Architectural Literature

            On Sunday morning during my song practice I saw the rare appearance of a crow as it flew from the west and landed on the roof of the building across the street. A couple of minutes later it continued east. One hardly ever sees crows this close to downtown.

            I spent a lot of the day working on my report about the anti-shock treatment rally.

            In the late afternoon I took a bike ride and found the streets to be pretty empty of bicycles. I guess people were too busy taking their mothers to brunch to go riding. Two or three guys passed me but I didn’t see hardly any women riding at all. This time I went as far as Main Street.

            On the way back, at Yonge and Bloor I stopped to take some photos of an old sign revealed by demolition juxtaposed with a couple of construction cranes.

            I didn’t bother to stop at the supermarket because I still had writing to do.

            That night I made pasta with a jar of meat sauce and watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay about a middle-aged man named Alex that is cheating on his wife Angela with a much younger woman named Fiona. Alex was played by familiar comedic actor Henry Jones, who often played weak willed clerical types and he was equally matched, as Angela was portrayed by Kathleen Freeman, who often played acerbic matrons.
            One of the early scenes shows Alex dancing the frug with Fiona in a swinging nightclub called Casa a Go Go and I was impressed with the 53-year-old Jones’s dancing. He noticed though that a young man was watching him and in fact he’d seen him in other locations as well. After another day or so of following Alex, Richard finally approaches him in the washroom of his place of employment. He represents a firm that offers a service to husbands or wives that are tired of their spouses. He explains that the home is the most deadly killing device of all, providing all kinds of opportunities every day to end a person’s life. His firm’s engineers just calculate the statistical death norm, the aspect of the home that would most likely cause a subject to die anyway if they are left to their own devices, and then they alter that aspect to increase the probability of that death occurring. They call it accident programming. Divorces are messy but the chance death of Angela would allow Alex to keep his home and his stamp collection.
            Alex at first says no but later agrees and changes his mind again. Finally though he pays Richard half the $15,000 fee. He goes to see Fiona but she wants to end their relationship because he’s a married man. He tells her it’s going to be all right but when he tries to use Richard’s logic she still sees it as murder and he has to call off the hit. He tells Richard but he insists that the rest of the money has to be paid first. After the payment Richard makes the call but tells Alex that he can’t stop it and so he’ll have to do it himself. He rushes home to find that she has already taken her vitamins, which were supposed to have been switched with something else in the home that would have killed her. Angela is perfectly fine.

            The scene switches to Fiona and Richard together and we see that there is no firm and no accident programming engineers. It’s all been a clever con by the two of them who are ready now to move on to the next town and do it again.