Pandemic Ninja

            On Wednesday morning I finished posting my translation of “Rock n Rose” by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse of his ""Lucette et Lucy". In the lyrics the speaker has twin Swedish girlfriends that sleep with him together but he can’t tell them apart. 

            In addition to delays caused by tuning problems, during song practice my D string broke when I had seven songs to go. I changed it and finished the set by just doing one verse and one chorus of each song. My rehearsal took fifteen minutes longer than the day before, which was already more than half an hour longer than it was before these recent extra tuning problems started. 

            At 10:00 I logged on for my British Literature tutorial. 

            Our essay is due a week from this Friday. 

            The plan had been to talk about both Margaret Cavendish’s and Andrew Marvell’s poetry and how they talk about the relationship of man and nature, but we ended up sticking with Cavendish. 

            I said that she is pointing out that man’s position in the universe is very small. 

            There is suggestion of everything else but man having a harmonious relationship with the world. Giving birth brings humans in to the cycle but there is also a lot of abuse. 

            She decentralizes human experience. 

            About twenty minutes into the tutorial Alexandra’s wifi died and we had to wait five minutes for her to come back. She’s still using a hot spot. 

            Cavendish talks in The Earth’s Complaint about us defacing the Earth with plowing and sewing and I wondered if she was really against agriculture or if plowing and sowing is a metaphor. I concluded that she’s probably talking more about plowing the earth to plant cities and other stuff like mines. 

            I said in her poem “The Hunting of the Hare" the dogs are made almost human with their singing and even the sky echoes their voices. The only thing that is itself is the hare. I said that it is already established in the first line that the hare is out of its element as it is resting between furrows of a plowed field rather than in a warren. She thought my observation was astute. 

            There was some discussion about whether this is a proto-vegan poem. A lot of vegetarian sites quote this poem but I think she’s more against the cruel killing of animals for sport than against eating meat. She may be just exploring a perspective outside of the usual human outlook. She does talk about men’s stomachs being graves for murdered animals. 

            I said there is an inevitability to the poem and a sense of predestiny. Twelve lines in it switches to the past tense and so the hare is already dead. 

            I still had problems with my mic but this time it worked at least. 

            I had crackers and old cheddar for lunch. I heated a muffin to have as well but it wasn’t thawed by the time I took a siesta, so I had it when I got up and it had gotten hard. 

            I returned to working on my essay but after a few edits I realized that I'd forgotten to buy beer and also remembered to check with the Vina Pharmacy about my prescription. No one answered the phone and so I walked over there. It was raining and so I had my hood up and kept it up when I went into the store with my mask on. They said they’d made up my cream but couldn’t find it among the other filled prescriptions. While I was waiting I noticed that they had one of the larger ear syringes that they didn’t have last time and so I bought one. 

            While wandering around in the store I looked at my reflection in the window and saw that the black hood and the black mask made me look like a ninja. It took about ten minutes for them to find my prescription in the place where the counter guy had looked the first time. 

            At the liquor store the security guard eyed me suspiciously in my pandemic ninja head and face covering. 

            I made some progress with my essay, just organizing the information and I was over halfway through with that phase when it was time to make dinner. 

            I used my last two tortillas to make little pizzas with salsa as sauce and cheap cheddar on top. It all turned into a semi liquid mess in the oven but it was tasty. I had it with a beer while watching the synopses of the last four episodes of The Quatermass Experiment. 

            In episode three an alien infection is spreading through Carroon’s body. Quatermass takes Carroon to the crash sight to play back the recording of what went on during the space flight. Carroon recounts how the crew hear a strange radio signal from outside the ship, the rocket rolls and suddenly the sound is inside the cockpit. The astronauts Reichenbaum and Greene begin to gag as if from poison gas and then they dissolve. Carroon is taken to rest in the remains of Miss Wilde’s home. He becomes fascinated with her cactus 

            In episode four Carroon is handling the cactus when a guy claiming to be a photographer harasses him for a photo. With one touch the reporter dies. He turns out to be a gangster and two of his colleagues kidnap Carroon hoping to get a ransom. But Carroon kills him with a touch and escapes. Judith says she thinks she saw Victor absorb the cactus into his body. He takes shelter in a bomb site and is found by a boy. Carroon has lost the ability to speak but with gestures he warns the boy not to touch him. The boy sneaks Carroon into a movie called “Planet of the Dragons” but Carroon runs away when the screen shows a "Wanted" poster with his face. Carroon goes into a chemist’s shop but ends up killing the man with a hand that is now spiked like a cactus. 

            In episode five Carroon goes to St James Park. In a matter of hours he is a shambling mass of vegetable matter with human eyes. All of the ducks in the park die and the trees are stripped bare. In the lab, a sample that had been taken earlier from Carroon mutates and begins producing spores. A drunk reports seeing a large creature climb the wall of Westminster Abbey. Meanwhile at the Abbey a live broadcast about the building’s restoration is being shot. But when the camera pans upwards it captures a massive pulsating vegetable monster high on the wall with root like tentacles. 

            In episode six Quatermass determines that of the creature begins to produce spores it will be the end of human life. When Quatermass gets to the Abbey the monster is already starting to produce spores but not yet releasing them. The military is planning a flamethrower attack but it is discovered that the tentacles have extended into the crypts and so they would not be affected by the flames. Quatermass approaches the monster and begins to talk to it, appealing to the personalities of Carroon, Greene and Reichenbaum and urging them to struggle against the monster from within. Judith plays the voice recording of the astronauts in the rocket before they were infected and it begins to disturb the creature. The monster begins to convulse and it begins to die and fall apart. Quatermass tells Judith, “They won." 

           I also watched the last part of the Quatermass Experiment movie and the ending wasn’t as good. The monster in Westminster Abbey is destroyed by electricity and Quatermass says he's going to send up another rocket.