It's Stupid to Call People Stupid

            At around 1:30 on Saturday I woke up with a major cramp running from my right hip down to my calf. It was so bad it felt like I’d somehow injured myself in my sleep. I was worried that it might not be a cramp and that there might be something wrong with my hip. I decided to try and get up to see if that would help. I wasn't sure if I could but it wasn’t much of a problem. I limped a bit when I went to and from the bathroom and then I sat down in the living room for a couple of minutes. It felt slightly better and I went back to bed. I fell asleep again not long after that and when I woke up at 5:00 the cramp was gone.

            During yoga I came up with a theory about what might have caused the cramp. On August 10^th I added a new pose to my yoga routine in which I lean back and balance my body on one hand and foot with my other hand and foot in the air. The muscles that are worked on my right leg by that pose are the same ones that cramped up while I was in bed that morning. I’ve had cramps for a while in the past while my body got used to a new exercise.

            I worked on finding the chords to “L’Oiseau du Paradis” by Serge Gainsbourg. Quick Partitions had the sheet music for the first verse, which is enough for this song because there is no chorus, but only some of the chords sounded right to me. D7, B-minor 7 and F-sharp fit in places but the rest needed other chords, so I had listen to the only version that exists online, the one by Zizi Jeanne-Maire, note for note, over and over again, to find the right chords, but after an hour I only had the first two lines done. I'll finish the rest tomorrow.

            When I started making breakfast I discovered that the two baskets of peaches that I’d bought from Freshco had gone rotten and that the fruit flies had found their way under the bag the cloth bag that I’d been using to cover them with on the kitchen table. The bag was soaked in peach blood. I was able to save parts of some of the peaches but most of them went outdoors in the garbage.

            At 9:45 I went to the food bank and found my place in line behind a white cart containing a large bag with Christmas colours and the close-up cartoon portrait of the face of a smiling snowman surrounded by snowflakes. As I write about it I wonder if an albino snowman would be transparent.

             A few of the regulars were sitting on the steps of 1501 Queen and smoking. Skinny Brenda was standing and chatting with a guy who wasn't a regular but I think I’d seen him there before. Elderly Michael came walking by in his large snow-white sneakers and Brenda came over to give him a kiss on the cheek. He smiled politely but made it clear that he wasn't comfortable with it, so she came in again as if to kiss him on the mouth but he gently dodged away. Brenda returned to her conversation and said, “Ya gotta have a sense of humour or you're dead!” The thought that came to me from that was, if the poor didn’t have a sense of humour, the rich would be dead.

             I read another couple of pages of Gustav Flaubert's "St Julian the Hospitaler". After the dying stag that Julian had shot prophesied that Julian was destined to kill his own parents, he refused to go hunting and spent several weeks in bed. When he recovered his father gave him a scimitar, but while standing on a ladder to take it down from a trophy stand, it slipped from Julian’s fingers and cut into the coat of his father, who was standing below. Thinking that he’d half fulfilled the prophecy, Julian fainted. After this Julian avoided weapons, but his advisor, the old monk encouraged him to behave like a noble. Julian took his advice and began practicing the javelin with the squires. He became the best among them but one day when he saw the wings of a stork through the branches of a tree he heaved his javelin and knocked his mother’s long ribboned hat from her head, nailing it to a wall. Julian immediately left home and never came back. 

            The second hand smoke had me moving away too and there seemed to be more people smoking than usual. It was hard to avoid because people were smoking far to the east, around the PARC door and just as many paces to west, to the end of an extra long food bank line.

            The food bank didn’t open at 10:30. Valdene came with the van and the volunteers unloaded it, then she drove away and a while later came back with another load. We took our places in line at around 10:30.

            The guy behind me in line was a regular who after putting his cart in line goes to sit by himself on the sidewalk until it's time for the line to move. He kind of looks like a gentle version of Charles Manson from when he had long hair, but after he lost his teeth. I noticed two collages in his cart and I asked if he’d made them. He confirmed that he had and that he was taking them to a friend’s place later. They were colourful and made from various materials and objects, such as different textures of paper and cloth and I saw at least one red feather. They had their charm but were not outstanding works of art because there was no flow between the diverse elements incorporated in the pieces and there were empty spaces between each object. The collages looked more like something that came out of art therapy rather than having been the result of an artistic vision. They were nice though and I’m sure his friend will like having them on their wall.

            The volunteers had taken about half a vanload downstairs and while Valdene was waiting for them she sat on the back of the van and broke up bread to throw to the pigeons.
            It was after 11:00 when the line started moving. Marlena was having a smoke after letting some people go downstairs while Valdene was still feeding the pigeons. Marlena commented, “They’re not white anymore!" I don't know if she'd seen some almost white ones earlier or if Valdene had told her that pigeons used to be white. “No, they’re filthy!" Valdene said, "But we took their land away!" She's mistaken about that. Feral pigeons are not native to North America. They’re descended from domesticated rock doves that were brought over to Port Royal, Nova Scotia by settlers from France in 1606.  They’re an invasive species and should not be fed.

            A guy behind me asked Valdene and Marlena if they were still using the number system. Marlena said no and he said “Good!” I asked him why he thought it was good and said, “Because I'm usually here earlier." Marlena said, "Nobody wanted the numbers." I said that think the reason people voted against the number system was because everybody thinks they can get there earlier, although nobody ever does. The first ten people can’t win with the number system and the last ten people can't lose. Valdene said, "I'd shuttle everybody in if I could!”

            Downstairs was a new volunteer that was a very beautiful young Black woman with a long ponytail. When I walked in she was standing by the baked goods section and looking at the bread. Lana, who's in charge of the bread, came up and told her not to touch it. The woman didn’t think there was anything wrong with her touching the bread and they argued about it. The young woman declared that she didn’t want to work on Saturdays anymore. After I’d shown my card and was waiting to shop the shelves, I saw them continuing their argument in the back. Lana told her that she had a bad attitude.

            I don’t know exactly why Lana was bothered by the young woman touching the bread, since the bread she’d picked up was in a bag and it looked to me like she'd been just curious about the ingredients.

            From the shelves I got a package of two almond butter granola cups; three peanut butter Clif bars; a sleeve of soda crackers; a large can of chickpeas and a small tin of tomato paste. There was again no cereal but Raisin Bran was on sale at Freshco that week and so I’d already gotten some. There was also no tuna for the third week in a row.

            As I stood behind the woman with the white cart and waited to shop the dairy and meat section, the row between Lana and the young woman was still going on. Apparently the young woman had called Lana “stupid” and that upset her to an extreme degree. Lana said she was going to report her to the board of directors and “where I come from you don't talk to people that way!" Sylvia said, “I’m with you on that! It's okay to call someone dumb, but not stupid!”

            The woman in front of me was waiting for Angie because she had gone to the back to get something for her, and so my volunteer stepped in and served me from that section. In addition to the usual 2% milk there were a lot of nut milks like soya and coconut, but I didn’t take either. I got a pack of four single servings of cherry flavoured Greek yogourt and the usual bag of three eggs. I turned down the usual frozen ground chicken, hot dogs and bologna. He also offered me a pack of veggie cheese slices and when I said I didn’t want those either, the guy behind me, who'd gotten ahead of the collage guy, asked if he could have mine. The volunteer said that he couldn’t give him an extra pack of veggie cheese but if I took one I could give it to him, so I did. It’s hilarious that I had to make something that I didn’t want mine for a second by touching it, just so someone else could have it, when it should have been enough for me to just say, "He can have mine”.

            Sylvia had quite a bit of stuff. She offered me another bag of potatoes but I told her that I got one last week an I only eat one potato a day. She nodded knowingly and said, “I have some nice mushrooms!" I told her I needed a bag for them and she just happened to have some plastic ones. I think that they were maitake mushrooms, which means, “dancing” mushrooms. She dug down in a box of bananas to get me a bunch of four that weren’t too ripe. She pointed at a bin of broccoli and told me she didn’t like the ones she had today. I agreed that they were a bit too yellow. She gave me a seedless, cucumber, an eggplant and some leaf lettuce and then I moved on to the bread section.

            I only really needed one loaf and there seemed to be plenty of variety already on the shelves but Lana was insistent on going to the back and getting me some more. While she was gone I grabbed a foccaccia loaf with rosemary and a pack of gourmet chocolate chip cookies. She came back with a box containing multigrain bread and dark rye, which she said she calls “chocolate bread”. I took multigrain loaf, even though I didn’t need any more, but I felt sorry for Lana because the other volunteer had been so mean to her.

            Calling someone stupid is really both ironic and absurd. If you really thought that someone was stupid it would be pointless to try to communicate it to them because if they were stupid they would not understand. Therefore the only reason one would have to call someone stupid is for the sake of some kind of mean-spirited self-satisfaction, which strongly suggests that anyone that would call someone stupid is actually stupid.