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”.