HUMAN WRECKAGE

Who I’ve Been

Last week marks one imprecise calendar year since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared covid-19 a global scourge. My mental department of personal pandemic statistics has since racked up some curious numbers.

My baseline for sedentary activity in the days of yore over the course of 12 months was fairly basic and was easily broken down into monthly segments. Saturdays at the Crooked 9 are what Ann calls “wake up smart” days. Together we complete the Saturday and Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles in the weekend edition of the Edmonton Journal, eight grids. This blog averages four fresh posts per month. I read two, but not quite three, books every month; the value of the fraction is subject to the work: glide or grind?

I still do all that, but things have changed. The most alarming indicator is my 500 iPad Klondike solitaire victories. I estimate I win one of every 10 hands and that each game takes about a minute to play. That adds up to two working weeks’ worth of my time, a little over 80 hours. Dear me, it seemed like just four or five minutes here and there.

Years ago, when every middle class home housed a folding bridge table, my older sister taught me how to amuse myself with Klondike. I’ve never needed a refresh of the game’s simple rules, and that’s something because the other night as I lay in bed, I tried to remember how to do long division. That arithmetic is gone. I don’t play other card games as any requirement beyond descending sequential numbers alternating suit colours is beyond me.

When Canada’s television landscape was transformed by the introduction of dedicated cable channels the competing sports networks were starved for daytime content. Subscribers were subjected to repeated episodes of Poker Stars - a show I’ve always thought begged a Klondike solitaire parody.

Imagine a tiny amphitheatre, a rapt audience in tiers, casino signs in the background. There’s a green poker table, a dealer wearing a vest and a bowtie stands behind it. The Klondike player makes her entrance; she’s wearing wraparound sunglasses and a costume that has become her trademark in high stakes solitaire circles. The gag lies in the hushed and reverent commentary of the announcer: “And the seven columns have been dealt, the last card face up on the baize in the scrutiny of the television spotlights. There’s a move, and she sees it, a black five onto a red six revealing the two of spades. Oh, oh so close to the ace and the start of her first discard pile. She’s stymied now and she’ll have to go to the dealer’s deck and hope for a friendly turn of the third card. Of course, bad luck comes in threes, as the saying goes. The crowd looks on anxiously.”

My other mostly solitary activity involves jigsaw puzzles. I’ve just about completed four of them – Ann usually swoops in with 50 pieces left to place to take them home and then bask in the glory of completion. Our first two puzzles reignited memories of our 2019 trip to England. We had a flat a block off the Tottenham Court Road and Oyster cards. If we weren’t walking, we were riding the Tube. A puzzle of the London Underground route map, an astounding work of graphic design largely unchanged since its conception in the 1930s, took us on a virtual holiday during the initial covid lockdown. And so did our second one, the cover of Abbey Road; we’d spent a morning hanging around Abbey Road Studios and the crosswalk.

The easiest puzzle was a Ravensburger collage of music-related memorabilia. Its pieces were slightly larger than those to which we were accustomed. I was struck by their finishes. The colours on each one arrayed on the dining room table were unaffected by the nature of the light in the room, natural or electric. The bastard to date has been a 20”x20” reproduction of the sleeve of It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll. The painting by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert depicts the Stones on the steps of a Greco-Roman temple surrounded by worshipful vestal virgins. It might be my favourite album cover ever; it was released during those days when I played a record over and over and over and over whilst staring at its packaging. A distant ominous band of black and green sky aside, the colour palette is all in the same spectrum: red, orange and yellow. And every virgin resembles her twin.

Me, I’m waiting so patiently, lying on the floor, I’m just trying to do this jigsaw puzzle before it rains anymore.

Like the side effects of a vaccine, the worst is yet to come but in a good way: Exile on Main St., the greatest rock and roll album ever waxed, four sloppy sides of rock, blues, country and gospel, ersatz Americana. Its cover is fitting, a black and white photograph of a collage of freak show handbills and photographs snapped by American photographer Robert Frank. Five hundred tiny, grey-scale pieces which will all turn black on the dining room table in certain lights.

As much as I love the album, I’m not looking forward to assembling a bastarding bastard puzzle of this louche masterpiece. But it’s too late to stop now. Ann and I, as with most people, have come this far relatively unscathed, consequently, slacking off or letting up at this point in time seems senseless. There’s a light ahead shinning, but in the meantime, another jigsaw. And Ann will drift past the dining room table and pause to click together the snapshot of the suspended and handcuffed escape artist. Afterward, I’ll box up the puzzle. I just may keep that Klondike app on my iPad though; I wouldn’t mind killing some time in an airport departure lounge.  

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of anxiety and cracking up since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming in 2021. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, use that thingy on the right.