The Maple Leaf Forever

            On Thursday morning I finished memorizing "De velours et de soie" (The Silk and the Velvet) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I'll look for the chords.

            I blog-published "Invisibility", my translation of "I'm the Boy" by Serge Gainsbourg. Tomorrow I'll start learning his song, "Harley David son of a bitch". 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I've been in the morning in two weeks. 

            I tried to work on my essay but as usual in the late morning my brain was too tired to function for that kind of problem solving. I was able to make a few small adjustments. 

            I weighed 84.5 kilos before lunch. I made guacamole with avocadoes and the last of my cilantro. Most of the bunch I had was rotten and so I had to pick through it to find the few good leaves that were left. I had it with kettle chips. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Bathurst. On the way home along Queen Street I met my neighbour Taro as I sometimes do, on his way home from his bike courier job. He said he's just started riding his touring bike. In the winter he rides his one-speed because there is less that can go wrong. That was interesting. He said the temperature is supposed to go up to 20 degrees next week. 

            I separated from Taro and turned on Gladstone to go to Freshco where the grapes were on sale so I got seven bags. I also bought blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, bananas, five-year-old cheddar, a pack of frozen basa fillets, and a box of spoon sized shredded wheat. 

            When I left the supermarket I had a melody in my head that I'd never heard before. I kept humming it until I got home and then recorded it so I wouldn't lose it. 

            I weighed 84 kilos at 17:45.

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:45. 

            I spent a little over an hour on my essay and pushed it one line into page ten. I revised my conclusion a bit: 

            Having brought his creation into the world Victor is surprised when it is not an extension of himself but rather the aesthetic Other who has no place in Victor's society. The creature's positive potential and inner beauty are meaningless because they appear on the surface as Other and must not exist. Victor therefore excludes him from participation in society, making him a monster, and consequently damning him to a life akin to that of a wild animal. Any society that does this to a thinking being, Wollstonecraft warns while quoting the French revolutionary Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, "can expect to see him at any moment transformed into a ferocious beast". This is so exactly what Victor does to his own creation that it is as if Wollstonecraft is directly addressing him when she quotes Riqueti further, "You have loosed the bull. Do you expect that he won’t use his horns?"

            I had the rest of the chili that I made a few days ago with a bowl of kettle chips. I ate while watching season 6, episode 21 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            It's January in Beverly Hills but the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing. Granny and Elly are homesick for the snow back home. When Drysdale hears of this, to keep the Clampetts and their money in Beverly Hills, he arranges with the movie studio to stage a snowstorm. They bring in plastic snow, wind machines, stuffed wolves and sound effects. He makes Jane turn the air conditioning in the Clampett house so high that it becomes like a freezer. They don't even know they have air conditioning after all these years. Jethro eats all the food but Drysdale and Jane arrive with provisions in a dog sled. But Jed figures there's something fishy when he goes out to get firewood and finds that it is warm outside. The snow doesn't melt and all the wolves are stuffed. When Granny is in another room Jed asks Drysdale what's going on. Thinking Jed will be mad, Drysdale blames it all on Jane. But Jed tells Jane that was the nicest thing anybody's ever done for Granny because it made her very happy. To keep Granny from going outside Jed tells Drysdale to pretend to be sick so Granny will be occupied doctoring him. But Granny feeds Drysdale snow ice cream made from the plastic snow. When he finds out what he's been eating he runs away. Jane makes him pull the dog sled. Still dressed as a Mountie we see him pulling the sled while a few bars of The Maple Leaf Forever are playing. I'd never noticed before how much elements of The Maple Leaf Forever sounds like Dixie. At the points where "Way down south in Dixie" and "The maple leaf forever" are sung the melody is exactly the same. It turns out that Dixie was written seven years earlier though. 

 

It's now been thirty-four days since I've found a bedbug.