What Is Love?

            My guitar sounds more out of tune when I'm sitting down than when I'm standing up. Maybe it’s because I’m closer to it or hearing it from a different angle.

            A few days ago I figured out that the source of the noise that I’d been hearing while riding my bike was my front wheel and I was relieved to find that it wasn’t a functional problem at all, but rather just my plastic reflector rattling against a spoke. Before I took my ride on Tuesday afternoon I wrapped some electrical tape around the spoke and that served to muffle the noise. Since the rain yesterday it was a lot less hot outside but not cool enough to need more than shorts and an undershirt.

            I stopped at the Firkin at Woodbine and Danforth to pee. There’s a blonde bartender who always says hello to me when I walk in, though maybe she greets everybody. On my way out a male bartender with a moustache told me to have a great day.

            Whether I stop use the washroom at Woodbine or not, it seems that I always start feeling like I have to urinate while I’m climbing Victoria Park. It’s weird because the distance is not that far between the two locations. Maybe my urge is pee-sychological.

            I turned right on Southmead to where it forks into three directions and took Engelhart Crescent north through a corridor of identical red brick three-story apartment buildings that look like they were built in the 50s or 60s. Engelhart curves east and when it got to Harris Park Drive where I stopped to look in a box of some kitchen items. There were several small and unattractive plates as well as a meat grinder that looked better than mine but I don’t use it enough to bother carting another one home. I went south to Coniston Road, east to Pharmacy and back south.

            The east side of Pharmacy from Eglinton down to Leahurst is all industrial while the west side is residential.

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home just to buy fruit. They had cherries that were super cheap though clearly there were some overripe ones in each bag. At that price though it was worth it. They also had Ontario strawberries and I would have been willing to pay $3.99 for a package but they were in horrible shape so I passed. I got four bags of grapes and then checked out.

            Just as I got off my bike in front of my building a guy that I’ve seen before further east was approaching and wearing a home made sandwich board, which simply asked, in large letters, "What Is Love?" I wondered if the sign was meant to ask the question for himself or to compel others to ask it. The man looked like he was in his 40s or 50s and walked with very little expression on his face other than perhaps a little defiance. As the guy passed and I was opening the door to my building, my next-door neighbour, Benji walked up. I asked him, “What is love?” He told me that the guy with the sign lives up at the West Lodge Apartment complex and that he walks around with the sign all the time. It’s funny then that I've only seen him once before and that was east of Dufferin.

            I had a chicken leg with a potato and steamed cauliflower for dinner while watching two episodes of Dobie Gillis.

            In the first story, the wealthy Chatsworth Osborn, seeing how impressed everyone is with Dobie in his uniform, decides to join the army too and is placed in Dobie and Maynard’s platoon. He turns the lives of the other soldiers into a living hell because he is so good at everything such as rifle drill and self-defence that the sergeant makes everyone else work harder just to learn what Chatsworth knows. Then Chatsworth’s mother arrives and takes control of the base. She buys all of the land surrounding the base and has an architect design a new base with a state of the art recreation centre and also a building for her to live in. Chatsworth convinces her to give it up and let him become a soldier on his own.

            In the second, NASA wants to find the dumbest and most incompetent person available in order to test how the isolation of space travel will affect ordinary people. Their massive computer locates Maynard G. Krebs. Maynard is to go into isolation in an Earthbound dummy capsule with a chimpanzee named Corporal Kilroy but the scientists decide it would be best to have a third person with them who can control the other two and so they select Dobie. They are supposed to be in the capsule for 30 days with nothing to eat but three food pills per day for each of them. After 8 days the chimp figures out how to open the hatch from inside and he and Maynard are able to go out to lift some roast chicken, potatoes and apple pie from the PX. After fifteen days the scientists put Kilroy in the real capsule to get ready for the Moon shot. That night Maynard misses Kilroy and so he leaves the capsule to look for him. He finds him and spends the night but then the scientists come and seal the capsule to take it to the launch pad. Maynard and the chimp blast off. At the end we see a desert island and a crashed capsule. Then we see Maynard in a hammock, playing a ukulele and being attended by four smiling Polynesian beauties as they feed him an exotic drink from a coconut. The chimp is in the next hammock wearing a flowery hat and feasting on bananas. Maynard declares, “You Moon people are like real friendly and like real cool!"