Virginia Sale

            On Wednesday morning I had an erotic dream and in it I learned that I’m still a great kisser. I didn’t get much sleep after that because I was kept awake by arousal. 

            When I got up my computer had for some reason tried to restart and then frozen just at that point where the distant Windows divided in four window is shown at an angle. I kept it on for the first half of my yoga and then shut the computer off manually. When I was done yoga and started the machine it came on normally. 

            I finished working out the chords for my song “Candy Coated Body Cast” and made some adjustments to the poem: 

            Candy Coated Body Cast 

 The streetcar’s a crimson dildo greased by the butter of the morning sun

 but who knows when it is going to go until the driver comes to strap it on?

 Well it ignores anticipation of its nervous mechanical bounce 

 reaming the route of its destination beneath an exploding golden mattress of clouds 

 No fantasies can jerk it through space, send it rattling with robotic desire 

 humming, shaking and dinging its way on a lightning spitting stretch of wire

 like a convulsive music box that’s tuned to a comedy in hell 

 but the driver doesn’t hear our thoughts because he cannot read so well 

 Instead he’s fixed on the Sunshine Girl who is bouncing right out of the page

 but even though he’s in another world my hopeful effort never went to waste 

 Its tension produced a higher note which served to elevate my sleepy mind

 so suddenly it was here I woke, this tin chrysalis on the streetcar line

 and now this can of emotional dope rolls free of a sleep too pure

 and where there is motion there is always hope however fleeting might be the cure

 

 A smoke-eyed Indian butterfly sits a kilometre across the aisle

 I wrestle with saying good morning to her when someone pulls down the stop request bell

 I finally build up the guts to talk when I notice her outside of the glass

 She’s fluttering away from me up the road because I let too many minutes pass

 So the streetcar’s another failed sperm crossing the rim of a widening gap

 of romantic desperation inside of a candy-coated body cast 

            I memorized the third verse of “Calypso Blues" by Boris Vian. 

            I finished translating “Yes Man” by Serge Gainsbourg but when I looked for a video so I could hear and learn the song there was none available. He wrote the song for Zizi Jeanmaire's stage show but no one seemed to like it enough to post it. I’ll just have to post the translation without the chords and maybe down the road someone will post an audio recording. 

            I found the lyrics for “Ciel de plomb" (Stormy Weather) by Gainsbourg, which turns out to be his translation of the English language jazz standard. It’ll be interesting to translate it back to English and see if I come up with something better than the original. 

            When I went to grab my guitar for song practice I saw that one leg of my wooden guitar stand has broken. When I was done I had to move the stand over so the dresser would support the side without a leg. 

            In the late morning I prepared to do my income tax and realized I didn’t have the T slips for my pension payments. I was able to access my CRA account and download the two I needed. I used the free option from H & R Block online as usual. It took me over an hour. I was worried that I would have to pay this year because when I applied for my pension I clicked that I didn’t want them to deduct tax. I was thinking later that might have been a mistake, but I ended up with a $314 refund, plus my Ontario Trillium benefit. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. I had eight saltines with five year old cheddar and lemonade.

            In the last month or so I’ve noticed that my Google News feed doesn’t have anything from Huffington Post Canada, which was one of my favourites because of the comments section. I did a search today and found out that Buzzfeed bought Huffington and closed all of its Huff Canada and Quebec operations last month. That’s too bad. 

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor, south to Queen and then home. Cannabis stores have popped up like weeds in the last year. I didn’t count, but along the route of my ride I’m pretty sure that there are more cannabis stores than coffee shops. 

            Now that school is over and I can take longer rides, it’s very relaxing. On my last few rides I’ve been able to do creative work while cruising along and I’ve come up with better rhymes for songs that I’ve been singing for years. 

            I weighed 87.7 after my bike ride and 88.3 kilos before dinner. 

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

            In the first story Mrs Beggs complains that a female speeder ran her off the road on highway six. She remembers every detail about the woman’s hat but didn’t catch her license plate number. There are other complaints about speeding on the highway but since Mayberry only has one patrol car they can’t always be monitoring that part of town. Barney decides to take care of that by buying a WWI motorcycle with a side car and becoming Mayberry’s highway patrol. But Barney starts becoming annoyingly gung ho and begins ticketing truckers who go slightly over the speed limit so they can take the hill. They and Andy say there is an understanding that this is unofficially allowed but for Barney the law is the law. In protest the truckers bring a convoy to drive around Mayberry all night honking their horns. Barney begins giving tickets out to people in town as well and even Aunt Bee gets one for jaywalking. Finally Andy uses Opie’s wood burning set to make a fake sign to hide under the cushions of the side car. The sign indicates that Barney’s motorcycle is a historic vehicle from WWI that belonged to General Pershing. Andy plays on Barney’s patriotism and gets him to agree to hand it over to a museum. 

            Mrs Beggs was played by Virginia Sale, who played hundreds of supporting roles in her long film career. Before that she was a success on radio, playing for eight years Martha the housekeeper on the serial “Those We Love”. In the fifties she wrote and starred in a one woman show called “American Sketches” and gave over 6000 performances in the United States and Europe. She co-starred with her husband Sam Wren in one of the first TV sitcoms: “Wren’s Nest”. In the late 50s she did mostly TV commercials. 

            In the second story Ernest T Bass returns, causing chaos and throwing more rocks in Mayberry as he looks for a woman. He crashes an upper class party at the house of Mrs Wiley and causes trouble and then he turns himself in to jail. Andy decides that the solution is to try to transform Ernest into a gentleman so he can attract female companionship. After a lot of work the transformation seems to be a success and Andy takes Ernest to a high society party again at Mrs Wiley’s. There he meets a shy rich girl named Ramona who takes a liking to him and even after in his excitement he reverts to his animalistic ways, revealing himself as the previous invader, Ramona still likes him and even pursues him as he’s being led away from the party. When Barney wonders why a well bred girl like Ramona would fall for Ernest, the writers cop out and blame it on genetics. Ramona is the granddaughter of a mountain wild man who burned down the town and then started a charcoal business. 

            Ramona was played by Jackie Joseph, who started out as a singer in The Billy Barnes Review of 1958. She starred as Audrey in the original Little Shop of Horrors. She was the co-founder of the Hollywood Dumpettes, which was a recovery group for the former wives of movie stars. She played Jackie Parker on the Doris Day Show from 1971 to 1973. When I was making coffee I saw a mouse on the counter. It was the first one I’d seen since about three weeks when I found a dead one between the garbage and the fridge. I thought that one was the final rodent but here this one was running behind the stove when it saw me. I shook the stove and the mouse ran back onto the counter to the end past the sink, but then it doubled back and ran under the left front burner of the stove. I turned on the oven and all the elements full blast and then left it that way for fifteen minutes, hoping that would take care of the mouse. We’ll see.