February 22, 1990

Thirty years ago today

            It was after 10:00 by the time GG and I got downtown. We were supposed to pick up eight chairs but I wanted to go for coffee first so we could stall for time and not have to go to that junk heap of a store at 935 Bay. I got pissed off at him because he went against me on that.

            When we drove around to 935 Bay GG had neglected to drop me off first at 25 Grosvenor so I could get the key to the store. It was raining and I didn’t want to walk back. He started walking over there but I followed him because I knew it would take him two hours to get the key. I was upstairs and back down with the key while GG was still chatting with the security guard. 

Fortune Teller 500

            On Thursday morning I finished working out the chords for “Eva" by Serge Gainsbourg and started posting it on Christian’s translations.

            I did some more research into the British monarchy. Particularly on how it’s going to be hard for Charles to shut up about environmental issues once he is the king.

            I rode to Freshco where their grapes haven’t been firm enough to purchase for a month. I bought another five bags of cherries. I got two pints of strawberries, a block of five year old cheddar, a five kilo bag of potatoes, some pastrami, a two litre carton of skim milk, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, a bag of oven fries and a pack of paper towels.

            I had a pork rib and some fries for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story begins with Sapphire leaving Kingfish to live with her mother because he’s a bum who’s never provided for her. In a desperate effort to win her back he gets a job as a deliveryman for a department store. He sends her a message that he has a surprise for her but doesn't tell her that the surprise is the fact that he is now employed. After work he has one package left over because the customer had not been at home and so he puts it in his closet with plans to deliver it the next morning. He goes out for dinner with Andy but while he is gone Sapphire comes home and discovers the package. Thinking that it’s the surprise Kingfish had mentioned she opens it and is thrilled to find that it’s a $500 beaver coat. Kingfish doesn’t have the nerve to tell her that the coat is not hers and so he tries to convince the department store that he was robbed of it while making deliveries. The manager almost believes it but then learns that Kingfish’s wife has brought a beaver coat into the store for alterations. Kingfish will go to jail if they don’t get the coat back. Kingfish gets his friends to arrange for a fake robbery of the coat but they don’t coordinate their plans and so three fake robberies are plotted. In the first one the beaver coat is taken and Kingfish is whacked on the head. A minute later another robber arrives to take Sapphire’s old coat and Kingfish is again clobbered. Seconds later a third thief arrives, takes Sapphire’s mother’s coat and also hits Kingfish. The next day Kingfish delivers the beaver coat to the real owner. She wants to try it on but when Kingfish is helping her Sapphire shows up, says she’s been following him, and seeing that her coat has been given to another woman she leaves him again.

            I did a bit of writing on my reflection paper:

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have a lot in common with Canada's hereditary chief. They are “caretakers of the people and the culture” while she similarly “gives a sense of stability and continuity by acting as a focus for national identity, unity and pride.” (Royal) Traditional leadership for the Wet’suwet’en hereditary leaders is more about responsibility than authority. This responsibility is paralleled by Canada’s hereditary leader, who has no executive role but plays an important part in the life of the nation by undertaking duties that have developed over a thousand years.

But then I got distracted by research into whether or not Queen Elizabeth is indigenous to England. Since she descends from the House of Wessex most of her ancestry would predate the Norman Conquest and so she's mostly Anglo-Saxon. If you think of the Celts as being indigenous to England she does have some Celtic ancestry. But the Celts weren’t even in England yet when Stonehenge was built.

            I made gravy from some beef drippings I’d been saving but I used too much flour and it became too thick. I boiled a potato and had the last of the pork ribs while watching Zorro.

            In this story Don Sebastian, a business associate of Don Alejandro is waiting to catch transportation out of Los Angeles with a large sum of money. The wagon that had been scheduled for his journey has a broken wheel but it will take five hours for repairs. Sebastian does not want to wait in the tavern and so he entrusts the 1500 pesos to Sgt Garcia so he can go back to Alejandro’s house and sleep. Garcia is nervous about the responsibility and Diego decides to stay in town to keep watch on Garcia as he guards the money. The dancer and fortuneteller Lupita plots to get the money with the help of her musician henchmen Gustavo and Hernando. She buys Garcia wine and then tells his fortune. She tells him that the person that he least suspects may kill him that night. Garcia begins to distrust everyone. He sends all the other soldiers away and locks Diego and Bernardo out of the fort. This allows Lupita and her men to easily overwhelm Garcia and take the money. They have just locked Garcia in a cell when Zorro arrives to defeat the thieves and retrieve the money. 

February 21, 1990

Thirty years ago today

            GG and I worked elsewhere than the dirty store and I deliberately took on more work at the other place so we could avoid going there.

            He dropped me off at my place at around 16:00 and so I was home early.

            I bought some condoms.

            Ibrahim finally came by for his stereo but I was okay with that. I’d used it to make four 90-minute tapes of about fifty songs. We struggled to put the stereo into the wardrobe bag he'd brought.

            Judy came over and the three of us talked about how women have lost the sense of their own power so that now all they see is the power that men have. The government has replaced the husband.          

Hereditary Chief

            Since the Coffeetime closed this part of Parkdale has become a ghost corner in the early morning. A lot less people cross over from Dunn and Queen.

            On Wednesday morning I almost finished working out the chords for “Eva” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            When I shaved today I accidentally shaved my whole beard without thinking about it. My beard wasn’t very long and so I tend to just shave my neck until the rest gets out of control.

            I had a smoked chicken sausage on toast for lunch.

            I did some research into the Canadian monarchy. Queen Elizabeth tends not to express opinions but on the day she read the Brexit speech from the thrown she wore the colours of the EU flag. She also wore a brooch given to her by the Obamas on the day she met the Trumps.

            Prince Charles is much more outspoken on environmental issues and has won several awards for his charitable work in that area. It’s very possible that he would stand with the anti-pipeline people at least in spirit.

            There was a knock on my door and it was my next-door neighbour Benji. For the third time in the last couple of months he’d locked his key in his room and needed to use the spare that he made for me to hold onto in case that happens.

            I was running out of milk for coffee but I didn’t want to go all the way to the supermarket today so I walked to the corner store across O’Hara. I’ve switched to skim milk but the lowest they had was 2% and so I got a small carton of that. It’s going to taste like cream to me after using skim for a while.

            I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Sapphire wants Kingfish to meet her cousin Sarah at the train station and show her around New York. She doesn’t know what she looks like but she’ll be wearing a white carnation. Kingfish hires Andy to meet Sarah instead and so he does. Later however Kingfish gets a call from Sarah who says she’s still in Georgia and won’t be there until the next day. Kingfish suspects that he and Andy are being scammed by the fake Sarah and so he gets Andy to lure her to the lodge hall where they lock her in the basement and then go through her purse. They discover that they have trapped a policewoman. She’s been acting as a decoy to catch a gang that has been preying on girls from out of town. They run away when they see two cops approaching the lodge. Later Kingfish comes home to find that Sarah has arrived. He asks how she found her way there and she says she was escorted by a policewoman. It turns out to be the woman they’d locked in the basement and she places them under arrest.

            I researched the monarchy a little more to find similarities with Indigenous hereditary chiefs.

            I had two smoked chicken sausages with cheese and toast for dinner with a beer while watching Zorro.

            In this story Captain Arrellano enlists four of the anti-Spain rebels to assassinate the governor of California. But as the governor is still recuperating at the De La Vega hacienda he has special protection from Zorro aided by all of the secret passages. The governor has a music box that almost immediately puts him to sleep when it is played and so he is put down for his afternoon nap in the library. The captain sends all of the soldiers away that would have guarded the governor’s door. The assassins arrive but Bernardo has moved the governor’s couch into a secret passage where he keeps him asleep with the music box. Meanwhile one by one Zorro takes out each assassin by emerging from a secret passage behind him. For every assassin taken Zorro drives his sword to hang from the ceiling until the captain finds them side by side. Zorro steps forward and he and the captain duel for a long time until the captain is killed. The assassins are left tied up for the soldiers to arrest.

February 20, 1990

Thirty years ago today

            I worked with GG again at Bay and Wellesley. I did some very heavy lifting and I felt young and strong.

            My eyes were licking the auras of many young women.

            When I got home I realized that I had taken my keys with me and so Nancy had no way to lock the door. She had gone out earlier for a while but nothing had been stolen.

            Judy and Mia came over and while Mia played with a balloon, Nancy spoke a little Spanish with Judy.

            I wanted to take a shower and so I told Nancy not to run the water in the kitchen. Halfway through Nancy came into the bathroom and passed through the curtain a carrot for me to rinse. As her hand was there waiting to get the carrot back I placed my penis in her palm instead and it made her jump.

           

Guy Williams

            On Tuesday morning upon getting up from yoga I seem to have put too much weight on my puncture wound and agitated it so that I was limping a little more than I have been lately.

I worked out most of the chords for the first verse of “Eva” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I worked on catching up on my journal.

            In the late morning I had to do my laundry. I’d put it off for a few days and had even worn ragged underwear to avoid doing it in a crowded Laundromat during the weekend. The place was empty when I came in and the middle aged matronly Japanese attendant said, “Good morning.”

            I was singing my translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Eva” the whole time I rode there back and forth until I brought my clothing home.

            I had some pork ribs and a few French fries for lunch.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. This story continues from the previous one in which Kingfish, to avoid being drafted, enlisted in the field artillery, only to find that the draft notice had been a mistake. As Kingfish prepares for his four-year stint in the army his friends throw a party for him and give him a gold watch. His wife Sapphire is so proud of her husband that she is crying from happiness. Kingfish gets a call from the army telling him they can’t accept him because of his age and his physical condition. Kingfish doesn’t know how to break it to his friends that he is not leaving and so pretends to leave and then hides in the attic of the lodge hall. When he learns that Sapphire plans to visit him at Fort Bragg he buys a helmet, a ragged uniform and some medals from a pawnshop and pretends to be on furlough. As he is bragging to her about his exploits in the army she gets a call and learns that Kingfish’s unit had already shipped out a week before. She asks him to remove his helmet and then hits him with a vase.

            I started doing research into the similarities between Canada’s hereditary chief, Elizabeth, and the hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en. There are quite a few. She’s the keeper of the faith and a holder of thousands of years of traditional knowledge. The British monarchs also tend to be conservationists.

            I heated some pork ribs, some French fries and the rest of my gravy and had them for dinner while watching Zorro.

            The secret plots by Captain Arrellano to assassinate the governor continue. A new assassin has been given the task. Meanwhile the governor continues to recuperate from his accident while staying at the De La Vega hacienda. The governor however is becoming increasingly bored and irritable and so Diego proposes that a fiesta be held in his honour. The captain suggests that it be a costume ball and Diego realizes that this would be a perfect opportunity for the captain to arrange for the governor to be killed. Don Alejandro complains to Diego that the only costume that he has is a Greek senator’s robe and the last time that he wore it people made fun of his knees. The next morning Alejandro finds on his bed a medieval executioner’s costume with a wooden scimitar and he assumes that Diego has given it to him. He wears it at the party and in the midst of it gets a message from the captain that Diego wants to meet him in the stables. But at the stable Alejandro is attacked by an assassin wearing the same costume but wielding a real scimitar. Zorro arrives just in time to save Alejandro but the assassin escapes. The plot had obviously been to have the man in Alejandro’s costume kill the governor and then for Alejandro to be blamed for the murder.

            Zorro is played by Guy Williams who really was an expert fencer and so his swordfights were not done by a stand-in. He loved playing Zorro and said he could have gone on doing it forever. Later when he played Dr. John Robinson on Lost In Space, even though he was the captain of the ship he didn’t have as prominent a roll because the flamboyantly evil character of Dr Smith got all the limelight. During his three years on Lost in Space Williams invested in the stock market and retired in Argentina with a comfortable sum of money. He chose Argentina because he was a superstar there where Zorro had been a tremendous hit.

February 19, 1990

Thirty years ago today

            I worked with GG all day and in the afternoon we went to this closed down variety store to take out all the shelving. The place was full of cat shit and ripped apart packages of kibble. There were also a lot of human food items that I helped myself to such as Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Raisin Bran, Minute Rice and cans of chicken gravy. I hoped the stuff hadn’t gone bad.

            GG dropped me off at my place on the way back to Mimico.

            For at least a month I’d been making tapes of Leonard Cohen songs in an order starting with my most favourite lyrics.  But I kept on buying new albums and would have to rearrange the order.

            Lately at the end of every day I’d had this nagging sense that nothing had been accomplished.