Blah Blah Blah

            On Saturday morning I got up with no backache for the first time in three days. My other sciatica symptoms in the hip area were less pronounced than usual as well.

            It was foggy, which in my experience indicated that was going to be a warm day.

            I finished working out the chords to my song “Hungry Hippunk Goes to Work”, which I used to sing with Tom Smarda in my band back in the 90s but never learned to play it on my own. I think I started writing the poem in Vancouver in 1979.

            I translated a couple of verses of “Pour des haricots” by Serge Gainsbourg:

The soldiers under the flag of our nation

battle valiantly for legumes

and then to add to their heroic legend

for dessert they fight over prunes

For me with only two sardines, I imagine I’m

with the army holding the Maginot Line

I’d like to toss back a bottle of Beaujolais

but only have a glass of anxiety

            I wore shorts and sandals to go to the food bank. Before leaving I needed to work out a mnemonic in order to remember two things that I'd forgotten recently and that I wanted to do after the food bank. I had to go to the post office to mail my application for the OAS and the GIS and I had to buy toilet paper. At first I broke it down to "mail-toi" but I wasn’t sure if that would stick so I needed a rhyme. Since a homophone for "mail" is "male" and "toi" could be "toy" I was pretty sure I would remember what I needed if I just kept the phrase “boy-toy” in an outside mind pocket.

The line-up was about as long as the week before when I arrived but less people showed up later on.

            A woman was sitting on her rolator knitting. Later on she told someone that it was something for a baby although she didn’t know anyone with a baby.

            I started reading Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Corde” or “The Rope”. It is told from the point of view of Baudelaire’s lifelong friend, the painter Edouard Manet. The story is based on a real occurrence in Manet’s life.

            The old man came along and put his bag down behind me, and then he went and threw up on the crosswalk. "I’m not gonna drink beer anymore! I only had two beers last night!" He walked further west to Beaty and spit some more. Later he came up to me and asked if I had a single filter Pall Mall Gold special light that I could sell him. That was the most specific cigarette bumming I’d ever heard.

The artist has often hired a certain boy as a model for his paintings and finds him so inspiring that he asks the child’s poor parents to let him live with him so he can pose and do chores in his studio. This life for the boy is like a paradise compared to the impoverished surroundings of his family. After a while the boy becomes addicted to liqueur candies and begins to steal them. The painter threatens to send him back to his parents if this behaviour continues. The painter leaves to run some errands and returns to his studio to find that the boy has hung himself. At the halfway point of the story he is just undergoing the difficult task of cutting the boy’s rope when my reading was interrupted.

            The man behind me asked if I was reading in both English and French. I told him I was and he wondered if I speak French. I said that I’m working on it and that I’d already completed second year FSL at U of T but found it very difficult. I explained that I am doing all my other courses first and saving the French for last while I study on my own.

            He said his name is Riadh and told me that he is fluent in French because he’s from Tunisia where French is the second language after Arabic. He’s been in Canada for ten years and likes it but finds the winters hard to get used to.

            Riadh asked me what new French word I’d learned that day. I knew that I’d learned words that I would recognize the next time I read but I couldn’t remember one of them at that moment. He advised me to make notes of the new words that I come across and to study them later. That’s not really the way my mind works and it would take the fun out of reading the stories.

            I told him that I also learn French songs and he wondered which ones. I said that I’ve learned and translated over a hundred songs by Serge Gainsbourg starting from his first recordings in 1958 and that I’m currently working on his songs from 1972. I said that I’m also learning the songs of Boris Vian.

            Riadh told me that he’s familiar with Serge Gainbourg but he’d never heard of Boris Vian. I informed him that it was actually Boris Vian that discovered Serge Gainsbourg but that Vian was more than just a songwriter. He wrote novels, plays, short stories, poetry, essays, articles and translations, played trumpet and he helped to organize the first concerts in France of several famous jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. He wrote a detective novel under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and claimed to only the translator. When it was discovered that Vian was really the author it became a best seller because the French loved the scandal. In 1959 when that novel was made into a movie Vian hated it before it was released but came to the premier to heckle it. While he was shouting at the screen he had a heart attack. He died on the way to the hospital.

            Riadh thought it was strange that a Frenchman would have the name “Boris”. I told him that French are just like any other culture in that sometimes they like to give their kids exotic names from outside their own culture. For example, my sister’s name is Sibyl and that's not a very Scandinavian name. I looked it up later and learned that Vian’s mother gave him the name “Boris” after her favourite opera “Boris Godunov" by Modest Mussorgsky. It occurred to me then that the name of the bad guy from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Boris Badenov might have also been inspired by that opera.

            Valdene, the food bank manager came down the line with a big bag of mostly Danish pastries. She barked orders as she went along like, "If you touch it you have to take it!" I said, “No thanks”. She asked, Riadh, "Would you like a pastry?" He took two and Valdene said sternly, "I said 'a' pastry, but okay!"

            Marlena gave me number 24. The guy ahead of me informed me that the little ponytailed Tibetan guy who was supposed to be two places behind me had gotten number 23. He actually approached me later and said, “I don’t know why she gave me the number before you”. It would have to have been because he was standing in front of me at the time. He didn’t offer to switch numbers though.

            A guy with two rambunctious prepubescent boys moved his cart in front of me. I’d actually forgotten that we’d already gotten or numbers and I told him that he had to move back. He started shouting at me in another language. When I tried to calmly respond he got even louder but this time just repeated, “Blah blah blah …” in a mocking tome while tilting his head back and forth from side to side, looking like a caricature of someone about the age of his kids. It was around then that I remembered that we already had our numbers and it didn't matter where he was in line and so I let it go.

            Downstairs the two little boys were running around and playing out of control. Their father seemed indifferent until Larissa, the older of the regular volunteers came up to him and spoke in his language. I’d thought that she was Ukrainian but what she was speaking didn’t sound Slavic. Maybe it was Hungarian, but whatever she’d said caused him to rein in his children and have them stand with him in the line-up for the desk.

            Hunter was behind the desk enjoying a bag of Ruffles. When Riadh showed his card Hunter said, “I’m not gonna share my potato chips with you.” But then Hunter hesitated and extended the bag to offer him some, but Riadh didn't want any.

            Larissa was my volunteer.

            The first shelf had the usual taco kits. There were individual servings of pancake syrup, bags of “donut” cookies and they still had bags of those white meringue candies. I grabbed two more of those little cans of green salsa, three maple-pecan protein bars.

            There were two kinds of crackers: some flavour of triscuits and Salmas oven baked corn crackers. I tend to go with the unfamiliar and so Salmas won out.

            From the shelves to the left I took a can of chickpeas and two small tins of “baked” beans. Larissa gave me four fruit punch drinking boxes.

            There was soup for the first time in a long time in some variety and so I picked a carton of roasted potato and spring leek.

            Angie asked if I wanted soymilk or regular milk and I said neither. She offered me some small containers of fruit bottom yogourt but I told her I didn’t want any. “Eggs?” I said I had enough. “So why are you here? I know, you’re here for the cheese!” She gave me a 450-gram brick of mild cheddar, a pressurized container of whipped cream and a bag containing a Cajun chicken with pearl barley and kale meal in two pouches meant to be boiled. From the bin beside her I grabbed a bag of frozen pocket pastries. Angie told me they have to be baked for ten minutes on each side.

            From the bread section I took three spinach pastries and although I’d brought a plastic bag just for that type of thing I‘d let it get buried at the bottom of my backpack and so I just put the pastries in my shopping bag with the hope that they wouldn’t get torn apart by anything else I put in.

            The vegetable station was being minded by Sue, who I hadn’t seen volunteering at the food bank for over a year, although I often see and hear her outside my place because she lives around the corner and knows and talks to everybody. I also used to see her regularly out for her morning run while I was rehearsing songs. I asked her if she’s still running and she said she is but she goes early now. 

            Sue gave me six red potatoes, four zucchini, a pack of cherry tomatoes, three oranges and two and a half orange peppers. The half pepper was a small one that I found later to be falling apart.  The final item was another large pizza. This one was pepperoni, sausage and red onion. Sue wanted to put the pizza in my bag for me but was having a hard time. She said, “I could never work at No Frills!” I said, “They don’t bag groceries at No Frills.” She thought for a second and said, “They do it at Metro, but who can afford to shop there?" That reminded me of when I ran into George Elliot Clark at Victoria Park and Danforth last summer when he was about to go shopping at Metro and he’d commented that one can really see the class division in his neighbourhood between those that shop at Metro and those that shop at Loblaws. I thought that was hilarious since in Parkdale the class division is between the poor people that buy their food at Freshco and the gentry that patronize Metro.

            On my way out I passed the Tibetan guy who was still lingering around the “take what you want” boxes near the door. His cart was more than full but he was trying to balance a mound of beats on top of everything else and some of them kept falling off. I’d overheard earlier that he shops for himself and five other people in his home.

            I took my food home and unpacked everything. The spinach pastries mostly survived. Before heading back out to No Frills I remembered my “boy-toy” mnemonic and grabbed the envelope to I could mail it on the way.

            At No Frills the grapes were part of the $0.88 sale and so I got several bags. I bought a bag of cherries, a pack of strawberries, coffee, abrasive cleanser, baking soda, yogourt and a reusable shopping bag to replace the on that broke last week. I also remembered the toilet paper.

            For lunch I had a slice of pizza with chipotle sauce and a sliver of berry pie with yogourt.

            I worked on my journal.

            I did some exercises in the late afternoon but didn’t take a bike ride since I’d already been out riding.

            I had three slices of pizza and a beer for dinner while watching episode two of the Untouchables. It was only the pilot that was based on Eliot Ness’s book and so the actual Untouchables series was made up of fictionalized stories of Eliot Ness and his squad taking on various historical gangland figures of the 1930s.

            This story was about Ma Barker and it begins with the final standoff of her and her boys against the feds in Florida but then it flashes back to how it all began. It starts with Ma Barker’s boys sneaking off to commit crimes. Herman is shot and killed during a break in and then there are three. At the burial their father threatens to leave the family if they don’t go straight. He leaves and then Ma becomes involved in their crimes, planning their bank robberies down to the last detail. After they make their biggest haul from a kidnapping the oldest son Doc gets married but Ma refuses to accept an outsider and so Doc and Eloise leave for Chicago with Doc’s cut of the ransom. The problem is that the ransom money is marked and so he is caught when he tries to spend it. He reveals where the others are located and so everybody but Doc dies in the shootout.

            Ma Barker was played by Claire Trevor, whose career spanned seven decades of work on stage, in radio, television and film. She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar in 1937 for “Dead End”. In 1939 she co-starred in "Stagecoach" the movie that made John Wayne a star. In the 1940s she found her niche in film noir and won an Academy Award for her part in Key Largo.

            Eloise was played by Louise Fletcher, who later became famous and won an Academy award for her role as Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. During her acceptance speech she thanked her deaf parents in sign language. She has said that when she was growing up she never cried when she hurt herself because her parents couldn’t hear her. She played Kai Winn on Deep Space Nine.

            According to FBI records the Barker boys were all mostly illiterate. The oldest son, Herman got arrested for highway robbery at 17. The boys got their education in bank robbery in the 1920s when they joined the midwestern Central Park Gang. On August 29, 1927 Herman shot a policeman point blank in the mouth after a robbery. While escaping, after crashing his car and injuring himself he committed suicide to avoid capture. In 1928 Lloyd, Doc and Fred were all in different prisons. The father, George left the family in 1928 but Arizona “Ma” Barker stuck with her boys no matter what. Without her husband or her sons Ma lived in poverty. In 1931 when Fred was released he formed a gang with another former inmate. When they killed a sheriff in Missouri they went on the run and Ma and her common-law husband Arthur joined them. Arthur joined the gang when he was released in 1932 and they went briefly to Chicago. To stay there they would have had to join Capone’s mob and so they went to St Paul where they came under the protection of police chief Big Tom Brown who directed their move from bank robbery to kidnapping. The gang escaped capture in St Paul and believing Arthur to be a rat the gang murdered him in Wisconsin. They began operating out of Menomonee, Wisconsin. They put Ma in various hotels and kept her in the dark about their activities, mostly because she resented any girlfriends the boys had and tried to break up every relationship. In 1933 they went back to St Paul where they did two kidnappings and made a total of $300,000 between them. They went to Chicago to launder the money but Arthur was captured and the rest escaped to Florida. The feds found with Arthur a map to their Florida hideout. When the agents surrounded the house only Ma and Fred were inside. Gunfire kept up from the house for several hours. Fred was found riddled with bullets and Ma was dead from a single slug. There is no proof that Arizona Barker even fired a gun or that she had anything to do with any of her sons’ crimes. It has been speculated that in order to save the FBI's reputation and to justify killing an elderly woman, J. Edgar Hoover exaggerated Ma Barker’s involvement. Her greatest contribution may have been simply giving the gang the appearance of a family. Famous bank robber Harvey Bailey, who knew the Barkers well, wrote that Ma Barker couldn’t plan breakfast, let alone a criminal enterprise. The real force behind the gang was police chief Tom Brown, without whom the Barkers would have just been a bunch of bumbling hillbilly burglars.

           

           

Modern Snobbery

            I had gone to bed an hour and a half early on Thursday nighr because I was too sleepy to function. On Friday I woke up at 3:30 with a backache. I stayed in bed until 4:18 and started yoga thirty-five minutes earlier than usual. My back stopped bothering me after yoga.

            This week I started translating “Je Suis Snob” by Boris Vian. So far I’ve only got the first verse:

I'm a snob... I'm a snob

It's really the only way I’m flawed

It came from months of hard time

like a slave in a gold mine

But when I go out with my girl Brook

it’s at me that they all look

I'm a snob... a fucking snob

My friends and I are all gods

We're all snobs that deserve applause

            On somebody’s blog featuring the words to songs sung by Sylvie Vartan I tracked down the lyrics to “Pour des haricots” by Serge Gainsbourg. The translation of the first verse that I have so far is:

The soldiers under the flag of our nation

eat nothing but legumes, ooh ooh

And the ones that like them are up every morning at dawn

to lick their lieutenant's boots

            One of the French words for “beans” is “fayots" which is also slang for "bootlickers".

            I washed another section of my living room floor. The next part I need to clean is under the bookshelf to the left of the one I already washed.

            I had cheese whiz with salsa and potato chips for lunch.

            It rained a bit in the afternoon but it had cleared up enough after I did some exercises for me to take a bike ride up Brock to Dundas, east to Gladstone, south to Queen and then home.

            I made some small edits that had been suggested by Albert Moritz to three poems in my manuscript. So far I’ve revised three-tenths of the book.

            I’d had a whole chicken thawing out all day and that evening I cut it up and roasted it. I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy while watching the second half of The Scarface Mob, which is the pilot for The Untouchables.

            After ten months in jail Al Capone comes home to find Elliot Ness has made a mess of his business. Capone gets the wiretap removed from his phone. Ness pressed George Ritchie for information and finds out that Capone’s biggest brewery is somewhere in the stockyards. Ness wants him to find out exactly where the brewery is and so George tries to get the information from his wife Brandy’s Uncle Jake. Next we see Brandy doing her burlesque act while singing George and Ira Gershwin’s “Aint Misbehavin”. Her performance is surprisingly risqué for US television in 1959 as she exposes her breasts albeit with pasties on her nipples.

            While George is standing in the wings watching his wife, two of Capone’s men come to tell him that Snorky wants to see him. Snorky is one of Capone’s nicknames. George is excited to meet Capone and so he goes with them. Meanwhile two of Capone’s men break into the apartment of Betty Anderson, Ness’s fiancée. They touch her in suggestive ways without raping her as an obvious message to Ness. She calls Ness and he hurries over. As he arrives a car pulls up and George Ritchie’s dead body is dumped in front of Betty’s building. On hearing about the assault Ness immediately takes Betty across the state line to marry her. Next, at a meeting of Capone and his top officers Jimmy Napoli is kissed on the mouth by all of them. The kiss of death signifies that Napoli has been given the task of committing a special murder. Later as Joe Fuselli is dropping Ness off a car comes by and opens fire with a machine gun. Fuselli covers Ness and is killed. Capones’s biggest brewery is taken out and then he is charged with income tax evasion. He is given eleven years in prison.

            Betty Anderson was played by Pat Crowley, who later starred in the sitcom “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies”.

            The actors that played Al Capone and Frank Nitti made horrible attempts at Italian accents. There was an especially bad depiction of Capone’s Italian accent, considering that since he was born in Brooklyn, New York he probably didn’t have one. Capone was a smart student but he got expelled at 14 for punching a female teacher in the face. While working at various jobs around Brooklyn he came under the mentorship of the gangster Johnny Torrio. He climbed up the age appropriate gang circuits from the Junior Forty Thieves, to the Bowery Boys, to the Brooklyn Rippers and then the powerful Five Points Gang. While working the door at a Brooklyn nightclub he was slashed in the face by Frank Gallucio for insulting his sister. This led to the nickname “Scarface” but his closest friends called him “Snorky” which means “sharp dresser”. At 19 a few weeks after their son Albert was born, Capone married Mae Josephine Coughlin. He followed Torrio to Chicago where he started off as a bouncer in a brothel and contracted syphilis. Torrio took over the Colosimo crime empire and Capone became his right hand man. In 1925 Torrio was shot several times and decided to retire, passing the torch to Capone. The organization consisted mostly of illegal breweries with a transportation network stretching to Canada. Establishments that didn’t buy Capone’s booze got blown up leading to 100 killings. He had a chain of brothels throughout Chicago but he also donated to charities and sponsored a soup kitchen. There were gang wars against Capone and people trying to kill him and so he liked to get away from Chicago as much as possible. He never registered property under his name nor did he ever have a bank account. Capone supported a Republican candidate and bombed the voting booths of his competition. Capone is believed to be behind the 1928 St Valentines Day massacre against the mob of Bugsy Moran. After being charged with income tax evasion come went to Atlanta penitentiary where he went through cocaine withdrawal. He was later transferred to Alcatraz where my cousin John Stadig was already serving a long sentence. Capone’s mental health began to fail and he was transferred again before being paroled in 1939. He spent time in the hospital and his mental capacity deteriorated. The next eight years were spent with his family in Florida until he died of a heart attack in 1947.

           

Prohibition Was Stupid

            When I got up on Thursday I got up with one of the worst backaches that I’d had in years. I was fully functional but mildly uncomfortable for most of the day.

            I published “Women Love Neanderthals”, my translation of “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût" on my blog.

            I finished the “Victoria” section of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”:

And then Victoria responds

to my psychic mayday

For just a mouthful of seconds

she stops off to save me

while on her sexual confection

enterprise work break

She clips his bonds of verbation

kills his Achilles wavelength

cools down his non-concentration

as his seat becomes shady

He knows he’s no competition

for my Africadian baby

so he and his apparitions

vamoose to the halfway

She deals a dose of aspiration

from a slow day in the jade trade

to fill an illicit prescription

for an illness that’s homemade

She borrows one hundred dollars

for an eightball of cocaine

just to leave me on a forlorn

limb until payday

She saved me from this guy

but I should’ve realized

she won’t do anything for free

            I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the kitchen floor for the first time in several weeks.

I had a can of tuna with salsa and potato chips for lunch.

            Nick Cushing was supposed to come by at around 14:00 but he’s usually later than he says and so I went to bed for a siesta at 14:11. He called up at my window at around 14:45. He brought me a couple of fenders for a mountain bike. We chatted for a little while but he didn’t stay that long. He invited me to come to the east end with him for a beer but I didn’t feel like going.

            I did some exercises and then took a bike ride up Brock where I found some dishes and glasses in a box on the sidewalk. I took two beer glasses. I turned right on Dundas and then went south on Gladstone where I stopped at Freshco. As I was locking my bike a woman was walking ahead of two little boys, each bouncing a basketball. One of them said, “Mommy, is my face all bloody?” Freshco’s grapes were fairly cheap but this week they are only $1.93 a kilo at No Frills, which is more than half off the Freshco price and so I bought six bags and did a price match. I also got a pack of strawberries and four red cluster tomatoes and I grabbed a pack of fourteen hot Italian sausages that were on sale for $6.86.

            My back discomfort was pretty much gone in the late afternoon.

            I’d been struggling off and on all day with the first stanza of my poem “Victoria”. Albert Moritz thought the poem was good but that the first stanza was weak:

I can’t find any sign of Victoria

She’s hiding far beneath her low profile again

It amazes me how easily she slipped across my border

threw a ball inside my heart

only to leave it before the last dance

            He said that starting with “border” I used three incomplete and unconnected metaphors. I only count two but maybe Albert didn’t get the idea of throwing a ball or dance being like throwing a party. But I see how “border” is unrelated to the dance and ball metaphor so I tried to find an alternative. This is the only thing I could think of:

I can’t find any sign of Victoria

She’s hiding far beneath her low profile again

It amazes me how easily she slipped across my border

colonized my interior

but left before the cultural exchange

            I boiled two potatoes, heated the last of my chicken breasts, warmed up some gravy and watched the first half of  “The Scarface Mob”, the pilot for “The Untouchables”.

The story begins with Al Capone doing a short time in prison for a weapons charge. Frank Nitti has been left in control of the organization, which mostly makes and sells illegal beer and booze. Elliot Ness is a Prohibition agent raiding a speakeasy only to find no alcohol at all because bribed cops have tipped the gangsters off about the raid. Frustrated, Ness suggests to his superior that they find six incorruptible men to form a squad that can’t be paid off. Ness goes to Washington to look through the agency’s files in order to find the men he’s looking for. Apparently it only took him a week to go through thousands of files and find the six men he was looking for. LaMarr Kane is a law school graduate; Eric Hansen is a former death row prison guard; Martin Flaherty is a former cop with an outstanding arrest record; Jack Rossmann is a former telephone company lineman; William Youngfellow is a Cherokee, a former football star and now a cop who broke up an Oklahoma City booze ring; Tom Kopke is a WWI hero and Joe Fuselli is a driver who knows every street and alley in Chicago and speaks several Italian dialects. He also served time for armed robbery.

The squad begins by wrecking Capone’s stills but these are easy to set up again. They need to find and destroy his breweries in order to do any real damage to his organization. Frank Nitti gets his man Johnny to pay the squad off. Pretending to be corrupt, Ness demands a fee ten times more than is offered and finally Johnny pays. But Ness keeps on wrecking the stills. Nitti beats Johnny up because he thinks he must have held back on the bribe. Ness tells Johnny that he’ll bust him for bribery if he doesn’t tell him where the breweries are. Johnny says he only knows one. Ness and his squad go there but there’s a steel reinforced door. By the time he can shoot it open the staff of the brewery have gone down the escape hatch. Johnny turns up dead.

The squad begins an intensive search for the breweries by following trucks carrying sugar and grain. They find one on the south side. They use a special truck with a battering ram to smash into the building quickly.

George Ritchie, who is married to Brandy, the niece of Capone’s bookkeeper, comes to Ness’s office because he wants to join the squad. Ness uses him to help put a wiretap on Nitti’s office. Flaherty poses as Frank Morris and flirts with Brandy at the Montmartre Club. He gets in good with the manager and arranges to use the phone in Nitti’s office because in order to tap the phone Rossman needs to hear a familiar voice on the line at a certain time. Betty pretends to be Flaherty’s girl at the other end and Brandy gets jealous, trying to interrupt the call. The tap is successful and with its help they are able to locate and wreck four more breweries.

There’s a scene in which Ness proposes to his fiancée Betty in a fancy restaurant and they have cherries jubilee, which contains rum and brandy. They decide that maybe the booze is legal from before the war. Betty says she wishes they had champagne. Ness says, “So do I, but it’s my job to see that we don’t.” She shakes her head and says, “What a business!”

I couldn’t agree more. What a stupid waste of resources and human life to fight so hard just to shut down breweries! The untouchables weren’t heroes they were idiots!

All My Guitars

            On Wednesday I finished working out the chords for “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût" and started posting it on my translation blog. It takes a while to reposition the chords in HTML so they match where they are in the original document.

            I worked a little more on the new section of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag”.

            I washed another section of my living room floor.

            I had a slice of pizza for lunch.

            I used the tablet that my upstairs neighbour David gave me to take pictures of all of my guitars. I’m still close to the bottom of the learning curve of working this device. I had to cycle through several steps to take each photo although I’m sure there is a direct way to do it. At first I couldn’t control whether the photos were landscape or portrait but I finally figured out that I have to hold the tablet straight up and down either vertically or horizontally for the little camera icon to match each position. Otherwise a vertical photo might come out as landscape or vice versa.

            For each picture I took a matching one with my Kodak digital camera.

            I flushed the wax out of my ears.

            I did some exercises for my piriformis muscles. I’m starting to think that I might have sciatica. I’ve read that piriformis syndrome can cause sciatica. My back has started to ache a bit where it didn’t when I started to feel the hip discomfort and all the symptoms seem to point to sciatica.

            I wore sandals for the first time this year and took a bike ride. I rode up Brock to Dundas. There were busses replacing the streetcars. A young woman passed me at a light and I passed her a little later. At Dufferin she came up beside me and said of the bus behind us, “That’s one of the nicest bus drivers ever! He waited for me until I passed!”

            I went down Gladstone and stopped at Freshco to buy milk. While I was there I also grabbed some Earl Grey tea and a jar of honey.

            I added some old cheddar cheese to my last three slices of pizza and heated them for ten minutes in the oven. I had them for dinner with a beer while watching the first episode of the first season of the Untouchables TV series from 1959. I realized afterwards though that I’d yet to watch the 99-minute long pilot for the series since it had been labelled as “The Scarface Mob” and not “the pilot”. I can start watching that tomorrow.

            This story begins with Al Capone getting charged with income tax evasion and being sent to prison. My cousin was at Alcatraz when Capone arrived there. What takes place after Capone is gone is people jockeying to fill his chair. Frank Nitti, Capone’s enforcer has already taken his first steps by rubbing out some of the competition. But Capone’s bookkeeper, Jake Guzik proposes a more socialist approach. He wants to use brains rather than muscle. He wants the organization to move from being a gang to an association. First of all he ensures that none of them will get charged with income tax evasion again. They all start legitimate businesses and are able to account for all of their money. Elliot Ness is foiled by this ploy because he’d been hoping to get them all or income tax evasion. Next he tries to divide and conquer. He orders a series of raids only on Frank Nitty’s establishments in order to make Nitty wonder why no one else in the mob is being hit. Nitty comes to Guzik ready for a fight but Guzik calms him down and explains that Nitty has been a victim of Ness’s strategy. So Ness is foiled again. His next strategy is to get to Brandy La France, the widow of George Ritchie, who has been mourning in black for a year. She’s obsessed with finding out who killed her husband. Ness contacts her and convinces her that the information she needs could be found in her uncle Jake’s books. Jake’s sister Norma catches her in his office and then Jake arrives to admit that he was the one that ordered Ritchie killed for being a stool pigeon. She attacks Jake and he knocks her down. She pulls out a gun and wounds him. Ness’s men come in and Guzik is busted. Norma reveals that Guzik’s book is hidden at George Ritchie’s grave. Ness thinks it’s in code but Norma explains that it’s just Polish written backwards.

            Brandy is played by Barbara Nichols, who was usually cast as sexy dumb blondes in comedies.
            Norma was played by Betty Garde, who won a play writing contest in high school, worked in theatre and made it to Broadway when she was twenty. She expanded her acting to radio and wrote and produced her own drama series. She also directed and starred in a radio soap opera called “My Son and I”. In the late 1940s she began working in television and film. She starred in the film noir dramas “Call Northside 777” and “Caged”.  She was in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma.

            The real Jake Guzik was a Jew from Poland. He started out running a sex trade business in Chicago and then became a political fixer who arranged for payoffs to the cops and to politicians. In the early 1920s he started working with Capone and became the treasurer and financial wizard of the organization. Capone valued Guzik’s advice and he protected him. He once emptied his gun into a man’s face when he heard that he’d roughed Guzik up. He spent a few years in prison for income tax evasion but died of old age in Chicago. At his funeral the synagogue was packed with Italians.

           

Tommy Sands

            On Tuesday I pretty much finished working out the chords to “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût" but there might be a slight change in the finale.

            My hip muscles were bothering me more than usual after my longer bike ride the day before.

            I had extra dishes to do because I hadn’t had time to clean up the day before because of the leak in the bathroom. On top of that I was feeling low in energy and even though I had a bit of time to wash part of the living room floor I couldn’t bring myself to make the effort. Instead I fixed a knob that had come off of one of my electric guitars, which took more concentration than sweat. The screw that held the knob is inside of the guitar but I couldn’t put the nut back on because the screw goes back into the guitar without the nut holding it up. Finally I realized that I had to turn the guitar upside down to slip the nut on and then pull the screw up with pliers while I turned the nut to secure the screw. After that the knob just popped on.

            I took a siesta in the early afternoon. When I woke up my pillow was wet from drool. I tried to work on a poem but had no concentration. I looked at the clock on my computer and saw that I’d only taken a half hour nap and so I went back to bed. I got up at 15:45 but still couldn’t focus my brain and so I lay down again for half an hour.

            I did some exercises and then took a bike ride up Brock to Dundas, across to Gladstone, south to Queen and then home. That seemed to give me back some energy.

            I spent bout an hour on the extension of my poem “The Street Sucks the Sandman’s Bag” and made some progress until I got tuckered out.

            I boiled two small potatoes, heated a chicken breast and some gravy and watched the last of the United States Steel Hour plays that have downloaded so far. There are three more in my torrents list but they’re all at 0%.

            This story was about a young man named Lennie who has just graduated from high school and is looking for a job. The problem is that he has a stutter and it makes it difficult for him to even get an interview let alone passing an interview. His mother decides to take matters into her own hands and to secretly speak to Barney the head of a company mailroom about giving her son a chance. Barney is a tough boss who is always yelling but he feels sympathy because when he was a teenager her was very overweight and people used to make fun of him. Lennie’s mother asks Barney not to let on to Lennie that she was there. He hires Lennie and he works out fine, especially with the help of a young woman named Sylvia with whom he works on the tally once a day. They like each other a lot and he eventually gets the nerve to ask Sylvia out on a double date with his friend Mickey and his girl. Sylvia is helping Lennie with his speaking and she becomes his girl. Lennie begins to get overconfident and while distracted he breaks a valuable piece of equipment. Barney is yelling at him and he yells, “Your mother didn’t tell me you had dropsy too!” Lennie tells him to shut his big fat mouth and storms out. Lennie’s mother tells him to go back and apologize and so he does. It’s after hours nut Barney is working late. He apologizes but Barney doesn’t accept it. Lennie persists and asks for his job back. Barney says “No” but Lennie starts helping Barney and Barney tells him to take his jacket off if he’s going to work. Sylvia comes in and helps out as well.

            Lennie was played by Tommy Sands, who was a DJ at age 12 and cut his first record at 14. In 1957 at the age of 20 he got the lead role in Kraft Theatre’s “The Singin Idol”, which was the first rock and roll themed television drama. “Teenage Crush”, the song he sang on the show hit #3 on the charts and Sands became an overnight sensation and a teen idol. He was married to Nancy Sinatra from 1960-1965 and when he divorced her it is rumoured that Frank Sinatra made sure his career would tumble.

            Sylvia was played by Cynthia Pepper, who later became a regular on My Three Sons as the girlfriend of the oldest son. She starred in her own series called “Margie” for one season.

            Mickie was played by a 22 year old Martin Sheen.

            Pete, one of Lennie’s co-workers that made fun of his stuttering was played by George Segal.

Drip

            On Monday morning I finished working out the chords for the verses of “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût” and started on the chorus.  I probably would have finished it if I hadn’t gone to the washroom and stepped with my socks on in a puddle. I grabbed a sponge and started soaking up the water. It was mostly under the bathroom sink where I discovered a leak. I used paper towels to dry up the rest of the moisture and put a bucket under the drip. I tried shutting off the valves under the sink but the drip was the same either way and it didn’t increase when the tap was running either.

            A little later when I went back to the washroom it was wet again and on closer inspection I saw that there was a hole in the pipe above the leak and it was spraying a mist to the left. I moved the bucket as far to the left as I could and still have it catching the drip. In a few minutes I checked again and the bucket wasn’t catching all the spray. I put two plastic containers to the left of the bucket.

            At 9:30 I called my landlord to tell him about the leak but he made me mad because the first thing he did was complain that everything that goes wrong happens in my apartment. I told him to stop blaming and to come and fix the leak. He yelled for a few seconds and finally said he’d call a plumber. He called me back a little later and told me to wrap a towel around the place where it was spraying so the water would drip down. That was a good idea and it worked to help keep the floor and the cabinet under the sink dry until the plumber came in the late morning.

            He was a young guy who introduced himself as Tony. As we poked our heads under the sink I saw that it was also leaking from the bottom of the sink. But when he left for his truck to get some tools I realized that the drip in the pipe was actually just caused by the water running down from the spray hole and what I’d thought was a leak in the bottom of the sink was really just from the spot where most of the spray was hitting and then the accumulated water was dripping down from there. Tony asked me how long I’ve been living here and I told him 22 years. He said, “If you don’t mind my asking, how much rent do you pay?” I told him $619. 70 and we speculated that the landlord would probably raise the rent to $1000 if I ever moved out.

            It took Tony just a few minutes to change the flexible pipe that had gotten rusted and he was on his way.

            Because of the leak the early part of the day got away from me.

            Instead of lunch I just ate some grapes and took a siesta.

            I did my gluteus muscle exercises for the first time in three days.

            I got caught up on my journal and after 17:00 I got ready to ride downtown to the OISE Library to return and renew some books.

            This was the longest bike ride I’d taken in several weeks. I would probably be sore on Tuesday morning but it was nice to get out and ride my bike.

            There was a bit of a flood at Spadina and Bloor as I rode through a brown pond to wait at the lights.

            After renewing my books the librarian said, “I guess I’ll see you in six months!” I said, “You mean six weeks don’t you?” and he confirmed that.

            I rode down St George to College, across to Spadina and south to Queen.

            I stopped at Freshco to buy yogourt and also grabbed a litre of olive oil for $6.

            When I was putting my stuff away a familiar shouting woman was calling someone a “little piece of shit”. Nobody ever gets called a “big piece of shit”. It’s as if it would be less of an insult to be a large turd than a small one.

            I grilled the three fresh chicken breasts that I got from the food bank on Saturday. I boiled two small potatoes, sautéed an orange pepper and heated some gravy. I had dinner while watching a United States Steel Hour teleplay.

            I was surprised that the story, “The Two World’s of Charlie Gordon” is adapted from a story by Daniel Keyes called “Flowers for Algernon”, which I read for my Science Fiction course in the fall of 2014. Charlie is a learning handicapped adult. He has a teacher named Jane Rollins. A laboratory selects for an experimental brain surgery that may make Charlie smarter and Jane is hired to instruct him if the experiment is a success. It is successful and Charlie grows gradually smarter until he becomes a genius. At that point he becomes the lover of Jane Rollins. But it turns out that the results are only temporary and Charlie gradually slips back to his previous state. He does have some faint memories of things he learned while he was intelligent. Jane encourages him to keep trying to learn because whatever knowledge he acquires from his own efforts are permanent.

            Charlie was played quite well by Cliff Robertson.

            Jane was played by Mona Freeman, who started modelling while still in high school and was discovered by Howard Hughes. Because she photographed young she got teen roles long after she was no longer a teenager. She retired from film work in the late 50s and worked in television. She said one could learn more about acting from five minutes of television than from working on an entire film.

            Jane’s last name in the original story was Kinnian. It’s told in the first person and so the spelling and grammar reflect the different stages of Charlie’s development and regression.

         

Glenda Farrell

           
            On Sunday morning I finished memorizing “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût” by Serge Gainsbourg and started working out the chords.

            I spent most of the day getting caught up on my journal and didn’t finish until it was almost dinnertime. I posted my blog, put three pizza slices in the oven at low heat and then headed out for a quick bike ride.

On Brock Avenue there were some books in a box on the sidewalk, which I can’t resist and so I stopped to look. They were mostly second-rate novels but there was one hardcover entitled, “Fact and Fantasy in the Writing of Sigmund Freud”. I almost took it but then decided that I’d rather read Freud than a book about whether or not his ideas can be proven.

I rode up to Dundas and turned the corner and found another box of books. There were more academic. One was Postmodernism for Beginners written from a philosophical perspective. It almost grabbed me but I slipped free. Another was Foucault for Beginners and I was tempted to take it but thought, “Isn’t reading Foucault first hand Foucault for beginners?” If I decide to read Foucault and need him explained afterwards I’ll look up a book explaining Foucault. The only book I did take was called, “Explorations in Musical Materials: A Working Approach to Making Music”.

I rode to Gladstone, down to Queen and then home.

The pizza was ready at 20:45, right when I would normally have dinner. I had it with a beer and watched a play from the United States Steel Hour.

This 1960 play was an entertaining romantic comedy entitled “Queen of the Orange Bowl” and it starred Anne Francis and Johnny Carson.

Ken is an advertising copywriter about to begin his two-week vacation with his girlfriend Anne, who is a Greenwich Village artist and poet. He tells his colleague Lou about her and Lou says, “Invite me to the wedding”. Ken says, “This is not the kind of girl you marry. This is the kind of girl you know before you’re married, if you’re lucky”. Ken is on his way out the door to start his vacation with Anne when his mother calls. Even though he spends every weekend at home in Rochester it’s not the same for her as a vacation. She guilts him into agreeing to come home. He goes to Anne’s studio and after some lovey doving he breaks it to her that he has to cancel their vacation together. She gets mad and kicks him out. He arrives at his mother and father’s house but a couple of minutes later the doorbell rings. Anne steps in with her bags and pretends that Ken had invited her to stay with them for his holiday. Ken’s mother is shocked because she’d never heard of this woman before and had thought that Ken had no secrets from her. Anne immediately endears herself to Ken’s father. As their houseguest Anne starts to show a domestic side that Ken had not realized she’d had. She cleans and cooks better than Ken’s mother and when she bakes him his favourite Dutch apple pie he realizes that she is no longer his pre-marriage crazy adventure girl but actually the kind of woman he would marry. Just as he is called to dinner he panics and runs out the back door. His father finds him in the local watering hole where the bartender is played by Al Lewis, who will later become well known as Grandpa Munster. Ken’s father George works in a pencil factory in the eraser division “because people are prone to make mistakes”. Meanwhile Anne is crying in the guest room. As Ken and George arrive home drunk, Anne is leaving with her things. Ken is too drunk to understand what’s going on. Back in New York Anne gathers up all of the things Ken had given her and brings them to Ken’s workplace where she meets Lou and he asks her out. Ken is about to go back to New York a day early when the next door neighbour Cora comes by with her niece Rosalinda, who has been mentioned throughout the play as Cora’s match for Ken but we expected her to be unattractive and she turns out to be gorgeous. Ken spends an extra day with Rosalinda. When he gets back to New York he goes to return the gifts to Anne that she’d brought to his office. She tells him that the day they met it was Beatnik day at the kindergarten where she teaches and the Beatnik clothes were just a costume. But since he had been attracted to her because he’d thought she was a bohemian she went with it. She also tells him that two years ago she was the Queen of the Orange Bowl but he doesn’t believe that either. He tells her that if she says she’s sorry for lying he’ll forget all about it. She says she’s sorry. They embrace and he tells her he’s saved all of Labour Day and they can see the whole city. She says, “I’ve saved something for you too. You’ll have to go there with me. I can’t go alone”. He says, “Anywhere at all!” “It’s City Hall, Marriage License Bureau.” “Now Annie, look …” “No, you look! Make up your mind! Do you want a perfect girl, or do you want me?” He asks, “What time does the Bureau close?” and they kiss.

The play ends with Ken’s mother showing Ken’s mother a magazine he found in the attic. On the cover is a picture of Anne when she was Queen of the Orange Bowl.

It seemed like kind of a rushed ending and that it should have been a little longer to convey the tension of the break-up leading up to the making up.

My favourite line was, “Modesty is nothing brag about!”

Anne was played by Anne Francis, who started modelling at age six. She started working in radio and made her Broadway debut at the age of eleven. She got her own show in 1965 when she starred as Detective Honey West.

Ken’s mother was played by Glenda Farrell, who started on stage when she was seven. In films she played tough blonde gun molls in the early 1930s in films like “Little Caesar" and “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang”. Later in that decade she starred in her own series of films as Torchy Blane, girl reporter. Jerry Siegel said that her role as Torchy Blane was the inspiration for Lois Lane.

Rosalinda, who didn’t speak at all in her role, was played by Nancy Kovack, who became a college freshman at fifteen and graduated at nineteen. She won eight beauty contests by the time she was twenty. She started out on television as one of Jackie Gleason's Glea Girls and worked on episodic TV shows quite a bit. She married conductor Zubin Mehta.

Phyllis Kirk

On Saturday I had a slice of pizza with chipotle sauce for lunch.

I worked on my journal.

My upstairs neighbour David knocked on my door to give me a slice of pepperoni pizza and though I had pizza coming out of the wazoo I didn’t have the heart to turn him down. This was really a pizza day!

I didn’t get around to doing my butt muscle exercises but they didn’t feel too bad.

I heated the pizza David gave me plus one of the slices of the pizza from the food bank for dinner and had them with a beer while watching “Tales of Wells Fargo”.

In this story the Wells Fargo agent Jim Hardie gets robbed by Belle Starr and her gang at a train stop. This was even more historically inaccurate than the Stories of the Century depiction of Belle Starr. They had her blonde, wearing jeans and not riding sidesaddle. There is no record of her ever having actively participated in any train or stage robberies, although she was friends with the James boys, her brother was a robber and so was her husband and her brother. She was more into horse rustling and behind the scenes criminality such as bribes to get her friends off from convictions. In this story Hardie goes after her and poses as a horse racer, challenging her to a race. He wins but she is a sore loser and her men take Hardie’s horse away. As they ride back to their headquarters Belle is trailing behind the others as she is also leading Hardie’s horse. He jumps her and captures her, aiming to take her back to Fort Smith, Arkansas to stand trial. After camping out one night she is rescued by her gang. They are going to shoot Hardie but in a very unlikely scene she tosses him a gun and he shoots two of her men. Even though she has saved his life he still takes her into Fort Smith where she is tried, sentenced to nine months and lives a straight life afterwards. That last part is also not true. Although she was a model prisoner she did return to crime when she got out and that only stopped two years later when her husband was killed.

Belle was played by Jeanne Cooper, who became a regular on The Young and the Restless from 1973 until 2013. When she had a face-lift some footage of her surgery was incorporated into the show. She’s the mother of Corbin Bernsen, who played the cad and ladies man on LA Law.

I had planned on only watching that show because I’d thought it was going to be an hour long like the last Tales of Wells Fargo that I’d watched. But this one was only a half an hour long and so I also watched the first story from the United States Steel Hour dramatic series. They called it the Steel Hour because it was for people doing hard time. People for who time is fragile watched the “Tin Hour” and those for who time was money watched “The Gold Hour”.

This story takes place in a hospital for recently released P.O.Ws from Korean prison camps. They had undergone torture and brainwashing and all have what later came to be known as PTSD but this story aired in 1953. The main character Lucky, who had been a leader of the group when they were prisoners and many of them credit him for helping them through. But Lucky had always been social and so although he was lucky enough to avoid physical torture he’d received the worst torture of all in being repeatedly kept alone in a hole, which broke him. After a brief stay in the hospital he is sent home to his family and his girl Betty Lou but he can’t stand being touched or being alone in his room and so he goes back to the hospital. There had been an attempted prison break when they were in the camp but someone among them leaked the plans to the Koreans and they were captured. One of them, Fitch lost his legs and he blames Lucky because he thinks he talked. Lucky thinks he talked too but it turns out that he didn’t and it was really Brian Keith’s character Iron Man who’d been tortured with sharp metal being put in his food. Fitch gets hold of a gun and wants to kill Iron Man for the loss of his legs but Lucky tells him, “What if the Korean’s had offered to give you your legs back in exchange for Iron Man’s life?” Fitch realizes it’s not Iron Man’s fault.

Betty Lou was played by Phyllis Kirk who played the TV version of Nora Charles on the Thin Man series. In the 60s she got involved in social causes and campaigned against the execution of Caryl Chessman. She visited him in prison regularly until his death sentence was carried out.

The Need for DIY Guitar Shops

            On Saturday morning I almost finished memorizing “Les filles n'ont aucun dégoût” and worked out a better English version of the chorus: “But there is no disgust at all / when women love Neanderthals / They like to wallow where it’s foul / Women have little repug / although I swear and I’m a thug / they still want me to kiss and hug”. But I think I could just as easily make it gender neutral and say “people” instead of “women”.

            Since I’m turning 65 next year I’ve applied for my “Old Age” pension and I was surprised that they even call it that anymore. “”Senior pension” would be better, but looking up the origins of the word “old” I saw that we’ve really drifted from the original meaning of “ripe” or “grown-up”. “Ripe” is all right but it might give the young the impression that we are edible. I think “grown-up” is the best one and so that means that I have one year of childhood left.

            When I got to the food bank line-up at my usual time it was already past the steps of the apartment building at 1501 Queen Street West.

            I opened up my dual language book of French stories and started reading he second one by Baudelaire. The Baudelaire pieces are more prose poems than stories but there is something story-like about them. The first piece, “The Old Acrobat” describes a joyous street festival in Paris where many entertainers set up booths for people passing to enter to see a quick performance and offer some alms in exchange. In one of the booths is an old acrobat, too ancient to still perform his craft but trying to make a living anyway. The narrator is about to offer him some money when he is swept away by the disinterested crowd.

            The prose poem I read in the line-up was called “The Little Poor Boy’s Toy” and it paints a picture of two little boys. One is rich and behind an iron fence on the grounds of his stately home. Beside him and untouched is a very expensive and beautifully crafted toy but what is holding his attention is the little poor boy in the bushes on the other side of the fence. He is showing the rich boy the toy that his parents made for him. Both boys have found something commonly entertaining in this toy and they are both laughing as they play with the homemade wire box containing a live rat.

            Behind me was the young guy of half English and half East Indian heritage. I finally asked him his name so I wouldn’t have to write “the young guy of half English and half East Indian heritage” anymore. He told me his name is Dave and I also learned that at thirty-five he’s about ten years older than I’d thought.

            Dave said that since it was Saturday he wanted to take his bike to Bike Pirates to get something adjusted. He expressed the wish that there was a similar “do it yourself” as Bike Pirates but for guitars. That would be a good thing. I looked it up and there are quite a few different kinds if DIY places in Toronto. There are places for learning to sew and do leather work; there are places to learn how to cobble shoes, to make hats, handbags and jewellery; there are places to learn to work in ceramics; there are places to learn carpentry; there are places to learn upholstery; there are places to learn to knit, do macramé and fabric dyeing; there are places to learn to make beverages; bartending classes; obviously there would be cooking and painting classes; there are soap making workshops; wine making classes; glass and metal workshops; a taxidermy workshop called “friends forever”; letter pressing classes; zine making classes; terrarium workshops; mitten making workshops; chocolate making workshops; homemade bitters and syrups workshops; there’s a well-known DIY machine shop around Ossington and Bloor; but there is no DIY type shop for guitars, I guess because guitar repair is much more specialized than bike repair. There are thousands of people that know how to fix bikes in Toronto and so it’s not hard to find ten of them to volunteer to help people. Plus bicycle parts are a lot more plentiful and therefore cheaper than guitar parts. There are guitar repair courses offered by a few shops but at $1000 for five days it’s a little steep for people that line up at the food bank. There’s a school of lutherie in Leslieville that gives lessons in guitar repair and in acoustic and electric guitar building. One can build an acoustic from scratch for $4000 in a four-week course.

            I think Dave might already know the basics of fixing his electric guitars but wants a place like Bike Pirates where one can pop in, get second hand parts and little help from volunteers. It’s very different from paying for courses.

            I told Dave I have a Kramer electric and he suggested that it might be worth a lot of money. He said that he’s always looking for electric guitars to use for spare parts in case I want to get rid of any. I do have three extra electric guitars that I could show him but I don’t know if by “get rid of” he meant, “give away”. I’d sell a couple of them for a small fee.

            He told me I should always loosen my strings after I’m finished playing so the tension won't pull the neck out of kilter. I looked this up and every expert on line says that is absolutely wrong. In fact frequently loosening and retightening the strings would do more damage to the neck than leaving them in tune. The only guitars that could be damaged by keeping them tight are classical guitars because they don’t have truss rods in their necks.

            Dave told me he plays slide blues guitar, but he also plays bass. He said he’s been listening to a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival lately. I commented that Creedence seems like pretty old music for someone his age to be listening to since it’s exactly from my era. He said he listens to Creedence because of the bass.

            A very loud young French Canadian man with his shirt off exposing pierced nipples on a slim but well-tones chest was riding by on a skateboard scooter trailed by his off-leash Jack Russell terrier when he stopped to talk to someone on the steps of 1501 Queen. He started talking in a thick accent about how he’s designing underwear that will keep his testicles in place so they don’t fall downtown on one side or the other. He said he was going to buy cigarettes so he stepped back on his scooter, gave some commands to his dog in French and they continued west.

            Marlena gave out the numbers and I got 26. The line didn’t start moving until around 11:00.

            Downstairs there were piles of boxes of large pizzas by the door. David said he would probably eat his on the way home. I told him that it would take me four days to go through one of those. He explained that food is his only drug. I said that when I was younger I could eat three helpings at every meal and burn it all up, but not anymore.

At the desk when I showed Hunter my card he said, “This chair is very comfortable”. I said, “Congratulations!” and he looked at me funny.

            On the first set of shelves there were still some spices left over from the windfall of last month. They still had big bags of masala and of paprika. As almost always they had taco kits, although they almost never have all the proper ingredients for filling a taco. They had cookies, mirangue candies, granola cups and little single servings of tartar sauce. I didn’t take any of those.

From the top shelf I took two small cans of "green Mexican sauce", although it sounds kind of disgusting the way they worded it. I don’t think anyone should eat the sauces that I've made anytime I was green. They indicate in smaller letters that it's salsa. It's ironic that any company up here that makes that condiment would simply call it “green salsa” without having to explain that it’s sauce. But this green salsa is imported from Nopalucan, Mexico and I guess the company, San Marcos assumes that we wouldn't understand "salsa".

There were a variety of canned beans as usual. I picked a tin of chickpeas and two small cans of “baked” beans. I got six peach-mango drinking boxes.

I almost missed the tuna, since there were only a few tins on a lower shelf.

At Angie’s section she'd just yelled at the woman in front of me for being too pushy and asking for extras. “You always give me a hard time!” she told her.

I passed on the milk and yogourt. I also didn’t take any eggs, since I had seven at home, didn't plan on eating any that week and since there’s almost always at least three eggs given out at every food bank visit there was no point taking home any more until I’m almost out. Angie gave me a bag containing two fresh chicken breasts. As an afterthought she handed me two bags of frozen mystery pastry pocket hors d'oeuvres and said, "For tonight, when you're snacking”. Since I knew I’d be having pizza that night the snacks would go in the freezer for another time.

From the bread section, perhaps because I had pizza on my mind, and since I already had sauce and cheese at home, I took a medium sized pizza crust.

In front of me at Sylvia’s station there was a traffic jam of three people getting vegetables. Sylvia was trying to give the big Jamaican woman some potatoes but she protested that they would make her bag dirty. Sylvia insisted that she should have some and the woman scowled as she kept putting them in. I grew up on a potato farm and the only time I’d ever seen potatoes that dirty was while they were still in the ground. Usually the harvesting process shakes off a lot of the dirt. I still have enough from what Sylvia gave me a couple of weeks ago to last halfway through the summer. It takes me two minutes to brush the dirt off one of those potatoes every time I make dinner.

I didn’t take any potatoes. Sylvia gave me one onion, an orange pepper, and a net bag containing three ataulfo mangoes. There were various toppings of large pizzas available. Sylvia opened one box up and showed me pepperoni and mushroom and I told her that was fine. I’m not that picky and would have taken any topping. If it hadn’t seemed sufficient I would have added some things to bump it up at home.

Near the door there was a box of big chunky carrots but I skipped those and just took three limes.

The big score this time was the fresh chicken breasts, since there is rarely fresh meat at the food bank, but the pizzas were a nice treat for a change as well.

As I left the food bank I saw that Graham was first in line and waiting to go in, with about ten people behind him.

I went home to put my food away and then headed down to No Frills where I bought a half-pint of raspberries, three bags of grapes, a frozen Canadian Berries pie, mouthwash, shampoo, conditioner, Greek yogourt, and a bag of Miss Vickies chips. The chips were larger than the regular size and didn’t show up on the scanner and so the gorgeous express cashier needed to call for a price check, which took a couple of minutes. The bill was $52.41 and I handed her three $20s, a toonie and a loonie, thinking she'd give me back $0.60 and a $10, but she stood there looking puzzled and I think my brain was thrown off balance by her beauty and I suddenly forgot the logic of the transaction and just took back the $3 to accept the $7.60 that she gave me.

Since I didn’t plan on going out again once I got home I decided to ride a little further west on King. I rode up Wilson Park Road, which is a lovely little street with a lot of old and differently shaped medium sized houses. When I turned on Queen and passed the food bank there were still fifteen people lined up outside.