(37 weeks)
SUNDAY.
On my way to the CBC cafeteria for lunch, I stop into the men’s room to wash my hands. The hand dryer is so weak that every time I use it, I can’t help closing my eyes and pretending that an asthmatic old man is blowing on my hands.
In this flight of fancy, the man’s name is Doc and he sits on a stool dispensing old-timey wisdoms while lamenting the good old days of steam blimps and ankle-to-forehead muslin underwear.
“I’m the last practitioner of a dying profession,” Doc laments between huffs and puffs. “With all these modern continual-cloth towel dispensers, I’ll soon be going the way of the elevator boy and the seltzer lad.”
After close to a minute, I give up and wipe my hands on the ends of my shirt.
I return to my desk with Salisbury steak only to realize that I’ve forgotten the cutlery. I search my desk drawer for a fork and knife, but succeed in finding only a teaspoon.
Eating an entire steak dinner with a plastic teaspoon proves an interesting challenge. Halfway through the meal, I become curious about the Salisbury steak’s etymology. After consulting Wikipedia, I learn it was invented by a Dr. James Henry Salisbury, an MD during the Civil War. The doctor believed that vegetables were responsible for “heart disease, tumours, mental illness, and tuberculosis” and that his steak dish, when eaten three times a day with coffee, could be healthful and also serve as a cure for battleinduced diarrhea.
Finishing the last spoonful, I hope that, at the very least, it’s cured me of my desire for dessert.
Ten minutes later, back in the cafeteria, I see it has not.
MONDAY.
The local repertory house is playing 2001: A Space Odyssey. While watching, I notice three things of interest:
1, while Hilton Hotels and Howard Johnsons are shown to survive forty years into the future, neckties don’t;
2, there is precisely one joke in the entire movie. One of the characters, about to use a space toilet, is confronted by a placard containing complex Ikea-like instructions regarding its operation; and 3, the monolith looks an awful lot like an iPhone.
The person in the seat in front of me is eating McDonald’s, and as a result I’m unconsciously experiencing outer space as a place that smells of Big Macs. This kind of thing has happened to me before. While watching Das Boot, the person beside me was wearing Polo cologne, which made the submarine smell like a sports bar.
When the movie is done, I find myself in the mood for something only slightly less sublime than outer space: a Big Mac. I will eat it with thoughts about space, the future of man, and the curative power of ground beef rattling around my head like empty soda cans on a late-night metro car.
THURSDAY.
Tucker and I are sitting on my couch, passing a container of Häagen-Dazs back and forth.
“Wouldn’t it be great if the Canadian dollar and the Canadian calorie were somehow linked?” he asks.
“How do you mean?”
“Like when the American dollar is weak, American calories would also become weak. So when a hundred Canadian calories are the same as eighty-two American calories, the time would be right to go over the border, rent a motel room, and spend the weekend eating pizza and doughnuts.”
“And then the moment you cross back into Canada, you instantly get fatter?” I ask.
“Yes, but since we weigh ourselves in kilograms, we can still believe ourselves fit.”
Whatever happened to those 2001 moon colonies we were promised—a place where we could eat ice cream all day and still bounce around as light as lunar dust? Sometimes I just can’t stand the unbearable fatness of being.