Santoku 7-inch with Tsuchime finish. Edge angle 16 degrees. Cuts a tomato in the air. Toss the tomato up and if your hand eye coordination is good it's sliced straight through, so that by the time your arm is in the down part of its downward arc you aren’t certain there will be two halves. So that you think maybe you missed. There’s just no resistance. Your arm ellipses counter-clockwise when viewed from your left, and at 180 degrees on the arc, the knife and your hand now at the bottom, the tomato is still going up. The pieces of tomato. Two of them, you can see. Your hand-eye coordination is good. But mostly you leave the vegetables on the cutting board. You work in the traditional manner. You work like Tengo in the Murakami novel. You work efficiently and functionally, and many of the ingredients are the same ones Tengo uses. Cutting up onions, Shiitake, garlic. More. Broccoli and ginger, kale. A pear. The radio is on low. Jian Ghomeshi is interviewing Dexter. It’s a Tivoli, your radio, and Ghomeshi’s voice is sharp through the Kloss speaker, Kloss innovation, free of distortion. Kloss’s legacy. It’s dark outside but there’s a bit of light from the moon and you can see the tree out front, the branches, shadows like a hand. And since your Tivoli with its Kloss speaker is distortionless, there’s no mistaking what Jian Ghomeshi says, clear between the rhythmic striking of your knife against your cutting board, when he conversationally says “There’s a convicted killer here in Canada who claimed to identify with Dexter.”
Which is chilling and there's no way you can even begin to think about this. Especially right now, while you’re minding your mitochondria. Check with Terry Wahls. What you're back to doing now, having flipped your radio to Off, is absorbing the blow from MS and deflecting it, Jedi-like. Mitigating it, really, and through nutrition. Getting the response to settle down before it causes damage. Doing this by eating well. And it's working. This is also why you’re sleeping so much. Why you’re narcoleptic, but without the clinical diagnosis.
The next morning you're downtown at the Bay, buying new bed linen. Since you spend so much time there. In bed. At the Bay on the linen level, the fourth floor, which is also where you can buy knives and blenders and soaps and chocolate, anyway for this entire floor there’s one functioning cash register. The others are broken, and to fix them staff have been calling The Bay's customer service in … wait ... Bangladesh. And it turns out they can’t understand the woman on the other end of the line, so the machines remain out of service. The line is long. You don’t mind the wait, but as you're standing there you're thinking of the outsourcing and it’s making you queasy, to the degree you're rethinking the purchase.
At home and out of curiosity you look up the Hudson Bay's mission statement. “HBC is a leading corporate citizen, giving back to the communities in which it operates. In 2011 alone the HBC Foundation invested over $7 million CAD, working with national and local organizations to build healthy families, create strong communities and inspire Canadians. Also in 2011, Lord & Taylor’s charitable foundation donated $1.7 million USD to charitable organizations in the United States, and through its ‘Do Better’ program, our Associates raised $66,000 for the communities in which they live and work. HBC is a socially responsible corporation, buying ethically manufactured products and recognized for our leadership in energy conservation and environmental protection.”
It's about then, with your radio off and your computer also now off, back to reading fiction, that you breach the 1000 page mark of the novel you're reading, not including the two hundred or so pages of footnotes you've also finished.