As I Lay Dying

            I finished working out the chords for “Le vieux rocker” by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through it in French and English and uploaded it to Christian's Translations. 

            Yesterday I was going through the bathroom door and my left thumb went against the frame and bent back to a somewhat painful degree. It was hurting and feeling snappy the rest of that day. This morning it was still bothering me and it made song practice a little difficult but I was still able to form chords with my left hand. 

            I weighed 88.9 kilos before breakfast. In the late morning, I went to No Frills where I bought five bags of red grapes, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, a pack of three steaks, mango-lime salsa, Sunlight dish detergent, fruit punch, orange juice, and a can of dark coffee. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with paprika and a glass of lemonade. 

            I made some more notes on the first song sung by Autolycus in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

            I read some more of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The father thinks that things built low and long like roads and snakes are travelers. He didn't want to raise a family in a house by the road because it would just make them want to go away. His wife said if you don't like a house by the road why don't you get up and go away? 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. At Yonge and Dundas there was a guy dressed in a First Nations dance costume. It looked like he was setting up to shoot a video of himself dancing against the backdrop of the downtown street. I notice the streetcar track renewal along Queen has reached Portland and that means soon I'll have to take Richmond further west before I go back up to Queen. Maybe to Niagara or Strachan. 

            When I was unlocking my building door I met Chai the poet. I used to see him at the Shab-e sher reading series and at other places. I told him how I got Banooed from Shab e Sher. 

            He said he got hit by a bus a while ago and is just recovering. Nothing was broken but he couldn't move the left side of his body for a while. He says it has something to do with gel in his brain. He doesn't ride a bicycle anymore. 

            He told me these days he is going around protesting against people idling their cars because there is a city bylaw against it but it is rarely enforced. Apparently one can get a $100 fine for idling for a minute and higher fines for longer. So Chai goes up and knocks on people's car windows to tell them not to idle, but he ended up getting charged because a driver claimed that he damaged her window. So now he thinks his upcoming court case is going to be an opportunity to make a point about the damage that idling cars do to the environment. He laughed when I asked if he had a lawyer. 

            He said he ran as an independent in the last election on an environmental platform. He got less than a hundred votes he considers it a win every time he makes someone aware of the environment. 

            I weighed 88.4 kilos when I got home. 

            I did some more research for my essay on Autolycus, listening to recordings of some of the songs he sings. The first one is “When daffodils begin to peer” but it doesn't look like this was a known folk song outside of the play. The second one he sings already existed in popular culture at the time:

            “Jog on, jog on, the footpath way / and merrily hent (grasp to vault over) the stile-a. / A merry heart goes all the day / Your sad tires in a mile-a.” It's a merry tune and it basically means that if one does not have fun doing one's job it will be a tiring activity. 

            The third song is “Whoop, do me no harm good man.” It exists now as a melody but apparently was a two-part ballad between a man and a woman in which he says things like “jump her and thump her” and talks of erect and limp penises, to which she replies “Whoop, do me no harm good man.” 

            Just before dinner, I noticed that Shankar's network had returned and so it looks like I paid for too much data. I think though that it's a good idea for me to have a phone plan with a minimum of data as a backup in case his network fails me again. So if his network holds up until next month I'll change my plan again to the minimum of data. I don't want to be stuck without the internet when I have to be in class, upload an assignment or write an online exam. Sometimes Shankar's router either needs resetting or gets unplugged and he doesn't notice right away because he has data on his phone independent of his wifi. 

            I made pizza on naan with Roman spicy red pepper sauce and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Carter shows Gomer the tattoos he got in Korea and says that his tattoo was what first attracted Bunny. Gomer later decides to play a joke on Lou Ann and gets Duke to draw a fake tattoo on his arm with some marking pens. When Lou Ann sees it she awkwardly claims she likes it although it's fairly obvious that she doesn't. So now Gomer believes she really does like it and he reluctantly decides that he's going to get it permanently drawn on his arm. When Duke hears that Gomer has gone to a tattoo parlour he decides that for his first tattoo Gomer should have moral support. So he calls Lou Ann to find out where Gomer went. He finds her crying and she says that since she thought it was permanent she'd told him she liked it to support him because Gomer wouldn't have gotten it if he didn't like it. When she finds out it's not real she rushes to the tattoo parlour and stops Gomer before more than two nostrils of the bathing beauty have been drawn.