Snails

            On Wednesday morning during yoga I saw a bedbug on my yoga mat. It was a baby and had no blood inside when I killed it, but this situation is getting out of hand. 

            I found the lyrics for “Le régiment des mal-aimés” (The Regiment of the Unloved) by Boris Vian and copied and pasted them into my Boris Vian song document. I started translating the song but only got the first couple of lines: “Watch them march by as they parade / the army of those who don’t get laid …” 

            I finished memorizing “L’hymne à l’amour - Moi l’ nœud” (The Hymn to Love – I’m the Node) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords, but no one had posted them and so I worked out the first few for the intro. This is a pretty simple rock song and so I don’t think it will take long to figure out how to play it. 

            I weighed 87.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I tried to call my landlord but once again there was no answer. I tried his wife’s number and she answered. I learned that Raja is in the hospital getting surgery and he won’t be out for three or four days. I remember the last time I had bedbugs eight years ago there was a period of a few weeks when I couldn’t reach the landlord. Finally, his son answered and told me his father was in the hospital because his stomach exploded. I told my neighbour Benji and he said he hadn’t known that Raja was in the hospital. He said he thinks Raja has kidney problems so maybe he’s getting a transplant. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before lunch. I had avocados and salsa with plantain chips. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. It was a grey day and uninteresting and so my ride felt longer than usual.

            I weighed 87.8 kilos at 17:30, but I didn’t like that so I tried the scale again and got 87.4 kilos.

            I got caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I finished transcribing my handwritten notes for my essay on Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. I tried to convert my pdf of Untouchable to document form but it became just a document with images and not editable text. I’ll have to find a different version. 

            I had two potatoes and some broccoli while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            This story begins in the mountains where climbers have recently met disaster but are too much in a state of shock to describe what happened. Dr Elefun and Astro Boy go to investigate. They visit the research facility of Professor Nutty Fruitcake who feeds them a delicious meal made from last years newspapers. He shows them his main project, which is growing giant fruits and vegetables but he is also experimenting with small animals. He has two gigantic snails in cages but he has a million giant snail eggs waiting to be hatched. Elefun tries to dissuade him from hatching them but he thinks doing so is a good idea. The million giant snails almost immediately turn on Fruitcake before leaving the facility and advance towards the cities. As with Godzilla and other scientifically giganticized animals, the military and the air force fail in their efforts to stop them. Astro Boy goes to a government chemical storage place and leaves with an enormous bag filled with an unspecified chemical. He flies over the million snails and begins to spread the chemical over the snails. This stops them and everyone is surprised that the chemical he used was ordinary salt.