Biting an Apple Sticker

beside the café
the homeless wind

goes through the garbage

            On Saturday morning, while I was practicing playing and singing my songs, an elderly woman with a permanent scowl walked, zombielike up Dunn Avenue and across Queen Street to the Coffeetime, as she does every morning. I usually see her several minutes later, crossing and walking back down Dunn. This time though she went directly across the street, opposite my place, with her cigarette and her coffee, and stood there for a while. The heat was on very high in my building and so I had both of my living room windows open. I was singing my song “One Hundred Hookers” and though the guitar has proven to be audible at that distance I don’t know if the lyrics can be heard across the street. Suddenly though, the woman looked up at my window, extended her arm over her head and began waving at me dramatically from side to side from side to side, while shouting, “Heeeeeeey! Heeeeeeey! Heeeeeeey!” several times. Then she stepped off the sidewalk, just a little toward me, and squatted with her knees far apart while comically miming the strumming of a guitar. Then she straightened up, put her scowl back on, but stood there finishing her cigarette while nodding her head in time to the song I was playing. After that she walked like a zombie back towards the donut shop, without looking up at me at all.

While eating a delicious apple, my enjoyment disappeared when I noticed that I had already bitten off and swallowed half of the sticker.

I spent most of Saturday working on my Children’s Literature term essay. It’s always a slow process to find a thesis out of the writing that I just throw down spontaneously at first, but I think I finally found it. Now I need to pull all of the ideas into harmony with the thesis.

I watched the last of the Sid Caesar collections that I’d downloaded. Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Danny and Neil Simon were all writers on Caesar’s Hour. Allen said that he learned everything he knows about comedy from Danny Simon. Apparently, Carol Burnett went to every single rehearsal of the show when she was honing her skills as a comedienne.

Pork Shoulder

           

            On Friday at 12:30 I met my TA to discuss the mark she gave me on my first essay and to talk about my plans for the second essay. I told her that I’ve gotten at least an A minus for the last several essays and it seems to me that I’m a better writer of essays now than I was when I started getting A minuses. I said that I could only conclude one of two things from the B that she gave me: either I’ve sustained brain damage or she’s wrong. She tried to explain to me where I lost marks, but all I could see from that were the reasons why I didn’t get a solid A. I told her that I’m going to get Professor Baker to reassess my essay. I realize though that it could potentially result in a lower mark, but I’m willing to take the chance. I respect Baker’s opinion and have found that her explanations make more sense than Christina’s.

            I told Christina that I’d be writing my second essay on the use of talking animals as a literary technique. Putting talking animals into literary works as characters allows an author to communicate a sense of otherness which can serve as a vessel into which can be projected human qualities that would not be as believable if associated with a character in human form. Placing several species of talking animals in a story can be used effectively to either create tension or a sense of harmony around a given issue. I also want to explore how and why more than one level of anthropomorphism is sometimes used in talking animal stories, such as in “Frog and Toad Are Friends” where Frog and Toad wear clothing while the other animals in the story do not.

            I finally got the direct deposit for my last couple of weeks of work. I took out $200 and went to No Frills where I got a three kilo pork shoulder for $6.66. They already have some inflated Christmas decorations hanging from the ceiling there and I commented to the check-out girl, “That’s just wrong! Putting Christmas decorations up this early!” She said, “I know! I don’t even want to think about Christmas yet!”

            On my way down O’Hara, a grey and black striped cat crossed my path that was so fat its belly swung underneath it as it walked.

            I rubbed the pork shoulder in mesquite, salt and pepper, put it in a roasting pan with a cup of water, a sliced onion and some bay leaves, covered it and put it in the oven at 120 celsius for two and a half hours. I boiled some potatoes while yellow beans and snow peas were steaming on top, then I mashed them all together with salt, pepper and margarine. It was a good meal.

            I finished watching “Sid Caesar: the Magic of Live TV”. The funniest skit was the parody of “This Is Your Life”, called “This Is Your Story”. Sid is selected from the audience and he puts up a wicked fight. Then when they bring out people from his past there is so much hugging and kissing that he has to be constantly pulled apart. Then a beautiful woman is brought out and Sid immediately begins to passionately kiss her until Carl Reiner asks him to tell the audience who she is. Sid says, “I have no idea, but it’s alright with me!” and then he starts to kiss her again.

Sid Caesar

            

            On Thursday in Children’s Literature, Professor Baker informed us that Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s “The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters” would not be available form the publisher until after the course is over. She said that she will still lecture on the book, but we will not be tested on it. That’s the only one of the remaining books of which I couldn’t find an electronic copy. She’s probably going to have to bump something anyway, the way she gets caught up with certain books in her lectures and doesn’t cover everything she’s originally planned.

            Later that night she sent us a message that “The Jolly Postman” has arrived at the Bob Miller Bookroom. I checked a couple of the U of T libraries and found that they have the book there, so I probably won’t bother buying it.

            Case in point, in this lecture we were supposed to talk about James Marshall’s “George and Martha” and Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Are Friends”, but we didn’t get to Frog and Toad at all.

            James Marshall said of drawing that there is only one place within a frame where an image belongs, and if it’s not there it is misplaced.

            The only story from George and Martha that we talked about was “The Tub”. It begins with the sentence, “George was fond of peeking through windows.” The next image shows George standing and looking in Martha’s window while she is taking a bath. The next shows her having somehow tossed the bathtub through the window onto George’s head, as she says, “We are friends, but there is such a thing as privacy!” I said that I can’t help but associate George and Martha with George and Martha Washington. I think it’s possible that George symbolizes government and Martha the people, and that this is a story about government spying on its own people. A lot of people laughed appreciatively when I said that.

            Since Orkin treated my place eight days ago, I have only seen one bedbug crawling on my wall, and that was three days later. When I killed it, it was black and dry inside. I decided on Thursday afternoon to do a search of my bedroom and I found two more living but sick looking bedbugs. I called the landlord and told him that it’s better to be safe, so he’s going to order one more treatment.

            That night I started watching the Sid Caesar Collection: the Magic of Live TV”. “The Seven Dwarfs” skit had some funny moments. There was a hundred dollar bet as to whether or not there was a dwarf named “Weepy”. Finally Sid called up Walt Disney studios, somehow got Walt Disney on the phone and asked him. All we could hear was Sid’s end of the conversation: “Oh … Well does your wife know?”

            The most impressive thing that I’ve seen from Sid Caesar so far was from the show that led to “Your Show of Shows”. It was “Five Dollar Date” from “The Admiral Broadway Review” in 1949. He compares a date in 1939 to a date in 1949, and barely taking a moment to breathe, he plays all the parts of the guy, the girl, the cab drivers, the waiters, and etcetera and he sings it. It was manic

All Men Are Children?

           

            On Wednesday just before 11:00 I headed down to the foodbank. The Second Harvest truck was getting unloaded when I arrived so the line-up was shifted to extend the other way into the driveway. At the front of the line was an elderly couple that look either Japanese or Korean. The man looked much older than his wife, as she was looking ready for a hike with her backpack on, while he was sitting while waiting in his rolator walker. I noticed that his walker was fitted on the sides with laced raw leather, that had pockets with zippers added. There was also a hanging case of the same material fitting perfectly one of his electronic devices. This did not look like industrial work because too much love had gone into it, so I’m assuming that either he or his wife had done it. I suspected her though because she looked like a crafty one. While I was waiting, I asked three people at three different times not to smoke in line and to various degrees they all complied. One palsied guy with a walker at first put out his cigarette entirely but I told him he didn’t have to do that. I said I would hold his place in line and he could smoke his cigarette farther away. A few minutes later he did light up, but just backed up a bit to a position that made very little difference in terms of the second hand smoke that came my way. I didn’t tell him twice as he might not have had the ability to understand. One of the reception volunteers came out and stood in front of the door to quickly drink her coffee and smoke a cigarette before going back inside. I didn’t even bother to say anything to her because I think there’s an almost impenetrable sense of privilege that the smoking staff members have about their habit. Something like, “Look at the good work I’m doing, then shut up and let me have my cigarette!” 

            While I was one of five clients lined up inside to get a number, one of the volunteers came up from the basement where he’d been putting away some of the stuff they’d just gotten from Second harvest, and told Joe that he’d just slipped and fallen on the water that’s leaking onto the freezer floor. Joe said that he’d hurt his back down there a few days ago. The volunteer said, “You’ve got to do something about that water!” but then he clarified that he didn’t mean Joe had to personally do something about it. I got number twenty and went home.

            My next-apartment neighbour was standing in front of my building, and as I was unlocking the door I told him that my bedbugs might finally be gone, as I haven’t seen any for a week. He then started offering me his theories about where the bedbugs could have come from in the first place. He said that the homeless friend of Sundar the superintendent, that comes to stay with him sometimes, could have brought them in. I told him that is was my upstairs neighbour, David, that, last year, first reported having bedbugs. This inspired him to begin a long list of complaints about David: that the third floor hallway is lined with junk that he’s brought home but which won’t fit in his apartment; that he brings people in to stay with him all the time, including prostitutes. Then my neighbour slightly lowered his voice and said of David, “I think he’s a little bit …” and then he held out his hand, palm down and twisted it back and forth. I asked what that meant and he explained that he thinks David is Gay, adding that one can tell by the way he walks and the way he talks. Frankly, I’d always thought the guy I was talking to was Gay. In the eighteen years that we’ve lived in the same building I haven’t even seen him speak to someone of the same sex. But if David really is Gay, I’m a bit insulted. Though I’m not interested, he could at least have asked if I was. What am I, chopped liver?

            My neighbour also surprised me with the report that our superintendent, Sundar, had moved out and up the street to the West Lodge apartments. Apparently he has a bad leg and he can’t climb the stairs to his apartment on the third floor anymore without a lot of pain. I wonder if he’ll continue to manage our place and collect the rent.

            A couple of hours later when I was back at the foodbank, the friendly male volunteer with the same wool cap he always wears (I assume there are dreadlocks underneath), called my number. He said, he’d noticed that I was reading another children’s book. I explained that I’m taking a Children’s Literature course at U of T and that I’m working on an essay about the use of talking animals as a literary device. He mentioned in response that the recent winner of the Giller prize had written a book about talking dogs and added that writing can help a person get $100,000. I had to look it up later, but he was talking about Andre Alexis’s “Fifteen Dogs”. I studied Alexis’s short story, “Kuala Lumpur” last year as part of my Canadian Short Stories course. It was quite a powerful and funny piece about a boy trying to deal with his father’s death at a West Indian-Canadian wake.

            I found a box of All Bran Flakes behind a wall of sugared cereal. When I’d made all my other selections from the first section, my first volunteer called across to Sue in the cold section, “One adult!” “I know!” she responded. As I walked up to her, I told her, “I’m an adult, but I’m also a child!” There was a choice between a litre of chocolate milk and two tubs of flavoured yogourt. Sue said, “All men are” as she put the chocolate milk into my bag, “but most of them won’t admit it!” Then she put the yogourt in my bag and said, “I’m going to give you extra for admitting it!”

            According to imago relationship theory, we all enter into relationships with the unconscious desire to have our childhood wounding healed by our partner. Sue is a very outgoing woman, so it seems natural that she would perceive men as children. I would say though that if we are paying attention we will see both the parent and the needy child in the other.

            There was also another medium sized whole pizza from Pizza Pizza. This one had a little more flavour when heated up because it had the added topping of bacon.

            When I got home, I gathered up the empties I’d collected from my two neighbours and took them to the Beer Store. About ten of the beer bottles had been carried in from the States, so though they could recycle them, they couldn’t pay me for them, and so I only got three dollars and change. I wanted coffee and margarine though, so I went to the bank to get twenty dollars and then went to Freshco.

I started down the aisle that had the coffee and passed a young guy stocking some diapers, when a package got out of hand, as diapers do, and tumbled. He caught it just as I was passing him. Nice catch!” I commented. “Thanks!” he responded proudly.

I stepped into a very long express checkout line-up, but looked over and saw a very short line a few counters away, so I stepped over there, only to find of course that there was a sign indicating that she was going off duty. When I went back to the express, there was a little white haired elderly woman who asked in a Germanic accent if I hadn’t just been in line there. I said I had, but she didn’t offer me her place. She left her basket in her place and went looking for something. As the line progressed, I kicked her basket forward for her. When she was checking out her items, she asked that some gourmet sausages she had selected be left till last. When it was the last item, the counterperson was about to run it through when the old woman said again to leave it till last. The checkout girl said, “This is the last item!” I said, “I think she means separate!” The woman confirmed that that was it. It turned out that she just wanted to make sure she had enough money to pay for the extra treat. So the checkout girl told her how much it was, the woman said she’d take it and the counterperson shook her head in mild annoyance.

I took a siesta in the afternoon that was interrupted by my vibrating phone. It was someone from OCADU asking if I could come in that night to replace another model that’d cancelled. I had planned on staying in and working on my essay but I can’t turn down work when there’s so little, so I accepted the job. I still had time to go back to bed for an hour but I was lying there with the kind of taste of burnt air in my throat that I get when the heat is on too high. The thing was though that the heat wasn’t on. It wasn’t noticeable on the bike ride to work but as soon as I was inside again I had the same taste. I was wondering if it was the symptom of some serious problem.

I worked for Keiran Brent on the sixth floor. He had me do a reclining pose and there was a space on the stage set aside for another model that would be coming in the next week. The students were to leave room in their composition for the other model. I asked Keiran if he had been a student of Richard Robertson, because that was something that he often did after the college dropped the budget for hiring two models for one class. He said he had been one of Richard’s students, and he really missed those classes of doing large drawings. Richard’s students had worked on very large drawing boards, doing full figure drawings that were life size or larger. I commented that Richard’s teaching style was very energetic, like that of an athletic coach. He said that Richard’s drawings were very athletic as well. He said that since Richard Robertson retired he seems to have kept a low profile and doesn’t even show his work in galleries.

When I got home from work I heated up half of the bacon and cheese pizza and watched the rest of “Sid Caesar Fan Favourites”. I think the best skit was the game show parody, “Break Your Brains” in which Carl Reiner played the exuberant host and Caesar played the returning champion who had won twenty five times in a row. He’d gotten beaten and robbed several times between shows because they always gave him his winnings in cash. At one point they brought in another returning champion who had won a total of one million dollars on the show. When asked if had changed her she said it hadn’t but for some strange reason all of her friends have changed, to become poorer and more boring. She and Sid were in separate soundproof booths but they kept removing the air from Sid’s Booth. At one point, the host said that, unknown to Sid’s character; they had flown to the studio his father, who he hadn’t seen in thirty years. If Sid won the next challenge he would be surprised with a reunion with his father, but if he lost he would never see his father again.

Feijoada

           

            On Tuesday there were no classes at U of T because of the two day mid-term break that started on November 9. I spent most of the day starting my term essay. Of the eleven topics offered, I immediately went ahead with writing on the subject of talking animals as a literary device because it’s the one I’ve been thinking about for a while. I managed to put down almost three pages of ideas, though they’re not in the form of an essay yet. I still have two full days and a bit before my appointment with my TA at 12:30 on Friday. I want to have something of the essay to show her then and I also want to give her a chance to explain to me why I had such a low mark of 75% on my first essay. If I don’t feel educated after our talk I’ll be taking the essay to Professor Baker to ask for a reassessment.

            I didn’t go out for a bike ride because I wanted to make progress with the essay, but I wouldn’t have gone anyway because of the rain.

            The last time I was at the foodbank I got a can of something called feijoada, which is type of Portuguese stew made from kidney beans and pork, so that night I had it for dinner on top of some baked potatoes. It was actually pretty good, though I bumped it up a notch with some salsa.

            I watched a few skits from the Sid Caesar Fan Favourites collection. In one of them, Caesar plays a Mexican bullfighter. At the end of the skit he’s just gotten gored by the bull and he’s dying. His friends are gathered around him and they ask him why he didn’t kill the bull. He answered that he’d realized that “the bulls are out there just trying to make a living like you and me!” He has a series of last requests: a kiss, a puff from a cigar, a shot of tequila, and then he asks for an American cheese sandwich but changes his mind because he had cheese for lunch. He said he’d take roast beef instead, but another bullfighter says he’ll take the American cheese sandwich, his girlfriend says to make that two roast beef and an American cheese sandwich, and so on.

Writer In Residence

            
            On Monday, I got a notice back from the professor at U of T who’s collecting the writing samples for the competition to get into the fiction writing seminar. She said I had to send one two page file of my fiction writing, instead of two. I combined the two stories into one file and sent them back to her, still within the deadline.

At noon I took an early siesta so I’d be fresh for work. I posed for Heather Frise’s class at OCADU. She had me doing mostly short poses. Some of them were three part action poses with a common pivot. I hadn’t done those for years. On the final pose she had the students do another exercise I haven’t seen done for a long time. She had the students start their drawing and then had everyone move one place to the right to work on the next person’s drawing, and so on, about every thirty seconds.

I watched some more old Sid Caesar skits. “The Professor of Magic” is pretty funny. Sid plays a famous German magician who has been invited to speak before the society of amateur magicians. The MC, played by Carl Reiner, thinking that it would be cute, shows the famous magician the first trick he’d learned as a child, in which one points one’s finger upwards, puts a handkerchief over it and then makes it disappear by bending it down into one’s fist. The professor of magic keeps asking where the finger went and accusing Reiner of being a witch.

In another skit, Caesar plays a hard-boiled newspaper reporter. He goes into a nightclub, the hatcheck girl asks him to check his hat, and he gives it to her, then takes another hat out of his pocket and puts it on.

Dislike

           

            On Sunday morning when I got up I saw that my anti-virus scan had trapped several pieces of malware, which I removed. The problem on my Facebook page persisted though. Finally, I looked up how to remove an add-on from the Firefox list and once that was done, the problem went away. I still think it would be interesting to have a dislike option for my page, but I’ll wait until Facebook comes up with one.

            Next year’s writer in residence at U of T, Rawi Hage will be holding a fiction-writing seminar in December, but they are only accepting fifteen people, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I had to submit two pages of fiction by November 9, and so on Sunday I sent my two short stories, “Mission to Mars” and “I Like to Masturbate In My Car”. It’ll be interesting to see if I get in.

            I listened to a couple of episodes of Amos and Andy from the 1940s. In one show, Kingfish’s wife, Sapphire was going to Philadelphia to visit relatives, leaving Kingfish all alone in New York. At the train station she asked if he had any money and he answered that he didn’t. “Good!” she declared, “Then you can’t get into any trouble.” Before he’d left the station though, two young women asked him if they knew where they could rent a room till Sunday. Since Sapphire wouldn’t be back till Sunday and the young ladies offered him five dollars, he said that they could rent his house and he would stay with Andy. But Sapphire called to tell Kingfish that she would be coming home early because her sister had the flu, so now he had to figure out how to get the girls out of his house before his wife came home. They refused to go when asked, so he arranged for Andy to pose as an agent for the city that hands out eviction notices, and they converted Kingfish and Sapphire’s marriage licence into an eviction notice to make it look official. There were phrases like, “United in holy eviction”. But while they were there, the phone rang and one of the girls answered. Sapphire was on the other end, wondering why a woman was answering the phone. Kingfish had to explain that the girls were his nieces from Georgia and Sapphire believed it, but she was calling to say she was arriving at noon and she’d love to meet Kingfish’s nieces. Kingfish tries to get the girls to stay and pose as his nieces but they refuse, so Andy finds two girls who are willing to play the part. But shortly after Sapphire comes home and meets the girls, the other girls change their minds and come back, saying they are Kingfish’s nieces. Then Kingfish’s real nieces happen to coincidentally show up. Just about then, Kingfish gets a lamp broken over his head by Sapphire.

            The second episode featured Jack Benny and Rochester as guest stars. Kingfish and Andy start an employment agency and their first customer is Rochester, who is tired of working so hard for nothing. Their second customer is Jack Benny, who is tired of paying too much to his employee for too little work. They find a perfect match for both their clients, but of course it’s the same arrangement that existed before. When they realize their mistake they are worried that they’ve committed “industrial bigamy”, so they let both clients know that they can’t help them.

            Since I’d been inside all day, that evening I took a bike ride. As I rode up Brock, a young woman in a purple helmet shot past me. I almost caught up with her several times but I actually stopped at the stop signs while she barrelled through them. There were no cars coming at most of them, but on Croatia, just south of Bloor, there are almost always cars coming from the right, and there was one that had to stop for her as she just kept on going. It’s a good thing she wears a helmet. People who drive like boneheads should have external skeletons.

            The Bloor subway must have been out of service as there was a convoy of busses rolling along Bloor. It was kind of annoying most of the way downtown because there was too much traffic in the centre lane to pass them when they stopped to pick up passengers. They got snarled in traffic after Bathurst and so I was able to get ahead of most of them. They were all turning right on Spadina. I noticed that the westbound stream of busses all had Spadina station written as their destination as well.

            I went to Yonge, down to Queen and home. At the streetcar stop near my place there was a middle-aged guy in a baseball cap who also had a monster jet-black handlebar moustache.

            That night I watched a little more of the Sid Caesar documentary. There was a silent film parody about a drunk and a skit about living in a tiny apartment in New York and trying to throw a dinner party. Most of the bits that I’ve seen so far were amusing and well done, but not earthshakingly funny. They were certainly as good or better though than a lot of what one might see on Saturday Night Live. The funniest thing about them is Sid Caesar’s facial expressions.