Paul Hartman

            On Wednesday morning it had been eight days since I killed the bedbug that I probably brought home from Vina Pharmacy after getting my first covid shot. There is still no sign of another and it takes about ten days for eggs to hatch, so I'm hoping there were none. 

            My hands weren't flaking today. I don't know if it had anything to do with the olive oil and the aloe vera I used. 

            I finished working out the chords to my song "Junk Shop Bizarre." During the process of feeling it as a song I also got a better sense of the poem and made some major alterations, which I sent to Albert Moritz for when he's recovered enough to look at the manuscript: 

The Parkdale night shift just got busted out of prison 

while I am stuck like lumber at the bend of the river 

My habit has been watching the assembly line of masks 

the conveyor belt of longing continues to carry past 

Sometimes I have the guts to cut my melpomene 

and bleed a smile or “hello” that is hopelessly sad 

A drunken pregnant woman from the island of St. Kitts 

pulls her dress up to her shoulders to show her bump and tits 

She lays back on a car hood while all her friends laugh and watch

spreads her legs and says she needs a big cock

It’s now four in the morning and it’s starting to happen 

insomniacs converging with those just afraid of sleeping

All are arrayed as unrelated nervous knickknacks 

on the junk shop shelves of the street 

I'm swinging in a hammock between Parkdale's jaws 

that sometimes builds a wind up to sling me down into its maw 

I try to stay but then its stomach’s anti-matter pull 

pukes me out because Parkdale 

finds me indigestible 

            I memorized the first chorus of "Le java des chaussettes à clous" (The Dance of the Studded Stockings) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished working out the chords for "Des laids des laids" (The Ugly The Ugly) by Serge Gainsbourg and uploaded it to Christian's Translations to prepare it for blog publication. 

            I weighed 89.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning I tackled cleaning my oven again. There are still black stains on the sides but they no longer dissolve into grease and so the water doesn't get as dirty as it did when I started this project a few weeks ago. I'm starting to think that some of the stains aren't worth getting off and I'm tempted to move on to other kitchen cleaning projects. When I compare the photos from this time and last time there's a minuscule difference. Maybe on Friday I'll do it one more time but with just soap, brushes and copper wool but no baking soda in order to clean up a little more of the blackness but also clean up all the baking soda residue. 

            Even though I used a lot of baking soda my hands didn't get flaky and so the flakiness from the previous day must have been caused by chemicals in the Comet I used to clean the bathroom sink. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. I had saltines and old cheddar with a glass of lemonade. 

            My daughter wanted me to send her any videos I might have of her when she was a child and so I took the four videos I have off of a disk. When I attached them to an email, since each one was well over 25 megabytes Google automatically started uploading them to Google Drive. Some of them were pretty big files and one of them took at least two hours. It took most of the afternoon to get them all uploaded but I was able to do other things like go for a bike ride.

            I rode to Yonge and Bloor. The grinding while I pedal continues but it hasn't gotten worse or affected the movement of the bike. I weighed 88.4 kilos when I got back. 

            The videos finished uploading a little before 18:00. 

            I worked on my poem series "My Blood In A Bug." 

            I edited the video of the animated bouquet of female cord ends within the music video I'm making for my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy." I started cutting out the parts where it shows the cords being pulled and pushed from below to make the the ends move so they look like they have a life of their own. 

            I colourized a few more bricks in my skateboarder photo. 

            I did some digital repairs of my "St Clair Sunset" picture from 1987. 

            I made naan pizza with Basilicata sauce, a cut up beef burger and old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

            In the first story Bee is offered a daily cooking show on a station in Siler City. She's worried about who will cook dinner for Andy and Opie but Andy assures her they'll find someone. After exhausting all prospects, to keep Bee from worrying Andy makes up a Mrs Parkins. Meanwhile Andy does the cooking and Opie is very unhappy about it. He's taking vitamins to keep up his strength after burnt corn beef hash and other horrible meals. Bee doesn't like the way Mrs Parkins keeps her kitchen and tells Andy to let her go because she's found someone to replace her. The next day Andy and Opie come home excited to find out whom Bee hired and are surprised and relieved to find it's Bee herself. 

            In the second story Emmett's successful brother in law, who owns a chain of insurance agencies is visiting. He says he wants to train and hire a salesman from Mayberry and his sister Martha encourages Emmett to take the opportunity. Emmett gives in to please his wife and puts in an effort as a salesman but he clearly misses fixing electronic items. One night Martha calls on Andy to tell him that Emmett has not come home. Goober tells them there's a light on in Emmett's fix-it shop and so they go over there. Through the window they can see Emmett talking to and fixing a toaster. He looks so happy that Martha realizes that selling insurance is not for him. 

            Emmett was played by Paul Hartman, whose father was known as the Ziegfeld of the pacific coast. He was put into show business when he was still a baby and had speaking parts at the age of two. He became a well known dancer in nightclubs and formed a successful duo with the future Grace Hartman that performed on the Vaudeville circuit and on Broadway. They both won Tony awards for the musical revue they created called "Angel In The Wings." After Grace died he turned to a bit of film work and a lot of work on television. He starred with Faye Wray and Natalie Wood in his own short lived sitcom called "Pride of the Family" in 1953. 

            I checked my phone before bed and saw that at around 16:30 I'd gotten a call from The Remenyi House of Music. I assume that means my Washburn has returned from Quebec. Hopefully it's been repaired or replaced so that it behaves the way a guitar is supposed to.