Tim Buckley

            On Saturday morning I memorized the first two verses of “Ciel de plomb" (The Sky is Leaden) by Serge Gainsbourg and almost had the third nailed down. 

            Since school is over for the year I had intended to start going to the food bank again on Saturdays so I could write weekly reports in my “Food Bank Adventures". But then I thought about the pandemic and how a lot of food bank clients don't socially distance or wear masks and how some of them are always coughing. This didn’t worry me when I went in December but now with the pandemic dragging on and the virus variants flying around I really didn’t want to push my luck, so I decided to skip the food bank until the vaccines start to take effect and gatherings become less dangerous. 

            In the late morning I wanted to go to the drug store and then to the supermarket but I decided to take a bike ride first. I rode to Yonge and Bloor, south to Queen and then home. I stopped at my place to pee because I have my own bathroom and then I continued on to Vina Pharmacy to ask them to fax my doctor about renewing a couple of prescriptions. 

            At No Frills there were no grapes and so I bought two bags of oranges, four mangoes, a pint of strawberries, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, three bags of milk and a container of Greek yogourt. When I was looking at the lemonade I noticed a combination that I didn’t see coming. It was lemonade with jalapeno so I had to buy it to find out how that would taste. I didn't try it yet because I still have some old lemonade to finish. 

            I weighed 89 kilos before lunch. I had a tomato and old cheddar sandwich with lemonade. 

            I’ve been listening to Tim Buckley’s discography. The guy had a great and quite powerful voice. It was similar in tone to David Crosby but with more range. I hadn't realized that I had heard one of his songs before. His "Morning Glory" is almost a folk standard. Most of his early stuff is pretty conventional but then in 1970 he broke free and started innovating with his voice and his music. Lorca and Starsailor are so far his most interesting albums but of course they are his least popular. 

            I took a siesta from 14:00 to 15:30. 

            I worked on my poem series “My Blood in a Bug”. 

            At 17:30 I felt tired and laid down again but couldn’t sleep and got up after ten minutes.

            I weighed 89 kilos at 17:45. 

            I went through the video recordings of my June 30, July 1 and July 2 song practices. I made a video of my performance of Sixteen Tons of Dogma from July 2. It’s not good enough to upload to YouTube but it shows improvement, plus I already had this one synchronized with the mic audio. I deleted everything else from those three sessions. I just have July 3 and 4 to listen to and then that will be it for my 2020 recordings. I’ll be ready to record some more long before my guitar comes back from Quebec. 

            I remembered recently that I still have a separate CD containing the drum tracks from the studio recordings Brian Haddon and I did at Mike's place twenty years ago. When he decided we were taking too long on the project and wanted us to finish it up he didn’t take the time to put in the drum track. Maybe I’ll try to synchronize the drums with the master recording this spring. 

            I worked some more on colourizing my black and white photo of the skateboarder from the 1980s. I uploaded the images from the negatives I scanned yesterday. 

            I had two strips of bacon, an egg, a naan and a beer while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

            In the first story Andy drops by the filling station, smells smoke and finds Gomer asleep as smoke is rising from some rags in an oil drum. Andy wakes Gomer and puts out the fire and what follows is one of the oldest TV tropes in which a character feels indebted to another for their life having been saved. Gomer proceeds to make Andy’s life a living hell by always wanting to do things for him or for Opie or Aunt Bee. Finally Andy figures the only way to break free is for Gomer to save his life and so he rigs the gas heater at the court house to leak and pretends to be unconscious. Gomer succumbs to the fumes and so Andy has to save him again but Gomer is so groggy that Andy convinces him that he saved his life without remembering. It doesn't really work though because Gomer concludes that Andy is accident prone and needs a lot of help. 

            In the second story Bee is obsessed with bargains and in trying to save five cents a kilogram on beef she buys a whole side. She puts 68 kilos of beef in the second hand freezer that she bought at discount and never used. But the freezer goes on the fritz and finally Andy just buys a new one.