The Death of Yonge and Gerrard

            I didn’t sleep well after I went to bed early Tuesday morning, but I slept enough to dream that I was in an enormous swanky restaurant with endless tables, each in little booths separated by vermilion curtains. I changed tables to try to convince someone that the greenhouse effect is not a conspiracy. Afterwards I looked for my waitress to pay my bill and was confronted by management and security who’d thought that I’d done an eat and run.

            When I got up I was fatigued from lack of sleep and had some symptoms of a cold. Later it cleared up so I think that being tired made me more affected by pollen.

            I called up my local pharmacy in the morning to get them to contact my doctor about renewing a prescription. When I called them back in the afternoon his office still hadn’t responded to their fax.

            There were still puddles on the street from the last two days of rain and so I didn’t want to take a long bike ride. I decided to go for a short jaunt up to Bloor, across to Yonge, down to Queen and home again.

            I noticed that they’ve torn down a section of Yonge Street at the southeast corner of Gerrard and the buildings just south of them are all boarded up and ready to die as well. Among the former places is the Big Slice, which was on Yonge for 40 years. Remington’s male strip club is gone too, as well as the Yonge Street Mission. There’s going to be a mega high rise condo building going up. The Zanzibar strip club us still there and the owner is holding out for an offer that will blow him away.

            On Queen Street from Bay Street to Peter, especially in front of Nathan Philips Square there were a shitload of cops.

            When I got home I felt like I’d devegetated myself with the bike ride.

            I looked at the video of my song practice from August 4, 2014. There were some mistakes on every song on this day. I have one day left to look at and I can start making videos of the songs that turned out okay that summer and synchronizing them with the sound recordings I made with the mic at the same time.

            I think the background sounds of traffic were particularly noisy that summer because the street tracks were being renovated and so only busses were running on Queen Street.

            I weighed 89.5 kilos before dinner.

            I cooked a carrot and a potato and heated a chicken leg and some gravy.

            I watched two episodes of Sea Hunt.

            In the first story Mike is in Costa Rica helping Professor Auerbach and his daughter Marian collect an underwater plant native to that region because it can be used to make a certain vital medicine. The professor is impatient to get more of the plan and so he dives with Mike but when he sees an alligator he swims too quickly to the surface and gets the bends. To save the professor’s life he has to take the professor back down to the bottom to stop the nitrogen bubbles from painfully popping in the professor’s body. He keeps him down there while he calls the Costa Rican air force to have them send a jet to drop a pressure suit.  Meanwhile some local fishermen are trying to stop them from intruding on their waters and taking the plant away that the fish eat. Mike convinces them that they can dive for the plant and they would get paid for it. The pressure suit arrives and after a few hours saves the professor’s life. There was a goof though because the hands on the suit were bare and the suit has to totally cover the body.

            In the second story two prospectors, Fred and Henri while prospecting for uranium discover that their Geiger counter goes off near the fish they’ve caught. They call Mike Nelson to help them dive to look for the uranium underwater. Mike rigs a waterproof casing for the Geiger counter and begins the search. After several days Mike finds nothing but Fred is suspicious and thinks that Mike might find something and file a claim for himself. On the next dive the Geiger counter begins to crackle but Mike gets caught in quicksand and only escapes by hooking a rope to something and pulling himself up. Fred becomes more and more paranoid and thinks both Mike and Henri are plotting to take the uranium. He pulls a gun and forces Henri to tie up Mike. He makes Henri put on Mike’s diving gear and go below for a piece of uranium, even though Henri can barely swim. But Henri becomes caught in the quicksand. The water is clear enough that Fred can see his friend struggling and suddenly comes to his senses. He frees Mike and Mike rescues Henri. A ranger arrives to tell them that what they’ve found is not uranium but rather radioactive waste from a nuclear testing site.