On Saturday morning I worked out the chords
for the instrumental introduction to “Flash Forward" by Serge Gainsbourg.
I added the chords for the first few lines of the song, but since Gainsbourg is
only talking again on this composition I based the chords on the tonality of
his speech.
During
song practice it’s been getting increasingly more difficult to tune my guitar.
Part of that is due to the extreme humidity of Toronto at this time of year but
it’s also because I need a new guitar. I might start looking for one on Monday
if I have $500 left over after paying the rent.
During
breakfast I bit my tongue very sharply. It was hard to tell at first if I was
bleeding because I was eating cherries when I chomped down on the old word worm.
A few weeks ago I had one of my teeth extracted and so now there is an edge on
the lower left that hadn’t been there before. On top of that when one is eating
cherries one must manoeuvre one’s teeth to avoid the stones and that put my
tongue too close to the unfamiliar dental edge. I was definitely bleeding and
my tongue hurt for the rest of the day, especially while eating. Fortunately
the tongue is the fastest healing part of the body next to the cornea.
At
9:45 I went to the food bank. My spot was the ugly pink heart but it was four
social distancing hearts ahead of where I'd been the week before. All the
hearts are getting pretty worn from being stood upon by impatient shuffling
feet.
Just
ahead of me in line was a woman in her thirties whose boyfriend had gone to Tim
Horton’s to get them coffee. Ahead of her was a very talkative middle aged man
with long brown hair who chattered at the woman and her boyfriend for the whole
time we were waiting and stood off his spot in their direction while doing it.
He
said he didn’t like Tim Horton's coffee and preferred McDonald’s. There is a
rumour that McDonald’s got the supplier that used to serve Tim Horton’s to make
a special blend for them. Apparently McDonald’s uses Mother Parker's coffee,
which long ago Tim Horton's used before it developed its own secret blend.
There is a common complaint that Tim Horton's coffee has gotten weaker over the
last few years since it was bought by a US company. I wouldn't know, since I
haven’t had Tim Horton's coffee since long before that and I thought it was
weak then and I hated having a machine determine how much cream went in my
coffee. What if one wants less than a single squirt of cream? I can make a
better cup of coffee at home with a French press than is offered in any gourmet
café.
Marlena
came down the line handing out seedless cucumbers. She was giving everyone two
but I still most of the one that I’d been given the week before and so I just
asked for one. The line was short and so when she covered everyone she still
had a couple left over and so someone ended up with four.
A
little later she brought out a couple of big boxes of bread and put them on the
sidewalk across from the door. She called for everyone to come up and get bread
if they wanted it. Around the bread , social distancing went out the window and
people converged on the boxes. The bread consisted of bags of white buns and so
I wasn’t interested. In a smaller box were bags containing three homemade
chocolate chip cookies each. At first I was going to pass them up but Marlena
said they were homemade and so I took one. I had one with breakfast the next
day and it was delicious.
A
few minutes later a big box of oranges and apples was brought out and placed on
the sidewalk beside the bread. At first no one was invited to come and get some
fruit and only those that were close enough to see came forward. Finally
Larissa called out that there was fruit. Once again we socially undistanced
ourselves around the fruit. The oranges and apples were loose and so whatever
one touched had been already massaged by everyone else’s grubby fingers. Of
course that’s somewhat true for supermarket fruit as well, but fruit in grocery
stores and at fruit stands is rarely as overripe as the fruit being offered at
the food bank. So this fruit was being squeezed a lot more to find the best
samples. They should be putting the fruit in little bags so there is less
chance of contamination. Otherwise what’s the point of all of this social
distancing?
Back
in our places I found that the boyfriend half of the couple in front of me had
moved about half a meter closer to me while he was adjusting his cart and
afterwards he just stayed in that position. I stepped back to keep my distance.
The
guy with the long hair said that he’ll be glad when this is all over and
commented that he thinks it’s all bullshit. His evidence of that was that only
old people have died and that they would be dying anyway from the flu or pre-existing
conditions. Obviously any infectious disease would hit seniors harder but if
the death rate has exceeded the average then Covid-19 is not bullshit.
In
2018 the death toll of Canadians over 65 was 227,975. Statistics Canada has yet
to complete its research to compare current deaths with those of years before
in order to find out how many more people have died from the coronavirus. The
official number of coronavirus deaths in Canada as of May 11 was 4,567 but
there could be more and in many cases deaths caused by other illnesses could be
assisted by the coronavirus. The Montreal Gazette had a 38% jump in obituaries
in April compared to the same month a year before. British Columbia has
reported a 2.7% historical increase in deaths for the months of March and
April. Also, fear of catching the virus may inadvertently cause other deaths
since in some emergency rooms the number of patients has dropped by 50% because
people with life threatening issues are afraid to go to the hospital.
The
boxes of food were brought out and we were told to come forward, which caused
more clustering of food bank clients. Marlena put my box on top of the gas
pipes and she handed me a PC gift card which she said was worth $10. That was
nice since I planned on going to No Frills after the food bank. All of the
boxes were identical on the outside this time and all of them were for some
stupid reason taped shut. I had to take out my keys to cut my box open. Laressa
tried to tell me to go through my box someplace else because I was in the way.
I told her that this was where Marlena put my box. Laressa nodded and walked
away.
I
took less than half of what had been packed in my box. I picked a box of
Triscuits with sea salt. There were four little almond bars called Kind Minis
with the motto, “Ingredients you can see and pronounce”. “Kind” is a company
founded by Daniel Lubetzky who has founded and co-founded several
organizations, including One Voice, which seeks to resolve the
Israeli-Palestine conflict at a grassroots level. Good luck with that.
I
selected a 400 gram bag of quinoa; a six-pack of little cans of V8; two cans of
mushrooms; a tin of red kidney beans; another of hot and spicy pasta sauce; and
what I thought were two cans of tuna, but they actually contained tuna with
vegetables, sugar, tomato paste and tapioca starch.
The
middle aged blonde woman whom I’ve chatted with before was packing her stuff
nearby and so I gave her everything I didn’t want, including the Cheerios, the
jar of soy butter, two packs of spaghetti and two cans of tomato soup.
There
was no dairy, meat or eggs this time around. Some amount of dairy and eggs tend
to be pretty much guaranteed at the food bank. Maybe the PC gift card was
supposed to make up for their absence in the boxes.
Perhaps the food
bank is still without a manager because it seemed very disorganized this week.
I
was home to put my things away before the food bank was officially supposed to
open, so that was a good thing. I rode down to No Frills where I was
disappointed to see that they only had green grapes but I got a couple of bags
of those. I also grabbed a pint of strawberries, a half pint of raspberries, a
pack of chicken legs, mouthwash and two containers of Greek yogourt. The gift
card knocked my bill down to $36.
It
felt like it was going to be a warm day and so when I got home I opened the
back door to the deck. I found both my second floor neighbours, Benji and
Shankar out there.
Shankar told me
he’s trying to lose weight and so he’s eliminating white food from his diet. He
says that milk, white flour and other white foods are fattening. I told him he
could become a cannibal and eat only brown people because white people are
fattening.
For lunch I heated
three of the spinach and feta rollini with some melted cheese slices on top.
I worked on my
journal and started writing about my latest Food Bank Adventure.
For dinner I had
my last four rollini with melted cheddar and a beer while watching two episodes
of The Adventures of Robin Hood.
In the first story
Montfitchet the tax collector, who also happens to be the brother of the Sheriff
of Nottingham, comes with his men to take every other goose, pig, sheep and
chicken from the villagers. But a wanderer named Mark happens upon a little pig
and steals it. Montfitchet demands that Mark hand the pig over but he escapes.
Montfitchet and his second enter a barn where Mark is hiding. Sorel hates
Montfitchet and wants his job and so while they are alone together Sorel stabs
him and leaves. Montfitchet writes Sorel’s name on parchment in blood before he
dies. Mark takes the parchment and is about to rob Montfitchet’s body when
Sorel bursts in with the soldiers and says that Mark murdered Montfitchet. The
villagers save Mark because they think he killed the tax collector and they
chase the soldiers away. They take Mark to Robin Hood and present him as a
heroic outlaw. At first Robin accepts Mark as a member of the band but he
refuses to work and then he tries to rob some nuns on the road. The nuns beat
him up and chase him away. Since Mark told the nuns that he was with Robin
Hood, Robin must pay the mother superior a purse of gold for the orphans to
keep her mouth shut. Meanwhile the sheriff is looking for his brother’s
murderer and says he will hang a villager every day until Mark is surrendered
to him. Robin discovers the parchment and figures out that it was Sorel that
killed Monfitchet. Robin banishes Mark from Sherwood. The sheriff is about to
hang the first villager when Robin shoots and arrow wrapped with the parchment.
The sheriff reads it and kills Sorel.
In the second
story Tom the Miller wants to sell his mill to Sir William because he thinks
that it’s haunted by the Little People. But Robin learns that it’s Sir William
that has convinced him of this. He has also poisoned Tom’s cats so that mice
have overrun the mill and then suddenly the stream that turns the mill’s wheel
has dried up. Robin’s men come to turn the stone to grind the grain while
Robin, Marian and Tuck find out what happened to the stream. Marian figures
that William couldn’t have simply dammed the stream because it would have
flooded his own property. He must have diverted it which means that he flooded
the property of Baron Mornay. If he stopped the stream from reaching Tom’s mill
then he must also have stopped it from reaching the orchards of the abbey. Both
the baron and the abbot come angrily to Sir William and he says he will return
the stream to its normal course. Meanwhile the sheriff tries to capture Robin
and his men when he learns they are at the mill. Three of the guards get pies
in the face from Tom, Little John fights two more, Robin and the rest chase the
sheriff and his men away. The stream returns to turn the wheel which knock out
the two remaining soldiers.
No comments:
Post a Comment