my head I went, “Whaaa?” During the coffee break I asked the young man what the teacher had meant by the analogy. He said it been about his colour choices, and explained that he has a tendency to paint representationally and only puts down the colours he sees. The professor was trying to get him to be more creative. The young man packed up and left before the second half of the class.

            The time went by fairly quickly for me, I guess because I’d been refreshed by my siesta before leaving for work.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco where grapes were super cheap, so I got four bags. Cherries were reasonable enough to pick two bags of those. I grabbed some bad bananas. They weren’t really that overripe but I just liked the way the phrase, “grabbed some bad bananas” sounded in my head so I wrote it down to use in something someday. The banana section was actually down to the dregs but the ones that I selected, though small, still had some green on them. I took avocadoes, bread, raspberry vinaigrette and soymilk. I had this feeling that I needed something from the aisle that has the toothpaste, but I didn’t bother walking over there because I didn’t need toothpaste, or floss or mouthwash.

            Ahead of me at the checkout counter was a young woman doing price matches but all the flyers were on her phone. I think there are sites one can access that have all the flyers from all the stores on them. After she’d paid for her items she turned out to be one of those annoying people that parks her shopping cart sideways up against both belts and is oblivious to the fact that she’s blocking someone else from packing their groceries. Next time somebody does that I’m going to say something.

            When I got home and went to wash my hands I realized why I’d had the feeling that I needed something from the lane with the toothpaste. What I needed was soap. I took a moment to mentally kick myself and then I moved on. I had enough slivers of Irish Spring to get me through till Friday.

            I watched an interesting episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour starring John Forsythe. The opening shows various characters doing various things on the street. A girl is impatiently waiting for her boyfriend, a man is tending to his roses, a drunk is standing outside a bar, a man is driving his car and a woman is waiting for a bus. Each person suddenly hears the squeal of tires, turns their heads to the sound and then looks at something in shock. After each character has reacted the camera shows the whole scene after they’ve all turned their heads. A motorcyclist is lying in the middle of the road and a white sports car is driving away.

            The next scene is a police station where John Forsythe (playing a character named Michael Barnes) arrives to confess to having been the driver of the hit and run car. His statement is taken down and a court date is arranged. He learns that the motorcyclist is in the hospital with a concussion, but is expected to recover.

            Next we see Barnes at the hospital. His wife (who we never see) is a 36-year-old pregnant woman, experiencing trauma as she waits to go into labour at any time. He asks the doctor to keep newspapers away from her for the next few days.

            Next, Barnes is at home and discussing the case with his friend, who happens to be a lawyer, but not the kind that would deal with a hit and run case. We learn that Barnes is a crime novelist. He explains to his friend that there are five witnesses that all tell the same story of him having gone through a stop sign and having hit the motorcyclist, but he also insists that they are all wrong, because the car did indeed come to a full halt at the stop sign. His friend is about to recommend the best lawyer for handling this case, but Barnes declares that he’s going to defend himself.

            In the court the witnesses are interviewed in order of their appearance. Barnes manages to shed doubt on the testimony of the teenage girl because she had been so angry with her boyfriend for not showing up that she’d been distracted. The man who’d been tending his roses is revealed to have lost his only child several years ago when a sports car hit him at the age of 3. The drunken man appears to be drunk in court and he reveals that he didn’t even remember if he had been leaving the bar or walking into it when the accident occurred. The testimony of the man that had been driving the car behind the sports car cannot be shaken, but there is some discrepancy in that he had said that he’d put on his brakes when he saw the accident, but now maintains that he’d reduced speed as he approached the stop sign. He says that he meant that he’d already stopped his car and that the brakes he’d referred to were his parking brakes. The final witness said that she’d been on her way to give up her baby for adoption when the accident occurred but that the event had upset her so much that she’d gone home. Several more subsequent occurrences had also prevented her from giving up her child and by then she’d fallen in love with it and decided to keep it. Of the accident, she tells the prosecutor that she definitely saw the sports car stop at the stop sign. This is contrary to her police testimony, which had gone along with those of all the other witnesses. When pressed about it she says she was mistaken before and that she remembers everything clearly now.

            It is announced that the motorcyclist has died.

            As a final witness, Barnes calls himself to the stand, simply to make a final declaration that he is innocent of the charge and the accident was not his fault. But the prosecutor cross-examines him and asks Barnes if he passed the stop sign. He hesitates and then declares that he refuses to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate him. But Barnes made the mistake of putting himself on the witness stand, which overrules his right to take the Fifth Amendment. The judge warns him that he will be in contempt of court if he does not answer, but he refuses.

            The next scene is of a juke-joint where several teenagers, including the young woman who’d been a witness to the accident, are vigorously doing the Twist. A young man approaches and cuts in on her partner. He is the one she’d been waiting for on the corner the day of the accident. He tells her that he’d been there all along but hadn’t approached her because she’d been talking to another boy. He adds that he’d seen the whole accident and that the sports car did indeed come to a full stop at the stop sign. She right away insists that they go to the police with that information.

            The next scene is the courtroom where the jury is delivering a verdict of not guilty.

            The final scene is the hospital where Barnes’s wife has given birth. Barnes has come to look at his son for the first time. His lawyer friend is with him and is trying to get Barnes to explain why he’d refused to answer the question on the witness stand. He answered that he did so because he had been under oath and didn’t want to commit perjury. His friend is puzzled and says, “But you said you were telling the truth!” “I was.” “You’re not making any sense. Why couldn’t you testify?” “You know my wife and how truthful she is? None of the witnesses really saw the accident. They didn’t even see who was driving. I wasn’t in that car at all. It was my wife who had the accident.”