Halloween

I boiled some eggs for breakfast. I used Larry’s “get the water boiling then put the eggs in for four and a half to five minutes” technique. It gets the eggs to the perfect softness. The problem I’m having is when I put the eggs in the boiling water gently with a big spoon to assist in the gentleness, one of the eggs always ends up cracking and spewing out its innards which froths up the water and reduces the amount of egg in the affected egg.

Larry’s watching this film called Babysitters while he draws which looks sexy about babysitters having sexual relationships with the husbands of couples they babysit for. I criticized it for being about relationships of younger women with older men. Larry has a problem because he can’t watch action or comedic or subtitled films when he’s drawing. They’re too visual. Because, ironically, he doesn’t actually watch the films that much, he listens to them. It wasn’t fair of me to criticize it just because of the older man, younger woman thing. But I did anyway. Then I joined him and watched it for a bit and it wasn’t bad.

Eli came home extremely drunk in the middle of the night. He knocked on the side door, waking us up then collapsed on the stairs that lead up to the main floor. He was crying. He was talking incomprehensibly about being treated wrongly. About being beaten on. I don’t think it was that bad. Larry was talking to him and even helping examine him and making sure.

Larry was helping him so much this week with emotional problems he has. Making sure he got to see his therapist. I don’t know why he had to go and get drunk. But I’m not completely ungenerous. I told Larry that maybe it’s just that the only way Eli used to know how to cope with his problematic feelings was by getting drunk. Now he’s doing better so maybe the getting drunk thing is just an old habit. Wasn’t that sweet of me to think that?

Eli had black mascara on because it was a Halloween party. A girl he liked had made him up. But we don’t know what happened to that girl from his story. There were these guys he shared a tab with and it was about eighty dollars and they took off. But he was the responsible one and stayed and didn’t run away. Also he was helping sort out a fight that had happened earlier. So if he was the responsible one and not running away why should he have to pay the full tab? That wasn’t fair. He just wanted to pay his part. And it wasn’t right either that he was picked up by security in the first place. He was the one helping out and being responsible. What was the most upsetting thing – the bad treatment - I think was they wouldn’t let him go.

Eli couldn’t answer Larry how he got home. Maybe because in his head, he was still out there. He could answer. But his answer kept starting at when he was helping out with the fight and then winding somewhere other than answering Larry’s question.

He was going to take responsibility for the $4,000 lambskin jacket that he didn’t come home with that Bubbie had got with him a little while ago in the morning. Eli looked down at his arms which were only partly covered with a short sleeved shirt on and brought up losing it. But I don’t think they really paid $4,000 for it. There’s no way Bubbie would get Eli a $4,000 lambskin jacket unless it cost a lot less than that.

Includes incomprehensible astrological terminology

Larry stayed up late talking to Eli. Then he got up with me to go into work with me so he could have the car so he could take Eli to his therapy. He was doing a lot for Eli and for me too.

Larry asked me to drive because he was tired. Then he didn’t like the way I was driving. I was mad at him. I was in a bad mood when I got into work because he was angry at me too. I was also feeling groggy and spaced out. Usually I eat some breakfast at my desk but I forgot to. Then I remembered and ate some. Eventually I told some of my female co-workers about Larry criticizing my driving and they all said their husbands did the same thing. One of them waved her hand in the air, like in dismissal of the whole male act of criticizing female driving.

I felt a little better.

Since Jacob’s away I wanted to meet Larry downtown for a coffee before his etching class. But Larry said he wanted to take a nap before he went out. I called him back a little while later. He wasn’t napping. He talked to me in a growly mad bear voice but I was able to convince him to come down and meet me. I told him it would be nice and I would smile.

There’s a new moon in Scorpio tonight. It’s right on my draconic Venus. And close to Larry’s natal Mars-Saturn conjunction. I was trying to get Larry to enact some astro-drama with me on this point. We were walking down the long wooden-floor hallway of the art building where he takes his etching class. He’s not as good at me at thinking astrologically and has to remind me to not be so inconsiderate and talk so fast. Plus the proximity to his imminent class was making it even more difficult for him to entertain my extreme astrology. He engaged enough to tell me I was crazy which actually fits the symbolism so I complimented him for it.

I walked along Queen Street to get to the University subway line to go home. There were a lot of shoe stores along the way. I was looking in their windows at the winter boot styles. Fall Out Boy was playing outside at City TV. I stopped and listened for a couple of songs. The performance was for the TV audience. They played a song then left the stage for five minutes or so and then came back to play another song. How they related to us - the background audience of their TV performance - reminded me of being a kid and performing to a mirror that I could be completely fake to but that still saw only the amazingest parts of me.

Then I was thinking of Marshall McLuhan and of how his first and last name begin with the same letter, the letter “m,” and of how even though “m” starts the very fitting - for him - words, “media” and “message” and “meaning” and “matter,” you would still think someone like him would have had a name starting with cooler and more cerebral letters like “s” or “e” or possibly “t.”

Mysterious

The first time I went to the women’s toilet at Starbuck’s today I found many droplets of pee spray all over the back part of the seat. It looked like whoever had done it had had a very full bladder. It looked like it couldn’t, for example, be a situation of someone deciding to just try one more time on their way out, in case there’s something there; one of those “planning for the future”, preventative pees. Such a pee would have left far less prolific results.

I was cleaning it up with a few different pieces of toilet paper for my turn thinking it looked like it had been fun for the person who did it, spraying the seat like that. In a way it made me happy for them. Then I was thinking the person who had done it might have been someone who is afraid to sit on toilet seats and maybe the whole experience of standing or half-squatting over the toilet may not have been fun for them at all. Maybe in the tortured process of part-squatting the person got a strain in their thigh or their calf muscle and their entire leg was shaking in a spasm as they were making their pee.

The next time I wanted to the bathroom to pee I had to wait a while. Evidently a lot of other people had to go too. Which does make sense for a coffee shop. This time, when it finally got to my turn the toilet seat was up. It wasn’t down in the sitting position. It was up.

I have to say I find what goes on in the women’s toilet at the Starbucks so mysterious.

Automatic reboot

Larry made us some Smoothies for breakfast. Now I’m cold. Smoothies don’t suit this time of year. That is what I have to say about Smoothies. Brrrr.

I finally started working on some revision work for my novel. It’s been hard to get at because I just can’t seem to convince myself that the revisions I have in mind could possibly be enough. I just can’t seem to let go of the idea that what everyone in the world wants from me including, naturally, the interested editor at Coach House, is ruinous killing compromises of the soul. I think that surely it can’t be until I’m feeling that way that the revisions I’m doing could be enough.

Anyway I got through it enough, started working on it, was feeling good, but.

But my computer sometimes likes to reboot itself in the middle of the night. And I didn’t save it. Sometimes it can go for weeks and not reboot. Sometimes it likes to do it a couple of days in a row. I didn’t save it because I hadn’t quite decided what to save it under, what kind of file it should go in. I was enjoying waiting on that decision coming to me. I also didn’t realize that it would be lost if my computer decided to reboot itself in the middle of the night.

My old computer would never do that. Sure it might crash on occasion. My new computer acts like an inconsiderate bully sometimes. It’s so imperious. It’s very rude. It thinks it knows everything.

When I found out my work was gone and had looked everywhere on the computer I thought it could be I asked Larry if he could help me find it. He explained to me It was too late and he couldn’t help me. I should have saved it.

I’m sure it’s going to be okay. It’s not like I wrote that much. It just would have been nicer if it didn’t happen. I would feel a lot better now about it if it didn’t happen.

Leaders and followers

I just updated the template of my blog. I didn’t change how it looked actually. But people following my blog can now add their name to my follower’s list. Since sheep are such good followers I might get some sheep signing up too.

Like who wants to admit to being a follower?

Eli, my stepson, went to leadership training camp this summer with the reserves. He was in this class of like a hundred young men all training to be leaders. Now when we’re out, the family, in the car, say, and a situation comes up that requires some hot and fast decision making Eli starts telling all of us what to do. He’s twenty-five. He’s excitable. What does he know?

Sometimes in these situations he reminds us of the power he now possesses of leadership trying to convince us his inexperienced twenty-five year old ass is the one we should be following.

Also, this summer, Larry coached Jacob’s baseball team. He had this co-coach who ran a lucrative printing business but who knew squat about baseball. He looked like Jeff Bridges but with darker hair and eyes which when I told him he already knew about. But whenever Larry would be coaching the kids the co-coach would be talking in this loud parallel voice at the same time sometimes saying similar things and sometimes saying completely opposite things that made no sense if you knew baseball.

I don’t think he ever asked Larry’s opinion or advice. He just always acted like he knew everything already. He was a very good recycler though. He knew which products went in which recycling receptacles at the ball parks. I have to concede that.

It made me wonder how he ran his business because isn’t one of the key attributes of being a business manager recognizing who is an authority on what and then using that to your advantage. And then aren’t you supposed to get rich from it and then be secretly laughing under your breath that the smart people whose knowledge you’re managing to your advantage don’t get to enjoy as many vacations as you or to renovate their kitchen with stainless steel chrome appliances as often?

When Eli returned from leadership training camp he looked like he’d had the crap kicked out of him. Which may very well have been the case. If too many chefs spoil the stew, wouldn’t too many military leadership candidates ruin their shoes? (bit of a rhyme there)

By the final and deciding game of the first round of the playoffs the tension between the two co-coaches came to a head. It was the third out of five innings. The team was down four runs. The Jeff Bridges look alike insisted on a pitching change that would put his son, who had struggled all season to throw strikes, on the mound. Larry questioned his autocratic approach. Jeff Bridge’s temper refused to answer. Larry, in an attempt to manage his piqued temper, removed himself from the game collapsing on a folding chair on the sidelines between Jeff Bridge’s wife and myself.

The chair was actually one of theirs’ and was broken. The back support part wasn’t attached properly so Larry’s back was falling out of the back of the chair and he was turning around to check it out when Jeff Bridge’s wife began reprimanding him for not being a team player and not knowing how to make compromises. I was so sure when she was talking to Larry like that that it must be the same way she talked to her husband all the time.

I thought there must be some really weird kind of déjà vu going on for her with Larry being in the position she must usually find herself in with her husband and her –by virtue of the fact she was lecturing Larry for it - being in the position her husband must usually be in, but her saying the words to Larry that she would usually say from her regular position to her husband.

Sudafed high

Larry’s sick with a cold. We were invited to Sukkot dinner at Leon’s for the second year. Leon was an accountant. Several years ago Larry’s mother got him to help us with a loan. But he doesn’t do that anymore. Now he’s a partner in a door business. Except he still does some accounting work for Jenny, Larry’s mother. Also Larry played hockey at a pick up hockey game Leon was running on Sunday nights for a while. Then Larry made waves by standing up to some of the bad actors at Leon’s game.

Larry took a Sudafed. Even though we got there late we were still sitting on a cushy sofa waiting for the last couple to show up. Leon’s wife, Denise was upstairs getting dressed or something still. It was the same couple who was there last year. The husband was a real estate agent and an expert on the Beatles. The wife was Australian. The ten year old daughter had hair so blonde it was practically white. The twelve year old son was going to be a lawyer one day. He was game and they’d all been working on that eventuality together pretty much since he was born.

Larry made jokes to Leon about telling his mother beforehand he was sick and uncertain he should attend the function and her insistent response that he still had several hours to make himself better so get to work already.

Jenny looked regal. She had her hair done up and her eyebrows shaped up too. She sat in an upright position on the sofa in a cream dress with a stylish fifties look to it, as we listened to Denise’s nephew describe in a sharp yet commanding voice a lot of details about the rural high school he teaches at. He was very short and had big blue eyes.

Leon's is a house with mezuzahs, which are religious parchments put inside sometimes fancy containers, at probably every doorway not just entering, as prescribed by Jewish law, but inside the house too. I could see the one at the entrance of the room we were in and got the impression from my vantage point at its far end that it had pink flowers on it.

I thought about getting a word in edgewise but as hard as I thought it didn't come to me what that word would be. The sofa I was sitting and listening on was so soft I was afraid I might sink into its cushioned layers like a firefly into a molten marshmallow.

Yom Kippur blog

For Yom Kippur the dishwasher stopped working. Very observant of it. It’s plugged up, apparently. Larry and I kept partly scooping out the water left in the bottom of it and then running the dishwasher over again in hopes of flushing it out.

Larry did more than that too. But I don’t want to talk about it.

The dishwasher kept not working. It would stop part way through its cycle; some internal sensors sensing too much water collected in its bottom, saving us the disaster of dishwasher flooding.

I cleaned out the foyer. I emptied the closet of hockey sticks, gym bags, tennis rackets, roller blades. I found this kid’s microscope Larry bought for Jacob when he was like four that didn’t work, that we never returned. I scrubbed the floor and the wall trimming with Pine sol.

Classically Jewish people go to synagogue on Yom Kippur. They dress up. They don’t wear leather. For some reason I can’t think of now it’s not religious to be wearing dead animal skins. The public phones are turned off at the synagogue. This is another example of observing the “don’t work” principle of Yom Kippur.

But really everyone observes Yom Kippur their own way. And they have cell phones.

I was reading some yoga magazines lately that were talking all about how in the yogic tradition it’s through service and work that you get in touch with your spiritual side. That’s the approach I was employing by cleaning up the foyer. Honestly. Besides when else would I allow myself to do such a thorough cleaning job without feeling guilty about it? I really do have other things to do that I usually consider much more important. Like manifesting a writing career.

My mother in law called part way through the day. She was sick. She’d never been sick in her life before on Yom Kippur she told me. The sickness came on her the night before, first as a chill, when she was at synagogue for Kol Nidre, when we weren’t there with her.

Larry was out when she called. He had to pick up his MasterCard that he accidently left behind when he was at an art fair he went to on Monday and was buying a subscription to the Canadian art magazine cmagazine. Leaving the card behind was working out for him though because it was giving him the opportunity to go back and talk some more to the nice woman he bought the subscription from who is nice and savvy about today’s Toronto art scene.

I kept trying to get him not to go because it didn’t fit in with my idea of how to approach Yom Kippur. For one thing it’s not practical driving downtown when you’re fasting. It expends unnecessary energy.

The day before, when Larry’s mom was calling Larry working at home then me during my break at work, trying to get us to go to synagogue with her for Kol Nidre, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. Neither was it what Larry wanted to do. I wanted to do some cooking during the evening to get stuff ready for breaking the fast the next day even if technically I should have already done that before sunset.

Jewish New Year’s is all about the symbolism. How things go, the decisions you make, is you symbolically setting up how you want your year to go. Do you really want another year of your mother in law guilting and dominating your life because you keep letting her perceptions of how pathetic a Jew you are win the day?

When Larry got home and I told him about his mother being sick, he immediately felt guilty, that it was his actions of not going to Kol Nidre with her that had somehow caused his mother’s illness. Funny, I said to him, it’s the first thing I thought of too.

Sunday Starbucks

Jacob has a mole over top of his top lip. It’s on the right side. It’s a beauty mark is what I tell him. He’s always had it. He’s worried that it’s going to grow too big.

The last few weekends Larry and I go for a walk over to Starbucks, Jacob stays home and does some homework, we drink our Venti Soya Carmel or Pumpkin Spice Lattes, Larry draws people in the Starbucks, I read Larry interesting stories from the New York Times Magazine over the jazz music that Larry can’t hear entirely or can’t focus on completely, perhaps because he’s concentrating on drawing, then Jacob calls and says he’s done his homework and one of us convinces him to do some more and then he calls again and we get him to read to us some of what he’s done and then we let him ride his bike over to Starbucks and join us.

Jacob gets a cold hot chocolate or a regular one or asks for this other chocolate drink that is so sugary and decadent we usually say no. He gets a pastry. We get him to buy us another Venti Soy Latte of another flavour to share between us but this one decaffeinated.

Today Larry and I got the purple cushy chairs. They’re the only soft chairs at our Starbucks. Jacob’s mostly too old to sit on my lap or anything like that anymore. But today he asked to squeeze in beside my on my purple cushy chair. Funny, when he asked I realized I was wishing it too. We jostled a bit before we figured out a way to get him in. I put my right arm around his shoulders and neck and patted it on his chest.