Bird Circus, with Free Poop!

            On Saturday morning my legs were aching and tired from all the bike riding I’ve been doing. I was also out of it a bit mentally as I fumbled slightly over chords and lyrics during song practice. I wonder if exercising this much is going to get easier or if I’m just getting old.

            I worked on figuring out the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Comic Strip”.

            After breakfast but with a still almost full cup of coffee left behind on my desk I went to the food bank. The line up when I arrived was not very long for the middle of the month. I established my place in line by eye behind the plaid-lined cart belonging to the guy with the neck tattoo, but when the African couple with a friend or brother arrived and when the woman put their carts directly behind his I stepped up to let her know that I was in between.

            I read another page of Balzac’s “The Atheist’s Mass” from my dual language book. It takes me a good half an hour to get through that much text because I first try to understand the French parts on my own, then look at the English, then go back to see if I’ve now grasped the French. Sometimes I have to go back and forth two or three times before moving on to the next line.

            Here’s some of what I read this time: “That horrible, incessant battle that mediocrity wages against the superior man: If you lose $25 one night, the next day you are accused of being a gambler and your best friends will say that you lost $25,000. If you have a headache people will say you’re crazy. If you get angry you are anti-social. If you try to be strong against the forces that work to drag you down your best friends will shout you down for being overbearing and pushy. In the end your good qualities will be seen as faults, your faults will be looked upon as vices and your virtues will be viewed as crimes. If you’ve saved someone then you have killed him; if your patient recovers it is understood that you have assured his present at the expense of his future; if he doesn’t die, he will soon. If you stumble you fall. If you invent something and claim your rights you are difficult and shrewd and don’t want to give the young inventors a chance. My friend, if I don’t believe in god, I believe even less in man.”

            Angie came upstairs for a smoke and had one with a group of regulars that come early and hang out together, including the big woman, the former film technician, and the guy with the neck tattoo. She knows them all by name and gives them hugs when she greets them. She also reached out to touch my arm, say hello and then say tome, “Still reading!” I stepped out of line to avoid the smoke, but was close enough to hear her tell them how much she likes and admires the new manager, Valdene Allison. She said that she’s a hard worker and she treats everyone with respect.

            Around this time a pigeon strafed the sidewalk with green liquid poop that fell exactly along the line-up in front of the apartment building at 1501 Queen Street West. Fortunately there were very few people actually standing in line at the time and so it was mostly people’s carts that got bombarded, but two or three food bank clients were unlucky enough to be greenly shat upon and immediately set about to cleaning themselves off. The entrance to the building is framed by a classical pediment with a flattop canopy supported by two columns. On each corner of the top of the canopy is a life-size statue of an owl. After dropping its payload the pesky rock dove landed on top of the head of the owl on the left. The guy with the neck tattoo walked over to look directly up at the pigeon, pointed his finger and called to it accusingly, “You are an asshole!” Then he went back to one of his friends who’d gotten a little bit pooped upon and told him, “It’s supposed to be good luck!” If that were true, the biggest cities of the world would be the luckiest places on Earth. Then he declared, “If this happened when I was young I would have taken my pellet gun and shot that bird right in the eye!"

            I looked up at the pigeon and saw that another pigeon had landed on its back, I assume because the owl statue is a coveted perch and the upper bird wanted to force the other one off. So with a bird on top of a bird on top of a statue of a bird, it created a kind of mostly living totem and a strangely comical sight.

            These plastic owls are supposed to scare birds like pigeons away but studies show that pigeons are smart enough to figure out that it’s a fake after four days.

            Among the many mentally ill people in Parkdale there is a young man that’s been in the neighbourhood for a few years who seems to be in a constant state of mental and physical chaos. He is always walking but also frequently makes extreme and sudden gestures with his arms in all directions that some people might interpret as threatening, though I’ve never seen him being violent. He also seems to be in great shape, which might result from all of that movement. He went by while we were waiting and made some drastic gestures and made some loud but undecipherable verbalizations as he passed. The guy with the neck tattoo commented that the chaotic young man is probably supposed to get a needle every day. The big woman said, “Maybe he hasn’t gone for the needle.” If he’s the type of psychotic that should take regular medication to control his condition but could easily forget to do so, there may be an injection available for him but it would not be every day but rather every two or three weeks. There’s also a new schizophrenia medication that only needs to be injected four times a year.

            The food bank van arrived with the manager and the doorkeeper and so we all got in line to wait to draw our numbers. I moved the carts directly behind the plaid one so I could squeeze into my place and the male half of the African couple came up to confront me because he thought that I was doing something unfair. I explained to him the situation and he nodded. Martina came around with the box of numbers. I got number 20, which is close to what I would normally get with the old first come, first serve number system. Someone else complained about getting number 56 but Martina said, “You don’t see 56 people here. There are a lot of missing numbers so you don’t really have 56.”

            Valdene was unloading food from the van and decided to start giving away right there on the street packs of frozen meat that she’d picked up somewhere, rather than taking them down to the food bank. She was over by the door with the box of what looked like a white variety of frozen items, such as beef hearts, pork and cold cuts, and people were coming to her to take them. I didn’t go over to her because it felt undignified, but of course if I were desperately meat deprived I would have stepped up. Valdene said something about how people should take the meat at their own risk. The three Africans complained that the meat was past its best before date and in response Valdene shouted, “Did everyone here hear me say, to take the meat at your own risk?” She paused and looked around, then asked, “Everyone heard me? Okay!” A few minutes later Valdene walked down the line to where the Africans were and, with her cigarette behind her back, said, “Let me educate you. The best before date on meat doesn’t mean anything if the meat is frozen. It could last six months past the best before date. It means something with dairy or some other products but not with meat. I’m not trying to kill my brothers!” Then Valdene put her hand on the woman’s arm and added, “Or my sister!”

Martina let in the first wave of people with whatever numbers that weren’t missing up to thirteen. She was complaining about how many missing numbers there were and so I asked her if she’d ever considered taking each number back from people before they go through the door. For example, when she calls number 1 then number 1 would have to hand her number 1 before going in. That way there would be less chance of numbers going missing. The big woman thought that was a very good and smart idea. Martina said that was one way of doing it but she’s been thinking of just giving the numbers out five at a time to the first people in line. That sounded very close to the old system whereas I’d thought that the random system had come in to discourage people from coming too early. This idea would make people want to get there ahead of everyone else again.

Once I was downstairs and my name was checked off on the computer, my volunteer was Roy, who’d helped me a few times before but for the first time I noticed that he wears a cross around his neck.

From the shelves I got a bag of Italian herb and olive oil vegetable chips; a box of Breton black bean crackers with onion and garlic; a 750 gram bag of No Name honey almond granola; one strawberry yogourt and three chocolate nut granola bars and a can of black turtle beans. I reached for a can of tuna but their strange new policy was still in effect whereby if one takes tuna one can’t have any meat. And yet I was allowed to take a box containing a can of bourbon and bacon chicken salad with crackers.

            When I was finished at the shelves, Roy called out to Angie to let her know that I hadn’t taken any tuna. But the meat she had to offer was the usual cheap frozen ground chicken and frozen chicken wieners. There were some individually wrapped burger patties in the bin with hot dogs and ground chicken, but they looked like veggie burgers and Angie confirmed that they probably were. So I didn’t take any meat and yet I didn’t ask to go back and get tuna because of the other stuff that Angie gave me, such as a one-litre bottle of strawberry kéfir, which she said was a bonus for me. She also handed me a pack of 12 frozen bacon, mozzarella and onion mini-quiches; a package of cheese and spinach ravioli and a box of those Snak Man Do frozen mini samosas, though I don’t know for sure what flavour they are because I threw the box away so I could fit the samosas in my freezer and I didn’t think to read it before taking out the garbage. I assume they are the same very spicy tandoori chicken samosas that I had before. I turned down the milk but took a couple of small fruit bottom yogourts and three large eggs. The eggs, instead of being in the usual clear plastic bag, were in a six-egg crate. When I tried to fry two of the eggs later that night, the yolk of one of them broke when I dropped it in the pan, which is often a sign that an egg is not fresh, but I find also that the sunny parts of larger eggs tend to break more readily than those of smaller ones.

            Sylvia gave me a few potatoes, onions, a handful of baby bok choy that were getting a little brown, a green pepper and a bag of about twenty rainbow cherry tomatoes.

            I skipped the bread because I have some at home.

            It seems that under the new management there is a greater abundance of items at the food bank. When I compare this time last year in my journal, the amounts and variety of dairy, freezer products and vegetables were much less. Then again, two years ago there was a cornucopia of garden donations that hasn’t been repeated. There’s also now that weird choice of either one can of tuna or meat and not both.

            After the food bank I took my stuff home, put it away and then rode down to No Frills to buy mostly fruit. I got strawberries, bananas, grapes, cherries, three grapefruit and three mangoes.

            For lunch I heated up the 24 frozen mini quiches that I’d gotten from the food bank the week before, and ate half of them.

            Late that afternoon I took a bike ride. I noticed that at the corner of St George and Bloor there were a lot of flowers for the cyclist that got killed by the truck there earlier in the week. I wonder whose fault it was.

            I rode up Victoria Park, took Southmead Rd to Pharmacy and then headed back. I waited at the top of the hill just south of Donside for the traffic light to change from green to red and to green again north of the bottom of the ravine so I could coast without interruption. Just as I started going down someone pushed the “Walk” signal but I made it through the light with ten seconds to spare before it changed again.

            On the way back at around Donlands there was a box of books on the curb, so I stopped to go through it. It was mostly full of Ken Follett novels and other thrillers but there was also The Iliad by Homer, so I took that.

            While riding down Yonge Street I noticed up ahead that it was still blocked from Dundas to Queen, so I took Gerrard to Bay.

            That night when I made my eggs and one of the yolks broke, I fried the third one because I always like to have two runny yolks with my toast.

            I watched two episodes of Dobie Gillis. Whoever uploaded this torrent of the complete four seasons screwed up the order and the titles for these episodes.

            The first story I watched should have come five episodes after the second because it shows Dobie graduating from high school, while in the second he’s still in school.

            In the first, as Dobie’s in his senior year, the yearbook committee plans to publish family pictures of all the graduates accompanied by each parent’s graduation photo. Dobie’s father, Herbert is strangely dismissive of the whole thing but later reveals to his wife, Winnie that he never graduated because of enlisting during the war and then getting married afterwards. She insists on him going to night school so that he'll get a diploma in time for Dobie’s graduation. His teacher is the same as Dobie’s. Herbert doesn't tell Dobie that he's going to night school but takes for his own sake a sudden interest in Dobie's homework, which actually causes Dobie's grades to improve considerably. The only problem is that Herbert copies all of Dobie's essays, which of course the teacher notices and he gets in trouble. In the end though they give him another chance and he manages to earn his diploma, which he receives in the same ceremony as Dobie. The odd thing is that Maynard graduates too, which is strange because in almost every episode Maynard is shown to never do his homework and to fail every test. In the first season it was revealed that Maynard is a year older than Dobie and that he had to repeat a grade, but in the second he talks about having repeated Grade 12 three times. Dobie and Maynard are supposed to have grown up together but there is no explanation for them being in the same grade or how Maynard could possibly graduate.

            The second story is actually five episodes earlier than the graduation episode. In the story, Dobie’s father is spending way too much time at his lodge meetings of the Benevolent Order Of Bison (BOOB). Dobie is reading a book on marriage for school and begins to try to intervene in his parents’ marriage. He gives his father a husnband test from the book, which he fails miserably and convinces him to change his ways, which he does. Because of this, Winnie and all the other wives invade the next Bison meeting and make Herbert the head Bison.