Masks

            On Monday morning I woke up with a toothache. It wasn’t excruciating but it felt like it was going to get that way sometime soon. I think that I'm probably due for the extraction of the tooth a dentist that refused to help me told me last year was eventually going to have to happen.

            When I turned my computer on an alarm began to beep frantically. I restarted several times but the same noise happened. It sounded like what happens when my external hard drive is turned on when I start my computer. I knew that couldn’t be the case because I hadn’t used my external hard drive for a few days. It looked like my computer had finally died and I prepared myself mentally to go out later that day to look for another second hand PC.

            After song practice I turned on my laptop and plugged the external hard drive into it. I’d never tried that before and I found that I could access all the files I’d backed up through my laptop. I also noticed that my external hard drive had not been properly plugged in. I was suddenly curious if my computer would start now and it did. The problem must have been that my external hard drive had been turned on accidentally or else the fact that it had been partially plugged in had caused a reaction. I guess I’ll find out once I plug the external back into the back of my PC.

I finished memorizing “Si ca peut te consoler" (If it’s any Consolation) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords but couldn't find them and so I worked out the first chord for the instrumental intro. I’ll figure out the rest tomorrow.

Around noon I got the stepladder from the third floor landing and used it to access and clean one of the upper shelves in my bedroom. I also cleaned two masks that my daughter and I had moulded for our faces back in the late nineties.

In the afternoon I did my exercises and listened to Amos and Andy. In this story Sapphire goes to visit her sister in Chicago for two weeks and insists that her mother move in with Kingfish to take care of him. The problem is that Kingfish and his mother in law despise one another. Kingfish decides however to try to be sweet and kind to her but finds that being sweet to that woman is like pouring Chanel No 5 on a goat. She sees a long hair on his coat and accuses him of cheating on her daughter. He insists that it’s probably a horse hair from sleeping on the couch. The next morning he goes out into the hall to get his newspaper but locks himself out. He goes around to climb into his window through the fire escape but Sapphire’s mother thinks he's sneaking in after having been out all night. She calls Sapphire to tell her that Kingfish is cheating on her. When Sapphire's mother doesn't come home later Kingfish thinks she has gone back to Brooklyn. Kingfish needs someone to clean the house and so Andy offers to get his girlfriend to do it. She tells Andy that he has but to command and she will obey. Kingfish asks Andy his girlfriend’s name but Andy says he doesn't know because he only met her last night. The attractive young woman goes to Kingfish’s place to houseclean. Meanwhile Kingfish runs into Shorty who tells him he just saw his mother in law. That means she has not gone back to Brooklyn and so Kingfish panics and heads home to get the young woman out of his place before Sapphire’s mother sees her. But on their way out they run right into the mother in law. Finally Kingfish takes Sapphire’s mother to domestic court to get her to stop interfering in his relationship with his wife. The judge rules in Kingfish’s favour and tells the mother in law that she has to mind her own business and be quiet from now on. From then on she is at Kingfish’s beck and call. He decides to explain to her what happened on the day she saw him come in through the fire escape. He demonstrates by repeating the actions of that day. While he is going around to the fire escape Sapphire comes home early. She sees Kingfish come in through the fire escape. Kingfish begs his mother in law to explain what is going on but she says she has been ordered by the court to be silent. 

After that I went for a bike ride downtown and took two library books along with me to drop off at the library. There was very little traffic for rush hour and it made for a peaceful ride. There weren’t even very many cyclists out. Two women passed me even though a year ago I wouldn't have let that happen. I ride in a lower gear now to keep my hip healthy.

I noticed that now that many non-essential businesses have been forced to close, homeless people have moved into some of their doorways. In the alcove of one place on Bloor a whole community plus two dogs had moved in.

I rode to St George and then south. I stopped at Robarts to put two books in the deposit slot and then continued. There seem to be a lot of college age skateboarders out. College age is kind of over the hill for skateboarding in top form.

When I came home I spent the next two hours getting caught up on my journal.

I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast beef for dinner while watching parts two and three of the 50s documentary series "Zoo Quest", hosted by David Attenborough.

David and his crew are on their way to Komodo to find a dragon for the London Zoo. On the way they stop at other islands to film and collect animals. This episode finds them going up a river in Borneo where they see proboscis monkeys. Later while looking for frogs David sees a gavial, which is a long nosed crocodile. David removes his shirt and approaches it. It looks like we are going to see a wrestling match but it turns out that one can pick up a gavial with one hand.

On their journey they were invited to stay in a Dayak longhouse. The entire village including the chickens and pigs lives in the one building, although families have separate compartments. It was hard to sleep because there is noise all night long and many of the men stay up all night gambling. The next day they witness a dance ceremony performed outside but viewed by everyone from the longhouse. David learns later that it was a funeral ceremony for two of their community. David asks when the people died and is told they died two years before. He also learns that they have kept the bodies in the longhouse for all that time not far from where David had been trying to sleep. He asks why they waited so long for the funeral and he is told that the people that died were important and so they had to save up money for the costumes and the feast. Later when they were back on their boat a Dayak came and sold David for ten bricks of salt a baby bear that he’d found. At the end of the show, back in London David shows that Benjamin the bear had grown much bigger and that the cameraman had been keeping him in his flat until he was old enough for the zoo. Malay bears are the smallest kind of bear but they are one of the only kind that cannot be tamed. They are only manageable in infancy.

After Borneo, David and his cameraman sailed to Java and travelled through the jungle. There’s some nice film footage of the gibbons, which are agile both physically and vocally. They visited the crater of the volcano known as Bromo, which I assume inspired Bromo Seltzer. The natives still throw sacrifices into the volcano but not people anymore. When they reached a beach on the Indian Ocean David found a large turtle shell and then looked around for turtle tracks to find turtle eggs to eat. He found the tracks and where they ended he began to dig. A metre down he found eighty eggs. He and his cameraman fried scrambled turtle eggs on the beach but they salted them, not realizing that turtle eggs are naturally salty. Next David finds a python in a tree. He cut down the tree and with the help of his cameraman he captured it. The show ends back in London with David showing the snake in the studio.