Frank Gorshin

            When I got up on at 5:00 on Sunday morning as usual I wondered if it might be psychologically or even physically unhealthy to force oneself to get up at the same time every day. I speculated that it might actually be better to sleep until one wakes up naturally and not to be so mechanically enslaved to clock time. I toyed with the idea of someday experimenting with less regimented sleep, but for now I’ll probably just continue with things the way they are.

Saturday’s snow was still on the ground on Sunday morning, plus a little more. I haven’t seen or heard a single plough since the season went into remission. It’s as if they sent them off to Florida to make waves for surfers. This time last year it was a rainy but normal mid-April day and the snow was long gone.

            The wind was even wilder than the day before and it caused my right curtain to break free of its lien de rideau and do the flag dance until my yoga was over and I stood up to fix it.

            At breakfast I made my last two pieces of cinnamon-raisin toast but one of them slipped out of my hand and fell, butter side down on my floor. I considered eating it anyway because it didn’t look dirty. I took a bite, but with my face that close to it I could see little hairs on it, so I made another piece of regular toast with jam.

            I had to send my income report to social services and fill a prescription at the drug store. I dropped off my empty containers of psoriasis cream at Vina and said I’d be back after the supermarket. Then I went to the mailbox to send my report and road through the slushy soup to No Frills. The pedestrians manoeuvring through the snow looked like they felt betrayed by springtime. I got five bags of grapes, a tomato, a pack of little Swiss rolls, some shampoo and some mouthwash. The cashier asked me if I had a points card. I told her I was pointless and she smiled, but I wondered how many hundreds of people have said that to her.

            I rode home along King to Dunn and then north. I’m still amazed that no one has bothered to plough. The road seemed to have been salted because it wasn’t very slippery but it was a dry, snowy mess. Do they lay off all the plough drivers on April 1^st?

            When I got home the wind sounded like someone playing a saw and flapping a sheet of aluminium.

            I heated up some of the frozen tandoori chicken samosas that I got from the food bank. There was way too much cardamom and it made them bitter.

            I took a siesta and goofed around on the internet.
            I realized two and one half hours too late that I’d forgotten to pick up my prescription from the drug store.

I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay starring Martin Landau as a successful lawyer with a conscience named Ned Murray and Frank Gorshin as his client, Lew Rydell. The story begins with Ned getting Lew off on a murder charge but when Lew tells Ned afterwards that he actually did kill the young man that died, Ned is in a moral dilemma. He has never defended a guilty man and so now he feels guilty himself. He wants Lew punished and plans to tell the DA but his boss and future father-in-law tells him to drop it. Ned tells an old friend and former client named Tony about Rydell. Tony is eternally grateful to Ned for having helped keep his brother out of prison a few years before. Tony tells Ned that he will take care of Rydell and Ned is almost all right with it because he thinks he would have gotten the death sentence for his crime if not for his defence. Ned goes to talk to the man that served as the judge in Rydell’s trial, who is also a trusted family friend. He tells him what Rydell told him, that the young man had been flirting with Rydell’s wife and so he killed him, and Ned asks the judge what he would have done as a lawyer in his position. The judge says that a man that kills because of his wife flirting with another man is mentally ill and so he would try to make sure he is locked up in an asylum where he can be treated. Suddenly realizing that he has sentenced Rydell to death, Ned rushes away to try to stop Tony. He arrives too late because Tony has been killed. Ned decides to become Rydell’s lawyer again, this time to make sure he is ruled insane.

It was raining as I got ready for bed and so there were fast little rivers running along the gutters and around the edges of snow that didn’t look like it was being dissolved at all.