Letting Go

            On Tuesday morning I spent an hour memorizing the second verse “Tata Teutonne” (Tata Teutonic) by Serge Gainsbourg. The problem was that sometimes when I’d nailed the second stanza I would lose some of the first. The song is full of so many words that are only subtly different from one another and so they don’t stand out as easily in order to put them where they are supposed to be.

            I worked on typing and researching my Monday lecture notes.

            Around midday I tidied up in the kitchen and threw out a tabletop that I’d been holding onto for over ten years. I’d been drawn to it on the street because it was attractive and also quite solid. But it was a square metre in size, it occupied space in the kitchen hallway and it took a decade for me to realize I’d never use it for anything. Even while I was taking it out to the street the packrat inside me was offering arguments as to why I should keep it. I also threw out a bicycle rim and a monitor.

            I had my last can of chickpeas for lunch with olive oil and garlic.

            I worked some more on typing my lecture notes.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Andy has been dating Charmaign Larue for quite a while and has finally decided to propose. He spends $35 on a ring with a diamond so small one would almost need a microscope to find it. He goes to her place to pop the question but when he gets there he finds that she is being visited by an old boyfriend who happens to be an actor and an intellectual. While they are discussing Macbeth he asks if they’ve seen the latest Abbot and Costello movie. Charmaign asks him to leave. He decides to go to charm school in order to win her over. He loses weight and studies diction and then goes back to propose to Charmaign once again but by that time she’s dumped the actor and hooked up with a wrestler named Strangler, who is three times dumber than Andy was in the first place.

            I finished typing my lecture notes.

            For dinner I had my last orange-chipotle pork chop with a potato and gravy while watching the latest episode of Doctor Who.

            Spoiler alert!

            This story had a heavily ecological theme and in order to stress the ways in which we are all connected through nature to story involved people in several parts of the world. It starts with an astronaut re-entering earth’s atmosphere in a ship that is breaking up. The astronaut’s husband Jake sees it on the news and hears that Adam is presumed dead. But then Jake receives a text from Adam that simply says, “Help”. He follows the GPS to a run down part of the city and a door. He tries to kick down the door but Graham and Yasmin show up and tell him they have a key. Inside they find Adam hooked up to equipment. Men wearing biohazard suits and carrying alien weapons attack them. Jake gets hold of a weapon and takes some of them out. The Doctor is suddenly there investigating and says the men in the suits are definitely not from Earth. They all go in the Tardis. Before this, in Peru, two hikers are camping beside what was once a beautiful river but is now a garbage dump. One of the hikers goes missing and while Gabriella is looking for her she meets Ryan who is there investigating some birds that are behaving aggressively. They find Gabriella’s friend in an abandoned hospital, with a crystalline infection advancing over her body until she suddenly disintegrates. Also earlier, in Madagascar, the Doctor pulls a sailor from the ocean. He is the only survivor from a wrecked submarine. He is also infected with the crystals and disintegrates. The Doctor meets two scientists with a fully equipped lab. Flashing forward to Adam being rescued, the Doctor takes Adam and Jake to the Tardis where Ryan and Gabriella are waiting. Yasmin says she wants to go back where they found Adam to get a piece of alien tech that might be important. Gabriella says she wants to go with her. Back in that lab they see one of the aliens use a teleport station. Yasmin and Gabriella follow him and end up on what looks like an alien planet. Meanwhile the Doctor takes Adam back to Suki’s lab in Madagascar to find a cure for Adam who is also infected with the crystals. She discovers that the crystals are an alien virus feeding on the micro particles of plastic that are in all of our bodies in the modern age. She develops a possible antidote and Adam insists that she test it on him. If it works they can release it into the atmosphere to save Earth. Suki turns out to be one of the aliens and they have come to infect the Earth as a way of finding a cure for their own dying planet. The Tardis goes to Yasmin and Gabriella’s location but it is not an alien planet but rather a bubble underneath a mountain of plastic garbage at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Suki gets infected with the virus and disintegrates. Adam is cured. Jake pilots the alien ship to release the antidote but the ship explodes. Fortunately the Doctor materializes the Tardis around Jake just before the explosion.