Changing Direction

            On Saturday morning during yoga there was a wicked smell of skunk coming into the apartment as if the animal had its behind backed up against my door.

I translated a few more lines of "Complaint du progress" by Boris Vain.

            I finished working out the chords for “La cible qui bouge” by Serge Gainsbourg.

91 kilos.

            At 9:30 I had to rush to post a blog before getting ready to go to the food bank. I also wanted to print the preface to Ways of Knowing by Yale Belanger so I could get some Indigenous Studies course reading done while I was standing in line. The problem was that pages 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 wouldn’t print. I clicked "print" again but it still wouldn't work until I turned my printer off and on and then off course it printed the pages twice. I turned the pages over and printed 2, 4, 6, 8 and ten without any problem, stapled them and got ready. For some reason, despite what seemed to be a delay I didn’t leave for the food bank any later than usual.

            As I approached 1499 Queen I saw that the line-up was for the first time running east from the door instead of beside the apartment building at 1501 Queen and rather than being close to the building it was on the outer edge of the sidewalk. I took my place behind Veronica and Graham and asked why they were doing the line-up in the other direction. Veronica said it was so clients wouldn’t be smoking in front of the apartment building. Here I'd thought that the recent rule of not smoking in line was out of respect for the non-smokers in the line-up, but now it seemed that it had only been to keep the tenants of 1501 from complaining. Now on top of that, to add insult to injury they’d moved us to where there would be twice as much second hand smoke because we were now beside PARC. In front of the community centre there was a whole different group of smokers for the free breakfast at 11:00. I was pissed off.

            Veronica noticed that I’d gotten a haircut since last weekend and asked what had made me decide to do it. I told her that I always get a haircut around the time school starts. She said that it makes me look less like a hippy. I’ve never thought of hippies as being aesthetically displeasing but when I first had long hair back in the early 70s the word "hippy" was already passé and people with long hair were called “freaks". To "freak out" was to step outside of the expectations of society and to be oneself. To fly one’s “freak flag” was to have long hair. The problem is that when a guy gets older, if his hair is getting thinner then having a lot of hair ironically emphasizes how little hair he has. But with styled short hair it’s easier to make it look full and therefore younger.

            The change in the line-up position seemed to change everyone’s moods. Graham went off to sit further east on the sidewalk and Veronica was not her usual conversational self. She just sat there quietly.

            I read most of the preface for Ways of Knowing and it was pretty boringly written, although the subject was interesting. It was mostly about the history of indigenous studies in North America and how it took until the mid 1960s for a university to have a Native Studies department. Canada didn't get one until Trent University started theirs in 1969 but in the next few years more blossomed in the prairies and northern Ontario. But the vast majority of scholars controlling these programs were still white men and the book has a good line when it refers to Native Studies programs as having been “colonial captives”. At the current stage of its development Indigenous Studies are stuck between being a scholarly discipline and being deeply cognisant of Native traditions, without being fully attuned to either one.

            As I was reading I found it hard to get physically comfortable and had to keep adjusting my stance.

            Graham stepped back into line and announced, “It's number time!" I took my position as well but at first forgot that I was supposed to be behind Graham. He didn’t seem to care but I moved back anyway. I got number 28.

            Marlina told people they couldn’t smoke in the line-up so maybe the food bank management does care about its clients after all. Then again, the new line position was much closer to the out of line smokers than the old one. 

            Veronica had been so quiet that I put my hand on her shoulder to ask if she was okay but her proper name got twisted by a shameful brain fart and I called her, “Victoria”. She coldly responded, "VERONICA is fine!” It’s hard to show concern for a friend if one doesn’t even remember their name when one is doing so. But now I will probably never forget Veronica’s name again.

            It actually happens to me every week or so that I will forget something that’s in my long-term memory. Quite often it's a word or a chord from a song that I’ve been singing every day for years but suddenly it's just gone in the moment it’s needed. The next day when I sing it however it will be back again. It may be that I do so much memorization of French song lyrics that sometimes it temporarily crowds other more established memories out of my mind.

            But why did I say “Victoria"? Maybe it's because I had a girlfriend named Victoria whom I’ve written about a lot. On top of that I've done a lot of reading of the literature of the Victorian era and I’ve studied nothing from the Veronican era.

            Graham said that he wants to get a little folding camping chair to bring on Saturdays so he wouldn’t have to sit on the sidewalk.

            I noted that Graham had only brought one red recyclable bag with him this time and had left his big cart at home. He explained that last week the haul had been so sparse that it had barely filled the bottom of his cart, so he didn’t anticipate it being worthwhile to haul it around this time.

            The food bank opened pretty much on time.

            From the first set of shelves I got a bag of Neal Brothers multigrain pretzel nuggets and a caramel walnut brownie flavour Luna Bar. There was a big package of granola at the bottom but I find granola a bit heavy this time of year. Maybe I'll eat it in the winter.

            The only protein foods on the shelves were cans of chickpeas and black beans. I took the chickpeas, which when I got home I realized were white kidney beans. Oh well, when life gives you kidney beans make chilli.

            There was a choice between fruit slammers and a can of a carbonated ginger-lemongrass flavoured beverage from Vienna called Tran Quini. It’s made with 100% organic cane sugar. It’s hard for me to pass up something I’ve never tried before and so I took the drink. The product motto is “Relax, be positive, good happens”. Tell that to a person being bombed in a war zone. I found some reviews of the Tranquini Company and every one of them says the management is disorganized, unrealistic, and doesn’t pay its staff on time. Now that’s relaxed!

            When I greeted Angie the first thing she did was to inform me that it was her birthday. I said, “Happy birthday!” I wonder if she told everybody she served that day that it was her birthday.

            I didn’t take any milk or eggs but she handed me a pack of two 118-gram glass jars of crème brulée and assured me it was “To die for!”

            She also gave me a 295 ml bottle of product that had the name “Broya” on the cap but no other labelling. She explained that it was broth. Looking it up I found that it’s turmeric and ginger chicken bone broth. The broth is mad from the bones of organically fed, free range cattle with organic vegetables added in the cooking process. The guy that started the company has a testimonial on YouTube talking about his transformative experience with bone broth and how it inspired him to crate the products. Bon broth has been around since Palaeolithic times and has become very trendy because of the popularity of the Palaeolithic diet.

            A couple of more things that I got from Angie were a box of chocolate chip waffles and a bag of chicken nuggets.

            All I took from the bread section was one triangular bun.

            Sylvia gave me five large organic tomatoes, three sorry looking potatoes, an onion and an apple.

            From the “Take what you want” section I grabbed a squash.

            The food bank is still pretty poor in the green department but not as sparse overall than the week before.

            I took my food home to put away and my back started hurting. I wonder if the new line-up direction lading to simply standing and facing a different direction, perhaps subtly twisting the body to the right instead of to the left could have affected my back or if the sudden pain was just a coincidence.

            I wanted to go to the supermarket for fruit but I needed to check online to find out how much money I had. I discovered that I only had $19 in the bank. That meant the $30 I had on me would have to suffice for shopping. I haven’t had to weigh fruit and calculate how much things are for a long time, but that’s what I had to do at No Frills. I bought a watermelon, a basket of peaches, two bags of grapes and some pork ribs. I had $6 left over and it was the closest I’ve been to being broke for two years. I guess this month cost me more because of sending $45 for my birth certificate, spending over $50 on school supplies and then there were bike repairs. I recently received notice that I’m getting my grant to pay for my courses this fall, plus an almost $500 refund, so I should be okay soon. Hopefully very soon since I still need to buy books for school.

            For lunch I had the rest of the lamb and rice that David had bought me.

            I did some exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. This story was their 1944 Christmas special. The story involved Andy having no money to buy the talking doll that Amos’s daughter wants for Christmas and so he takes a last minute job as a Santa Clause in a department store. He deals with mostly nice kids and enjoys himself. He gets Amos’s daughter her doll. The last half of the Christmas special always has Amos explaining the meaning of Christmas to his daughter on Christmas Eve and it was apparently a very popular episode every year because of that alone.

My back was still bothering me a lot and so later on I did a yoga exercise but it didn’t help. It was even painful to just sit down and then stand up again.

            I worked on my journal.

            For dinner I heated up the chicken nuggets that I’d gotten from the food bank and had them with a beer while watching Wagon Train.

            This story was a sentimental two-parter that I guess was written to show the human side of Major Adams. It begins with him visiting a grave in the desert at the halfway point of the trail. It’s the grave of a woman named Raine and the rest of part one is a flashback. Seth and Raine are in love but he joins the Civil War. He asks her to marry him before leaving but she doesn’t know if he’s going to die or not and so she wants to wait. In a battle both of his legs are injured and doctors want to amputate but he refuses to allow it. He manages to pull through and walk again but when he goes back to Raine he discovers that she’s married someone else because she hadn’t heard from Seth and thought that he’d died.

            Years later she coincidentally joins the Major’s wagon train, not knowing it’s his. That was the end of part one and I expected part two to be just as boring.