I Don't Like Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil, But I Watch Them Anyway

           

            On Wednesday at 11:00 I went to the foodbank to get a number. There was already a line-up. The red faced woman with the grey hair was smoking on the fire escape, as usual. She was talking to the guy in front of me, who also had grey hair, but he wasn’t in bad shape. I guess he’d been talking about people that he doesn’t get along with and she kept saying, “I like ya!” She also told him he had a cute face. I got number eighteen and went home.

            When I came back I was annoyed to see that both sides of the bike stand on King Street, in front of the food bank were occupied. I went around to the back and locked my bike on a tree.

            The red-faced woman was still smoking on the fire escape. I don’t know if she’d ever left. As her number was about to be called, she came and stood by the door. She said to a dark haired woman who was sitting by the door, “You’re a pretty girl, eh?” She said to the door person, “Dr. Oz says carrots are good for the eyes!” The door person responded, “They’ve been saying that for years.” “I don’t know, but that’s what he says! Do you watch that Dr Phil?” “No, I don’t like watching Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil.” “I don’t really like them either, but I watch them anyway!”

            There’s usually a choice between canned soups or a carton of broth, and I always take the broth. The volunteer I had always likes it when I make that choice, but each time lists for me some of the possibilities of what I can cook with it.

            There was no milk or meat this time around, only a choice between four small flavoured soymilk drinks and a two litre carton of cranberry-Raspberry cocktail. I took the juice. There was also a weird rock-hard, flourless cake made out of grains, nuts, honey and agaves syrup. Hilariously, instead of as part of a list of ingredients, the ingredients are listed after the words, “May contain”.

            The bread lady had a replacement this time around and he gave me a lot of bagels.

            The pickings were pretty slim this time around.

            That evening I rode north to St Clair. The clouds were pleasant and soft and were gold tinted from the sunlight. To the west, with the sun shining around and through them they were much more dramatic.

            Riding east on St Clair, my shadow was stretched to the limit.

            I rode up Mt Pleasant to Millwood and through a lower middle class neighbourhood to Bayview, back down to Davisville and then west again. On the way to Yonge I found a box of books. I took Salman Rushdie’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, Douglas Coupland’s “Life After God” and Johnathan Goldstein’s “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!”

            It was dark already and I turned my front and back flashers on, which are both getting a little weak. I considered stopping to buy batteries but decided I could make it home this time, but promised myself I’d do it soon. I was worried though about my visibility all the way down Yonge Street.

            On Queen Street I felt better after passing a parking enforcement officer with a back flasher just as weak as mine. His was larger though and so more visible.

            At Bathurst and Queen there was a young drunk guy in a pork pie hat lying spread eagle on the sidewalk with his legs sticking out on the road. He wasn’t unconscious though, as I heard him talking to some people behind him who were sitting on the steps of the West Neighbourhood House.

            I watched the Buster Keaton silent film, “Neighbours”. Keaton and his girlfriend are neighbours across a courtyard, but her father doesn’t approve of them seeing each other. There are a lot of acrobatic displays on the part of Keaton as he uses the community clothesline, power lines and a wooden fence to get to her. Near the end, two guys help him elope with her from her third story window. One guy comes out of the first story window and another onto his shoulders from the second and Buster on his from the third. They cross the yard and buster carries her away on top of the two other guys.

An Ethical Dilemma About Pharmaceuticals

           

            On Tuesday, the tall TA, who we’ve been told is an expert in Victorian literature, Katherine Magyarodi, was the guest lecturer. She is the TA for group B, which she said stands for the “best” group. The professor sat in the back and only made a couple of comments through the whole two hours.
            The lecture was called, “Encoding and Decoding Violence in ‘Code Name Verity’” This was about Elizabeth Wein’s young adult novel, “Code Name Verity”. I had only made it through one-third of the book by the time of the lecture but I don’t think most of the other students had gotten that far. Brian, the student I know from the Irish songs that he sings at the Tranzac, was up to page fifty.
            Katherine began by asking what moral lessons we learn by reading literature about World War II. It turned out that not a lot of people have read World War II literature. I commented that I’ve noticed that literature written at the time of the war portrayed Germans as evil and there was a gradual softening of that view as the years passed afterwards.
            She asked us what defines children’s literature. My answer was that the characters are children, and the target age of readers tends to be the age of the characters in the stories. She asked why “Code Name Verity” would be classified as a young adult novel. Aside from the fact that the characters are in their late teens, I said that there is a sense of the military as replacing school. The characters develop as they gain more knowledge.
            We talked about the British literature that we’ve covered so far expressing colonial attitudes, such as when the Redskins in Peter Pan refer to him as “the great white father”. Hitler made the British stop thinking they were the centre of the universe.
            “Code Name Verity” communicates a process of cultural negotiation. Though the book is not about the Holocaust, it is about the world that caused it. Britain did not declare war on Germany in order to save the Jews. One of the two main characters of the book is a female Jewish pilot.
            I was thinking around this point that Katherine Magyarodi is kind of cute.
            In the first part of “Code Name Verity”, the character, Julie, is a prisoner of war who has been tortured to the point where she has agreed to tell her interrogators all she knows about the British war effort. She writes her confession in the form of a story about her relationship with Maddie, from how it began to her point of capture.
            Because of the war, there is a limited amount of stationary to write upon and so the Gestapo has to salvage various types of paper, the symbolism of which guides a different phase of the narrative. Julie’s prison is what was once a high class hotel in France, and so she begins by writing on the hotel stationary, representing a lost time of prosperity. When that runs out she is given the prescription forms of a Jewish doctor who has already probably been taken away to a camp. Julie naively envisions that the doctor will probably be breaking rocks until the war is over. The next paper that is found for her is the backs of sheet music of songs that were popular around the time that the war began. Finally she writes on recipe cards acquired from a cook in the hotel who she allowed to fondle her in exchange for the favour. As she writes, she notes that all of the people who had once owned the stationary are dead. The stories of the dead continue in their possessions.
            There is a quote from Admiral Nelson repeated throughout the book. “Kiss me Hardy” is what Nelson is reported to have said to his best friend on his deathbed after the battle of Trafalgar. A parallel is made between England’s being threatened by napoleon and by Hitler. Julie, at the time of her own death, repeats the phrase, but adds, “Kiss me quick!” The kiss being the bullet that kills her, as a kind of reverse fairy tale ending in which the kiss puts the princess to sleep.
            There are a lot of references to Peter Pan in the novel.
            I commented that the way in which Julie’s death at the hands of her interrogators keeps getting postponed as she promises more information, has a touch of Scheherazade. Katherine said that it does and her interrogator actually calls her that later on, so I was embarrassed about having only finished a third of the book.
            After class I went to Staples to buy a pack of pens and a 2016 appointment calendar.
            Then I rode up to Yonge and St Clair. On St Clair, just east of Yonge, I had stopped at a light when a young man on a bike pulled up beside me and asked if he could ask me a question. He asked what I thought of pharmacies, but the real question was what I thought of pharmaceuticals. I said it depends on the drug. I told him that millions of lives have been saved by pharmaceuticals since World War I but that some drugs might have little value. He said that he was in an ethical dilemma because he was in his second year of biology, leading up to the four-year program of study to become a pharmacist. He wasn’t sure if any of the drugs he would be pushing as a pharmacist are actually good for people because he leans towards a more natural approach. He said he’s thinking about becoming a doctor instead but that would be a lot more work. I told him that, if he becomes a pharmacist, he’ll have to work for a pharmacy and he won’t have a lot of control over what drugs people take, but if he becomes a doctor, in private practice, he will have more independence. Since either way he has to finish his second year of biology to go in either direction, I told him he has a year to think about it.
            Alternatively though, I suggested that he could always take some time off after that second year and either travel or work. I told him about my friend, Pat Rockman, who was almost thirty when she decided to start studying to become a physician. She’s now Dr. Rockman, so it’s not too late to wait a few years. I was trying to find out if there was anywhere he’d like to travel while he’s getting his head together, but he didn’t know. He was born in the Ukraine but we agreed that that’s probably not the greatest vacation spot these days. He’s nineteen and I told him he’s got lots of time.
            I asked him why he’d chosen to ask me about this, but he didn’t really know, other than that he was bursting to talk to someone.
            I rode up to Davisville and Mount Pleasant and then went east to Bayview. On one of the side streets there was a couple of guys from a small road crew, probably building a driveway, taking a nap against a couple of trees, while the guy in the little road roller was happily talking on the phone.
            I watched two Buster Keaton short films. In “Two Weeks” a couple who’ve just gotten married drive to the location of their new home where the unassembled house is delivered to them in a crate, with numbered directions as to how to put the home together. When they aren’t looking though, the vengeful guy who wanted to marry the bride switches the numbers, so that the house comes out ridiculously lopsided, with the roof on the wrong way around. A big storm comes along later that causes the building to spin like a merry-go-round. After the weather clears the house looks even worse. Then someone comes along to tell them that they had built their house on lot 99 when it should have been lot 66, across the railway tracks. So they jack the house up and roll it on barrels but it won’t go over the tracks. A train smashes it to pieces, then he puts a “for sale” sign on the wreckage and he and his bride walk away.
            The second film was “The Scarecrow”. The first part was very clever, as Buster and another man share a one-room house where they must economize on space. At dinnertime, all of the condiments and portable table items are lowered from the ceiling on strings and they have a very clever pulley system for passing things they need back and forth. In the end they pick up the tabletop, that turns out to have all the plates glued to it, and hang it on the wall to hose it down above the sink. It looked like a pretty good system to me.

Enough Cat Hair to Make a Cat

           

            On Monday I took advantage of the fact that I had a little extra money and did my laundry. It’s nearly impossible to dry anything on the deck this time of year anyway.

            I called my landlord to ask him to have the exterminator come next Monday, but he said next Monday was Thanksgiving, so I asked for Wednesday.

            Amarillo is shedding big chunks of brown hair all over the couch, so finally I vacuumed up enough for a whole other cat.

            I didn’t take a bike ride because it was cloudy and grey it would have been quite dark on the way home. Maybe I would have gone if I’d been cooped up all day, but having gone back and forth to the Laundromat three times, I felt like I’d been out.

            I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle film, “The Cook”. It starts off in a restaurant with the normal ridiculous antics of Arbuckle and Keaton, but then it gets bizarre as Roscoe leaves work and gets into a goat cart to join other rush hour traffic of nothing but goat carts moving throughout the city and being directed by traffic cops.

            I watched “Convict 13”, one of the first films to be directed and written by Buster Keaton. He begins by playing golf, but plays so badly that he follows the ball far off course to the outside of a prison, where he hits the ball against the wall but it bounces back and knocks him out. Meanwhile an escaping prisoner discovers him lying there and switches clothes with him. Keaton is then of course mistaken for prisoner 13, who is scheduled to hang that day. At the hanging, all the other prisoners are sitting and cheering on bleachers like at a baseball game, ordering hot dogs and drinks. The guards were not successful in hanging him because he bounced a lot like on the end of a bungee cord, so they put off the execution and put him to breaking rocks, which he started doing very delicately until the guard insisted that he swing the hammer, which of course knocked out the guard. Buster exchanged clothes with the guard and prevented a prison riot so he was promoted to assistant warden.

Chim Chimney Chim Chimney Chim Chim Cher-ee

           

            On Sunday I left my place at around 8:15 to go and meet my friend Paul Valliere, in his secret identity as mild mannered chimney guy, Bill Rundle. He and his son Daniel were going to be destroying the chimney of a building on Harbord, near Spadina, but it was next to an alley and they needed someone to either stop traffic or direct it to the part of the laneway farthest from possible falling chunks.

            On my way there, along Harbord, I heard two beeps as a beat up old pick-up truck with a ladder tied to the back passed me. Although I’d never seen Paul/Bill’s truck before, I knew it was him.

            We met at about 8:45 behind the work site. Paul had brought his dog, Kira along. Luckily she was wearing a muzzle because when I went to pat her she tried to bite me. I’d patted her a couple of weeks before at Paul’s apartment, but I guess the context was different, plus I had been sitting down before, and threat perception probably changes according to how tall the animal we are encountering happens to be.

            Paul? Bill’s son arrived in a fairly new four-by-four, which when parked beside Bill/Paul’s old pick-up, illustrated the difference between their two personalities. Paul/Bill is a “let’s play it by ear” type of guy, whereas Daniel is a perfectionist and wants to have a plan for success.

            We met the guy who hired Bill (He doesn’t know Paul). He looks like “Hardball” host, Chris Matthews. He’s a real estate agent with whom Bill/Paul has done business for many years. We went upstairs to look at the chimney from where it was accessed on the rooftop patio. It was quite a nice townhouse, with a bookshelf stretching along almost the whole of one wall of the second floor. Just outside on the patio though there was a big pile of raccoon shit.

            Before they started on the chimney they had to transfer some brick pieces from Daniel’s truck to Bill/Paul’s truck, I guess because his truck would be taking the pieces from this chimney so they might as well all be together. They didn’t ask me to help, but I did anyway. I would have felt stupid just standing around.

            My job was to stand in the alley and to direct cars, cyclists and pedestrians to swing out closer to the wall of the building opposite, just in case stuff came down on top of them. If I couldn’t get people out of the way I was supposed to yell, “Stop!” to Paul/Bill and Daniel. For the most part, everyone obeyed my directions, but one stopped in the middle of the alley, rolled down its window and the people inside wanted to know what was going on. The woman asked why they didn’t have pylons lined up to guide traffic. I said, “Because they have me!” She said, “You’re doing a great job!” and they drove away. I guess I should have shouted to the guys above me to stop while they had pulled over though. They kind of distracted me and I forgot.

            Another person who did obey my directions, stopped after swerving out, rolled down her window and said, “Christian!” It was Maria Gabankova, a painting instructor that I’d worked for over a period of many years at OCADU. She was with her husband, who I think is also a Czech artist. Though they live near Lansdowne and Dundas, they apparently go to church in the Spadina and Harbord area and they were driving around looking for a parking space. It always surprises me when artists go to church. She said she doesn’t teach at OCADU anymore, and though she misses the students, she said the school has changed.

            After the first hour we took a break and Paul/Bill gave me one of his chicken salad sandwiches.

            Although quite a few little red brick chips did fall in the alley, only a couple of pieces came down that could have scratched a car or a person. Bill/Paul had expected it to be raining brick chunks but Daniel had brought a stone saw and cut away large sections of the outside of the chimney, so a lot less hammering had to be done.

            Once the chimney was gone they had to cover it but the piece of stone tile that Daniel had brought was too small, so he went someplace to get a bigger one, while Paul/Bill sent me for coffee. On the way to Harbord Bakery, I passed a bookstore called Caversham that specializes entirely in psychology. The list of subjects printed in white on the window was amusing. They included, “Dreams, death, divorce, obsession, depression, paranoia …” and the list went on.

            It had been quite cold in the alley until the sun swung up and around to chase the shadows away. It was pleasant in the end to sit with a coffee on the nice patio from which one could see the top of Robarts Library.

            Paul/Bill is hoping to get tickets to the upcoming Black Sabbath concert. He told me that the band is doing okay, since they are worth a hundred million these days. I said that the Osbornes reality show probably didn’t hurt the band, as well as the Iron Man movie, which features their old song, “Iron Man”.

            Paul/Bill had promised me fifty dollars cash for my help, but ended up giving me eighty. I don’t know what I did for it but it was nice to have it and kind of fun to hang out with Paul Valliere in his secret identity.

            On the way home I stopped at No Frills to buy a few food items I haven’t been able to buy for a while. I also splurged on a coffee filter so I could stop messing up the kitchen counter while making coffee with a funnel and some paper towel. I say, “splurged” even though it only cost a dollar for the filter. If I’d known that I could have bought one when my French press broke back in the summer. Since I didn’t know, I didn’t even bother to go into the section where they might sell them until I had the money to pay more.

            That night I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle silent film, “His Wedding Day”. Roscoe runs a soda fountain and he and his girlfriend are getting married, but another suitor wants her. She rejects him and he’s pretty upset about it. She has ordered her wedding dress and Buster Keaton delivers it. She wants to see how it looks and so she asks Buster to try it on and model it for her. Meanwhile the rejected Romeo gets his gang together and plots to kidnap the bride. Of course they end up kidnapping Buster Keaton instead.

Gassy Abdomen

           

            On Saturday morning I had an appointment to get an abdominal ultrasound at Bathurst and Bloor. I had to fast and only drink sips of water from midnight until 10:30.

The yellow form that I had been given by my doctor’s nurse said that it was on the third floor. The third floor hallway was full of Jamaican guys of various ages. I don’t really know what they were doing there. I guess medical imaging doesn’t take up the whole third floor, and these guys didn’t look like they were waiting for a procedure. Anyway, it turned out that I had the wrong floor. The x-ray people told me to go to the fifth floor, but I went to the nearest open room from the elevator, which had nothing but Chinese people in it and Chinese signs on the walls. As soon as I saw the expression on the receptionist’s face upon seeing me, I knew I was in the wrong place. I asked her if this was room 507. She told me it was down the hall. When I went out in the hall, I felt pretty stupid because at the end of the hall was a big sign shouting “507”.

            The only person ahead of me was a woman with a baby carriage. The receptionist took my health card and I didn’t see it until several minutes later when the technician, a middle aged woman with an eastern European accent, called me. She was the first white person I’d seen since entering the building, and I wondered absurdly if white people don’t usually need medical imaging.

            She had me pull up my shirt to my chest and pull down my pants to my groin. She had me lie down, poured a cold, slippery, translucent gel over my belly and began to move the ultrasound wand around, pressing fairly hard as she went. She kept on asking me to take deep inhalations and hold them. At one point I had to face the wall and twist my upper body back towards her, and at another I was on my right side. Finally she had me sit up so she could look at my pancreas. Finally I had a view of the screen. It was like a moving Rorschach test in 3-D or fabric being slowly torn underwater or ghostly images emerging from out of a thick fog and then disappearing again. 

            She commented that my abdomen is very gassy, thus making it difficult to see what’s going on. I asked if it was gassier than average and she laughed and said, “I would say so!” I asked her if diet would cause that but she answered that it’s probably just that I have a slower metabolism and don’t digest food as quickly.

            She said that my doctor would have the radiologist’s report in three business days.

            Shortly after getting home I took a siesta so I’d be fresh to finish writing my prose analysis of a passage from Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”, which had to be submitted electronically before midnight.

            I was done with the assignment before that evening and sent it in. There would have been time to take a bike ride, but I decided to stay home.

            I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle silent film, “The Garage”. It begins with Roscoe washing the windows on the inside of a car and then to wash the outside he simply pokes his head through, revealing that there’s no glass at all. The garage of this small town also serves as the fire station. The garage owner’s daughter is being courted by a young man who brings her a bouquet, but while the guy is holding the flowers behind his back, Roscoe is doing some work that gets oil all over the bouquet so that when the daughter smells them, her face is blackened. She is then mad at her boyfriend and refuses to see him. To get her alone, the boyfriend sounds the fire alarm and so Roscoe and Buster go out looking for the fire. Meanwhile, the boyfriend accidentally sets fire to the firehouse.

He Hit A Moose With His Motorbike

           

            My daughter and I were moving into a new apartment in a building that had an elevator with glass doors. I had met an attractive black haired woman who was wearing a red sweater and we were descending in the elevator together to the ground floor, where Astrid was waiting. I talked the woman into helping me play a trick on my daughter. We were to be amorously holding hands when Astrid saw us, but I took it one step further and had my arm around her when we got to the lobby. Astrid looked at us with a bored expression and said to me, “You and I need to have a little chat!” Then I woke up.
            On Friday morning I called my doctor’s office to inquire about my notebook and pen and was relieved that they’d found them. That pen is one of the only ones I have with ink still in it. I think I’ll have to buy another pack while I’m downtown on Tuesday.
            Shelly came to my yoga class that afternoon. I didn’t teach her a regular class though, as she’s backed up on certain exercises that have caused her pain. It’s so hard to try to help people with movement related issues if they don’t know their limitations and can’t communicate them. We worked out a few exercises for her legs, but she’s not sure if she’s going to be coming regularly again until she feels more mobile.
            After class, I headed to Dr Shechtman’s office, and got there around 16:00 but the door was locked. The nurse called out, “We’re closed!” I called back about my book and she asked, “Are you Christian Christian?” and when I confirmed that I was, she let me in. I expressed surprise that they closed so early on a Friday, when most places are open later. She explained that they close early on Fridays because, and for some reason, she lowered her voice to almost a whisper when she said, “He’s a Jewish doctor! He’s got to go home!” I guess if Dr Shechtman is a practicing Jew he has to be home well before sunset to get cleaned up and change into nice clothes before dinner.
            I rode up Bathurst and then across St Clair to Mt Pleasant and then north to Baliol and west to Bayview. On Baliol, I passed an interesting antique truck and so I stopped to take some photos. The owner was outside doing something and so I asked him if it was okay to take pictures. If he hadn’t been there I would have taken them anyway, but he was more than okay with it. He gave me a guided tour of the truck and the whole story on how he got it. It’s a 1946 Chevy three-quarter ton truck with a flatbed. It needs a lot of work but he said it’ll only cost him $8,000 to fix it up. I think he said he bought it in Florida for $1,000 and towed it here from there behind his SUV.
            He’s got four other antique trucks behind his house and has a parking space for one more. It was actually hard to get away from the guy. He went on for about half an hour talking about his house and his life. He’s a retired high school teacher and taught his whole life at George Vanier Secondary School on Don Mills Rd between Sheppard and Finch. He also has two motorcycles that aren’t antiques and a few years ago while driving one of them in Alaska he hit and killed a moose. The damage to his bike was about $1,000 but the damage to his body cost him $1,000 a day in a hospital in Anchorage.
            He was amazed that I ride my bike from Parkdale to his area.
            That night I watched two Roscoe Arbuckle silent films. “Coney Island” started with Arbuckle on the beach and trying to get away from his boring wife. When she wasn’t looking, he buried himself in the sand so that when she went looking for him he escaped and went to the amusement park where he met a girl who was being courted by two other men, ends up in jail, but wins in the end as usual. The other movie was called “Rough House” in which he played a rich guy named Mr Rough, whose mother in law is visiting. At one point his bed catches fire, but when he sees it he goes to the kitchen in long slow trips to get several cups of coffee with which to put out the fire. Once, halfway back to the fire he absent-mindedly drinks the coffee and has to return to the kitchen for more.

You're a Neanderthal!

           

            When I arrived in the lecture hall on Thursday, there was a soft, blue, zippered lunchbox under the seat behind me. I picked it up and gave it to the professor of the student who must have forgotten it. A few minutes later the owner of the case came looking for it. When I told her what I’d done, she put her hand on her chest and said, “Thank you so much!”

            In her lecture, Professor Baker continued to talk about Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”.

            The narrator in the book, unlike in Peter Pan, is an ally of the children.

            The series, featuring the same main characters, has several stories over each a different summer, but the children are always the same age every year. There is never much time related anxiety within the stories. They know at the end that summer’s over but they are already looking forward to the next holiday.

            All of the stories are drawn from Ransome’s own reminiscences of the favourite part of his childhood, the summer vacation.

            Every adventure that the Walker children have is always within the bounds of parental permission, but they are given total freedom within those bounds. Danger only comes when they venture to the edge of that permission, like when they sail their boat at night. They remain safe because they have internalized that which their parents have taught them and because they maintain a hierarchy similar to that of the British navy, with the ranks applied according to age. John is the captain, Susan is the first mate, Titty is the able seaman and Roger is the ship’s boy. The Blackett sisters however, do disobey their mother, with no ill consequences.

            The children are inspired by British traditions of colonization. They think of the island they camp on as theirs because it was uninhabited when they made camp. The Blackett children use the argument that it is there’s because they have been camping there all their lives and also they claim it because they named it. At the height of the empire, Britain laid claim to one-seventh of the planet. Those who went to live in the colonies could no longer feel that Britain was their home, and there is a hint of this with the children, when they visit their mother across the lake, on the mainland.

After class on Thursday I went to Robarts Library to look for Elizabeth Wein’s “Code Name Verity”. I saw it listed in the catalogue with code “F-WEI”, so I went to the tenth floor, where the “F” coded books are. I looked all around, but couldn’t find and “W”s after “F”. Nothing went past “D”. Finally I asked someone and was told that the whole floor consisted of law books. I went back downstairs to the computer and realized that I hadn’t checked which library had the book. It was the University of Toronto Schools library. I went to the address and found that it’s a high school. At the office they said, their librarian would sometimes let a U of T student take a book if it’s not available in any other U of T library, but if it’s merely “out” elsewhere, they want only their high school students to have access to the books.

            Since I was in the neighbourhood, I went to the Admissions office to find out if I need another fee deferral letter for January since I only received half my grant. I was told that I could just ignore the emails reminding me that I have a balance in my student account. That was a relief.

            I went to the bank to take out my rent money, my phone plan money and some extra to buy Code Name Verity”, then I went to the Willow bookstore on Bloor, but they didn’t have it. I went to BMV and they didn’t have it either.

            I was mostly hanging around the area because I had a doctor’s appointment for 13:45 because I wanted to see him about getting a skin tag that’s gotten painful removed from my butt. I’ve had it for a few years but haven’t tried to get it removed, as I knew that would cost money because it’s considered to be cosmetic surgery. I was thinking that now that it hurts, the removal might not be cosmetic. Dr. Shechtman said that there was a skin tag that was near the other one and it broke off and that’s what’s been causing my irritation. He said the skin tag I’ve had for years couldn’t be causing me pain but he’d remove it for twenty-five dollars. He said though that it’s not that hard to remove oneself. I could just tie a thread very tightly around its base and keep it there until the skin tag finally falls off. Maybe I’ll try that if I can see to tie it.

            When I left Bloor Medical I headed east along Bloor to look for the Bob Miller Book Room. The guy in the Willow told me indifferently that it was before Avenue Road. I rode to Bay but didn’t see it on the south side, so I got off my bike to cross over and head west again. In front of me there was a man in perhaps his late sixties in a bright green shirt and holding a takeout cup of coffee. He turned to the young woman on my left and asked her if she was cold. She told him that she was, a little bit. Then he turned and asked me, “How about you? Are you cold?” I said I was okay. He responded, “Well, of course you are! Look at you! You’re a Neanderthal! You’re all set!” Just before the light changed he commented, “At least I’ve go my coffee!”

            I rode west and finally saw the tiny sign for the Bob Miller Book Room. I went inside the office building that had the sign, and the security guard directed me to the basement. I walked around the store, but couldn’t find Code Name Verity until someone asked if she could help me. She showed me the book, and I told her that I’d had a hell of a time finding their store. She admitted they were well hidden. I looked at the book, but I was just checking the price before going to young street and seeing if it was in the adult fiction sections of ABC or Eliot’s. I went there and it wasn’t so I just went back to Bob Miller to pay the $12.95.

            After all that riding, I decided not to take a long bike ride up to Yonge and Baliol, so I just went home.

            Later on I went to look at my lecture notes from class but couldn’t find them. I realized at that point that I’d forgotten them and a pen in my doctor’s office. It was too late to get them that evening, so I just hoped they’d be there when I called the next day.

            I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle silent film, “Goodnight Nurse”. It opens with Arbuckle drunk on a city street in a rainstorm. He keeps trying to light a cigarette but of course the rain keeps putting the fire out. There’s a cop and another drunk nearby and then a couple of street musicians, a guy with a trombone and a woman with a tambourine, come along. Roscoe puts some change in the woman’s tambourine and tells them to play the national anthem. Both the other drunk and the cop stand up and take their hats off and so Roscoe goes over to the cop and lights his cigarette under his hat.

            The main story is that Roscoe enters a sanitarium that claims it can cure alcoholism through surgery. Most of Arbuckle’s time is spent trying to escape. He steals the uniform of a very large nurse but while he’s walking down the hall, one of the doctors, played by Buster Keaton begins to flirt with him. Flirtation scenes are hilarious in silent films because they are so drawn out and involve a lot of gesturing, eye contact, sudden looking away, running ones and over objects and sticking one’s finger in one’s mouth, smiling and waving the other person away, etcetera.