James Brown

            On Thursday morning I felt something crawling down the front of my midsection. When I reached for it I suddenly smelled the pungent odour of bedbugs. It was almost 4:30. I was afraid to turn on the light and find that I had bedbugs again after five and a half years. I turned on the light and threw back the covers. What I saw was a big piece of lint that had fallen out of my bellybutton. I think that I was dreaming when it happened and the sensation of the lint moving over my skin evoked an olfactory flashback to when I had bedbugs.

            I worked out the first couple of chords for “Mozart avec nous” (Mozart Is With Us) by Boris Vian. So far they fit with the chord set I downloaded. 

            I memorized the chorus of “Velours des vierges” (Velvet Virgins) by Serge Gainsbourg. The imagery is of the virgins being like a charging Amazon army on horseback and armed with bows sending the men into retreat. 

            I’ve been listening to the discography of James Brown from 1959 and I’m up to 1979 now. He had an amazing voice and a great and very funky band. It's hard to tell though whether his most repeated phrase is "Good god" or "Looky here." He said them both hundreds of times. 

            Around midday I took a bike ride. Even though it hadn’t snowed since my last ride the Bloor bike lane had more snow in it because snowploughs had knocked the snow back onto the path. There were three guys shovelling the path around Dovercourt and two of them apologized to me as I passed. I rode to Ossington and on the way home I stopped at Freshco. 

            As I was locking my bike I found a half pint of blueberries that I’d forgotten to take out of my bag on Saturday. What's weird is that even though they'd been sitting at room temperature for five days they were still fine. 

            In the store the red grapes were mostly soft but I found a couple of bags with firm ones. I also got five bags of green grapes, a pint of strawberries, a bag of shelled sunflower seeds, chocolate soymilk, canned peaches, a jar of honey, a jar of peanuts, a jar of roasted peanuts, raspberry vinaigrette and some frozen soy dessert.

            I had kettle chips, salsa and yogourt for lunch. 

            I re-read another eighty pages of On Beauty by Zadie Smith, taking me to almost a third of the way through the novel. 

            I had two potatoes with gravy for dinner while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Fred Goss the dry cleaner has taken up flirting with Bee. But with a cigarette always dangling from his mouth and spilling ashes, his general appearance and his boorishness, she does not find him to be her type. But her friend Clara convinces her that maybe her choosiness is what keeps Andy from finding a wife for him and a mother for Opie. She begins dating Goss and even though Andy doesn’t like him he thinks Bee does and so he approves of him. Since Andy and Bee both misunderstand each other things roll ahead towards a possible engagement. It takes Opie to repeat in front of Bee what Andy told him about true love and when Bee starts crying Andy realizes that a mistake has been made. Andy helps Bee break it off by telling Goss that Bee will be wearing a dress of paper taffeta, with plastic buttons at the front and rhinestones at the back, all the things that Goss hates to clean. When he hears Clara will be wearing a simple cotton dress he asks her out instead. 

            Fred Goss was played by Fred Sherman, who started out doing tent shows and Vaudeville before breaking into films and television. Shortly after this episode he had a stroke that ended his career and he died seven years later.