Margaret Field

            On Sunday morning I ran through singing and playing “Arthur, où t'as mis le corps?” (Arthur, Where’d You Put the Corpse?) by Boris Vian in French. 

            I finished searching for the chords of “Malaise en Malaisie” by Serge Gainsbourg and found there was only one set posted. I started working them out myself and found that for the intro and the first line of the chorus the posted chords fit. I began deviating from those in the second line. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I wrote some initial thoughts towards my keyword essay: 

            Monsters are monstrous. The adjective “monstrous” describes either that which is a monster or that which is like a monster. Being faced with the monstrous can evoke a sense of the sublime but while sublimity relates more to an experience of raw, inorganic nature, monstrosity carries with it a sense of life, will, and intent. William Rubin talks of the effect of the African masks in Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon being similar to that which Conrad’s character of Kurtz experiences in Heart of Darkness. He encountered a real manifestation of his own ancestral memory and let go of his own civilized inhibitions to a dangerous degree. But Rubin and Picasso see this sense of the monstrous as a means of frightening away the truly monstrous. Donning the masks to terrify away that in ourselves which horrifies us while at the same time calling it forth to full intensity, bringing it forward, inviting it back from our own so called primitive past when there was no wall between nature and human nature. Just a thin line of imagination that only art could fortify. A sense of ritual from a pure form of civilization that has not yet become monstrously mechanical. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before lunch. I had a toasted slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with melted five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Grace. Grace is already narrow but the wide strips of ice on either side have made it into the width of a laneway. I turned west on Dundas and then south on Dovercourt. A car ahead of me stopped in front of a house, blocking traffic in either direction while the driver and his passenger and her dog got out. People were leaning on their horns while a guy from inside the house came out to tell the drivers to relax. I walked around and continued on. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos at 17:00.

            I was updating my journal when just after I pasted my written thoughts on the keyword assignment the text of all my documents suddenly went crazy. They were broken down into several tiny pages intermixed with lines of regular size text. No amount of undoing would change it so I just closed down word and started again. Everything was fine after that.

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:20. 

            I read another section of Laura Doyle’s “Inter Imperiality.” She gives evidence that capitalism goes back to older empires than those of Europe and that Europe may have learned its trade practices from empires it traded with before it spawned significant imperial powers. 

            I worked on my assignment on the keyword “monstrous.” I edited the parts where Kurtz’s obsession is described and inserted them into my text.

            I deviated from working on the assignment a bit while trying to figure out Word 2003. I couldn’t find “word count” and looked online to learn that I have to get it through the Tool menu, but I couldn’t find that either. Finally, I searched “Help” and found that there is no longer a tool menu. One just adds or removes features via customization. I searched specifically for Word Count and was told that there is automatically a word count in the lower-left corner of the screen. I’d totally missed that. Then somehow, I’d lost the “Save” icon and had to track it down and put it back up.

            I made pizza on naan with marinara sauce and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            The back situation in this story is that Reed’s wife has put him on a diet and now he’s very hungry and wants to go for a code seven (meal) early. But they keep getting sent to calls and can’t get a break. Reed snacks on crackers and candy bars in the meantime. 

            The first situation involves a man whose had his lawn stolen. His neighbour Mrs. Mollinson called the cops because Mr. Jenkins was so upset. A kid tells Reed he saw some guys in pool maintenance uniforms steal the lawn with a pickup truck. It turns out though that Jenkins doesn’t own that section of the lawn as it belongs to the city. It’s still a theft though. 

            A woman named Mrs. Milne reports her stepson has been selling credit cards with a shady type named Talbot. They find them leaving a pool hall and when they see the cops they run. After Malloy and Reed catch them, Reed is asking for identification when Talbot drops his. But when he stoops to pick it up Malloy pulls his gun on him. Then he searches Talbot’s legs and finds a switchblade. 

            After dark they are passing a car lot and Reed notices someone inside of a Jaguar. When they investigate, the man says he wasn’t trying to steal the car. The Jag is blocked in by other cars and so it would have been impossible for him to drive away with it anyway, even though somehow the keys were in car. Malloy checks and sees that some other cars also have keys in them. The guy says he’s on parole and if they take him in, he’ll go straight back to prison. Malloy tells Reed he can make the call on this one and so Reed lets the man go. 

            After work Malloy offers to buy Reed a steak but Reed is so stuffed on candy bars that he’s no longer hungry. 

            Mrs. Milne was played by Margaret Field, who was the mother of Sally Field. She worked in film and television for three decades. She co-starred in “The Man from Planet X” and “Captive Women.” She died on her daughter’s 65th birthday.