Ladder to a Fall

            On Sunday morning I memorized the second verse and refrain of “Ballade Comestible” (Edible Ballad) by Serge Gainsbourg and revised my translation.

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            I started to try to read some more of "Planetarity" but I felt tired early again and so I took a siesta at noon. 

            I dreamed that I had to climb an extremely high ladder to get to an event related to my Global Modernisms course and once I was there, I was flagged as a person of interest in the murder of one of the authors we are studying. I recall a dream before that in which I was involved in the murder but had thought that I’d covered my involvement completely. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch. 

            I took an early bike ride and made sure I peed before I left but by the time I was on Yonge Street, it was fairly clear that I wasn’t going to make it. Just west of Queen and University I stopped at the Rex Hotel, but the main bar seems to be closed on Sunday. I went around to the side entrance for the jazz club, but they require proof of a covid self-check and I didn’t have time for that. I continued to John Street and thought I’d go into Starbucks, but it was crowded, and I anticipated a line-up for the washroom, so I continued on to Spadina and stopped at The Horseshoe, where the bartender was extremely welcoming, and I had no problem finding relief. 

            At the corner of Spadina and Queen, three people were singing gospel songs with electric guitar accompaniment. They all looked like alcoholics and they weren’t very good, but they were having a good time and it keeps them off the street. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos at 16:30. 

            I felt tired again at 17:00 and slept for another hour. 

            My muscles are still aching because of my fast and my back is sore. 

            I worked on my essay but it’s not much more than a quarter of the page count it needs to be. 

            I am halfway through Gayatri Spivak’s “Planetarity”. She has the same take on the Congo River in Heart of Darkness being a vagina that I did when I first read the novel. 

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

            In this story a strange ship appears in the lab in front of Astro Boy and Mr. Pompus. A boy named Teddy Tyme emerges who says he’s from the future and looking for his father to stop him from collecting samples of humans from different eras to put on display in the 23rd Century. Astro Boy and Pompus decide to travel with Teddy and help him stop his father. They first land in Asia in an ancient time. A native is sucked into one of the tubes of the ship, but Pompus throws him back out and they continue back through time. They land in one of the ice ages. Astro Boy fights a mammoth, then Pompus and Teddy are confronted by two cavemen with tails. Teddy subdues them with a tranquilizer gun. Pompus wants to try out the weapon but winds up tranquilizing himself and Teddy. They are captured by the cave people who are ruled by a beautiful queen and their language seems to consist of “Bababababa ….” One of the cavemen draws a picture of Pompus on the cave wall. They are taken to an arena that is far too sophisticated for prehistoric men. Just like in a Roman colosseum they are placed in the middle and instead of lions, sabertoothed tigers are released. Astro Boy arrives to defeat the tigers and carry Teddy and Pompus back to the time machine. They go back to the time of dinosaurs where Astro Boy saves a mother brontosaurus from a tyrannosaurus rex. But then a volcano erupts, and Astro Boy falls down a chasm onto a magnetic rock where he is trapped because his robot body can’t move while a river of lava is slowly making its way towards him. Meanwhile Teddy and Pompus find Teddy’s father, who has just captured one of the mother dinosaur’s children. He also has a child from the cave man tribe. Teddy tries to persuade him to stop his cruel activities. Just as the lava is about to reach Astro Boy the mother dinosaur saves him. But another dinosaur has gotten into Teddy’s father’s time machine and begins wreaking havoc in the future. Astro takes Teddy’s ship to stop the dinosaur. He brings Teddy’s father back and as usual the bad guy is sorry and says he was wrong. Since Astro Boy will live a long time, he promises to visit Teddy in the 23rd Century. In the present time a cave drawing is found that is a portrait of Pompus’s face.