I'm Surprised By All the Masks I See Now That We Can Take Them Off

            On Monday morning I translated the chorus of “Le régiment des mal-aimés” (The Regiment of the Unloved) by Boris Vian: 

 Ah, fear and doubt all the ones 

who’ve detached themselves from love 

Instead you can have confidence 

in the army of the unloved 

            My interpretation of the chorus may change as I translate the rest of the song. 

            I memorized the third verse of “Ballade Comestible” (Edible Ballad) by Serge Gainsbourg and almost nailed down the whole song. I was able to remember all the words for the final verse but didn’t have time to see if I had the whole song in my head. I’ll probably easily have it done tomorrow and then start looking for the chords. 

            During song practice, the two mating sparrows were outside my window again. The female still picked the exact same spot on the wire and fluttered her back feathers even more enthusiastically to coax the male on top of her. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            My landlord is either still in the hospital or recovering from surgery at home. Meanwhile, the garbage bins are all full and so bags are piling up on top and at the foot of them. Animals have been ripping them open. I went out to put another bag on top of the pile and saw a squirrel run away with a big, unshelled walnut in its mouth. Who throws away a walnut? 

            I read five more pages of Planetarity. 

            I tried to work on my essay, but I felt sleepy. I went to bed from 12:30 to 13:30. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch. After lunch, I went to bed again for another half an hour. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor, and I was very surprised at how many people on the street are still wearing masks. More than half the pedestrians I passed either had a mask over their faces or around their necks. Since masks are still required on the TTC I could understand the masks around the necks. But the percentage of people wearing masks on their faces while walking on the street is considerably more than the people doing so last year when covid was even more of a concern. I had almost expected people to be running around maskless and shouting “Hallelujah we’re free at last!” or having ritualistic mass mask burnings at Dundas Square. Maybe some people paid money for masks, and they are going to keep wearing them, so they don’t feel that their money has been wasted. 

            I had to pee again and thought I’d stop at The Rex, but it was closed again except for the jazz club. I went to The Horseshoe and walked in without a mask. The same drunk black guy was sitting on the same barstool as yesterday and talking loudly about something. When I left, I found it confusing that the doorman was still wearing a mask. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:30. I went to bed again at 18:30 but didn’t sleep for the first half-hour. I was a minute or so away from getting up when I fell asleep for about 40 minutes. When I got up there were only fifteen minutes until dinner time. I was able to work a bit on my essay. 

            I had avocado, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, a black jalapeno, and lime juice with a glass of Garden Cocktail while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            This story begins thousands of years ago when a fisherman finds a bottle on the beach. When he opens it, a genie comes out who says he’s hungry after thousands of years in the bottle and he’s going to eat him. The fisherman says he can eat him but first asks him to show how someone as big and fat as him got into the bottle. The genie says, “You can’t fool me with that trick since all I’ve had to read inside the bottle for a thousand years was The Arabian Nights. The fisherman says he can eat him if he proves he’s a real genie by drinking the ocean. The genie does it but then he’s too full to eat him. The fisherman gets away and it takes the dumb genie a thousand years to recover. Then he goes back to his home deep in the universe and plots to take revenge on humanity. In the year 2000, he sends a large object hurtling through space to Earth. It causes tremendous local damage where it lands. Dr. Elefun and three other scientists go to investigate. The object is down a volcano and so Elefun calls for Astro Boy to bring it out. It’s in the shape of a spherical rock but Dr. Snout says that’s because it was smushed by the landing. They take it apart and put it back together and it turns out to be a giant robot but it’s not activated. That night during a lightning storm Dr. Slickem sneaks to the robot and plants a tree limb in its chest to attract lightning. The electricity brings it to life. Slickem says he is secret agent Z-M4 and he works for the robot’s masters. He tells the robot he must obey his commands and orders him to destroy the Earth. Elefun wakes up and reasons with Slickem that he’ll destroy himself as well. Slicken tries to order the robot to stop but it turns him into a bug. The robot has tremendous strength and power and the armies of the world are useless against it as it is indestructible and can shoot disintegrator rays from its fingers. It begins to breathe poison gas to change the atmosphere for its masters. (I thought its master was a genie who has shown that he can already breathe here. It seems this story might have been pieced together from two separate ones). Astro Boy tries to fight the robot but he fails and runs out of power. But Astro Boy tells the robot that he must also change the gravitational pull of the Earth so his masters won’t be crushed when they get here. So, the robot reverses gravity and causes himself to be propelled out into space. There is no indication as to how the changes the robot made to gravity were reversed back to normal.