Zig-Zag

            On Friday morning at the end of the second week since the bottom of my foot was punctured by that piece of wood, my foot hurt almost as much as it did the day of the accident and my limp was more pronounced. The black spot where the puncture occurred has shrunk but my foot is still slightly swollen. They say a deep wound can take several weeks to heal.

            That morning I finished posting my translation of “Eva” by Serge Gainsbourg and began memorizing his “Zig Zig Avec Toi” (Zig Zig With You). He seems to be playing with the “zig” from "zig heil" and the expression "zig zag" and perhaps he’s also making fun of the zig zag shape of the swastika. I remember that all the years my father smoked until suddenly quitting before I became a teenager, he always rolled his own from Zig-Zag brand tobacco with Vogue papers

            I had two chicken hot dogs for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story continues from the previous one in which Sapphire left Kingfish for good. She’s been staying with her mother at her house in Brooklyn but Kingfish does not know that they are planning to vacation in Florida and to rent out the house while they are gone. Sapphire’s mother has bought her daughter new dresses and has told her to burn the old ones in the furnace in the basement. They rent the house to a man who takes Sapphire's bedroom as his. Kingfish misses Sapphire and decides to go to Brooklyn to plead with her. He and Andy climb up a ladder to Sapphire’s bedroom but find the room is full of a man’s things. When the man comes home they hide in the bathtub but he reaches in and turns on the hot water. They break the window and fall to the ground. Later they discover the remains of Sapphire's burnt dresses beside the furnace. The man is building flower boxes in the basement but all they know is that he’s building boxes, which they think are coffins. They conclude that he has killed Sapphire and her mother.

            I worked some more on my reflection paper:

The parallels between the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs and the hereditary chief of the nation of Canada are not as solid in relation to the land. While Indigenous hereditary leadership is intrinsically tied to a territory, Canada's hereditary chief is the symbolic caretaker of so much land that it would be impossible for her to have a deep connection with it all. To be fair, if the Wet’suwet’en leaders had control over one sixth of the planet’s surface they probably would be less concerned about 190 kilometres of pipeline in the arm pit of Canada.          

But despite there being no documented official spiritual connection to the land on the part of Canada’s hereditary chiefs, the two future Canadian hereditary chiefs, Charles and William, are both very outspoken and active on environmental issues. If they were allowed to take sides they might indeed side with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs on the issue of the pipeline, as does the mainstream media.

The two Macleans Magazine opinion pieces and the twelve CBC articles that resulted from a Google search of “Wet’suwet’en” were all very supportive of the anti-pipeline protests.  They all mention gratuitously as a passing attempt at balance that twenty elected band councils signed benefits agreements.  But both Macleans and the CBC seemed to deliberately avoid publishing quotes from Indigenous leaders that are opposed to the protests. Only one news source featured such opposing views from Indigenous leaders and I was refreshingly surprised to discover that it was APTN.

Kathleen Martens of APTN gave very balanced coverage of the Wet'suwet'en pipeline protests by giving voice to all Indigenous sides of the debate and not just that of those opposing the pipeline. She even quoted Dale Swampy, president of the National Coalition of Chiefs saying that poor Native people on the streets of Vancouver and Calgary are being offered hundreds of dollars to protest against the pipeline in order to counterbalance the fact that the majority of protestors are white. This is a claim that no one else has repeated and which does not seem to have surfaced anywhere else. As a former street person I can confirm that the homeless could be paid to protest but it would be impossible to pay them to shut up about it afterwards. The fact that only Swampy is repeating a claim that would be common knowledge if true strongly suggests that it is merely a conspiracy theory.

Later in the day my limp wasn’t as bad until I stepped on a crack in the floorboards and pinched the wound.

I cooked the six pork souvlakis that I’d bought recently. I also fixed the too thick gravy that I’d made the night before by adding some chicken broth. I had two of the souvlaki for dinner with a potato and gravy while watching Zorro.

In this story a merchant returning to Los Angeles discovers a Chinese man stowed away in his wagon. The man speaks no English and so he cannot communicate his circumstances. Through sign language Bernardo is able to discern that the man escaped from a ship. Sgt Garcia is confused because there are no Chinese people in Los Angeles. He is forced to place the man in jail. The man has written a page of text in Chinese and so Diego attempts to get it translated. It turns out that a friar from a nearby mission is able to read some Chinese although it has been years since he has tried. Meanwhile a sea captain named Vinson arrives claiming that the Chinese man is an escaped murderer. Garcia releases his prisoner into the captain’s custody just as Diego discovers that the man is actually a Chinese prince named Chiu Chang who had been kidnapped for ransom. Zorro intercepts the captain in the mountains and in the midst of a fight the captain falls to his death. Chiu Chang is shipped back to Shanghai in style.

Chiu Chang was played by the great character actor James Hong, who auditioned for the role of Sulu in Star Trek but lost to George Takei.

But how could they know Chiu Chang was a prince just because he wrote it on a piece of paper?