There was a powerful rainstorm with thunder just after I got up. A woman was wrestling in the wind with a garbage bag as she tried futilely to turn it into a hat.
I weighed 84.5 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I've been in the morning in eight days.
I worked on my essay but kept dozing off as I often do when working in the late morning. I managed to lengthen a couple of lines.
I weighed 84.8 kilos before lunch and that's the most I've weighed at that time in twelve days. I had a slice of multigrain toast with hummus, avocado and Dijon. I wasn't sure the combination would taste good but it did.
It was raining when I got up from my siesta and so I didn't take a bike ride.
I weighed 85.2 kilos at 16:00, which is the heaviest I've been in three months.
I was caught up on my journal at 17:07.
I worked on my essay for more than two hours. About halfway I realized that I'd forgotten to buy beer and so I went out and bought a six-pack of Creemore. I returned to my essay and managed to bring it to five lines short of nine pages. I still need at least another page. Here's what I have so far for my conclusion:
For Victor, a mind cannot be beautiful unless the thinker has a beautiful face. The world must be simply understood with the inside revealing an unmistakeable reflection of the outside. There are no hidden meanings because the world must be literally as it appears to be as revealed by physiognomy and pathognomy. But the creature is proof that Victor's belief in appearances is a self deception. He demonstrates that he can reason, learn, and develop senses of fairness and charity. As Wollstonecraft says, "to bring into existence a creature... who could think and improve himself" is an "incalculable gift" that should not be called a curse. But Victor does see his creation as a curse and refuses responsibility for it, thereby forcing it out into the world before its mind has "been stored with knowledge or strengthened by principles" as Wollstonecraft says. She is writing of the educational paucity that women experience, but her statement also applies to all othered genders, and to many others ostracized by society because of deviations from accepted norms of appearance of dress, or form of artistic expression. In making no effort to understand his creation's positive potential and to help him realize it, Victor excludes him from participation in society, making him a monster, and consequently damning him to a life akin to that of a wild animal. Any society that does this to a thinking being, Wollstonecraft warns while quoting the French revolution supporter Riqueti, "can expect to see him at any moment transformed into a ferocious beast". This is so exactly what Victor does to his own creation that it is as if Wollstonecraft is directly addressing him when she quotes Riqueti further, "You have loosed the bull. Do you expect that he won’t use his horns?".
I heated some mini-samosas that have been in the freezer for a year. I dipped them in curried ketchup, tamarind chutney and mango chutney and had them with a beer while watching season 6, episode 20 of The Beverly Hillbillies.
After a week Jethro's diner The Happy Gizzard still doesn't have any customers, despite the fact that Granny is now the chef. Jethro goes driving around and looking at the other restaurants to see what they have that his place doesn't. The difference that he notices is that they all have signs that say the waitresses are topless. He figures that means that they don't wear hats. He has Elly May go out with a sandwich board sign and advertize that they are going topless that night. One trucker almost goes off the road when he sees her and the sign.
Meanwhile Drysdale is trying to land the $20 million account of Mr. and Mrs. Vanderpont. Mrs. Vanderpont wants their money only in a bank that has the cream of society as its customers. Then Jethro walks in to tell Drysdale that their restaurant is going topless. The Vanderponts storm out but later come back only to meet Jed who has come with a jug of headache medicine for Drysdale. Drysdale tells them Jed is an eccentric doctor. Mrs. Vanderpont takes the jug. Drysdale invites them for dinner and then Jed tells him he'll be doing him a big favour if he takes them for dinner at The Happy Gizzard. Drysdale has no choice but to try to please Jed because he has $73 million in his bank. That night Jethro and Elly are trying to speak in French accents and they have a French menu but Granny serves hog jowls and grits. Mrs. Vanderpont is appalled but Mr. Vanderpont, who has been silent until now finally speaks. He has a southern accent and he's from back in the Tennessee hills like the Clampetts and so is his wife. He says these are the best grits and hog jowls he's had in years and he wants seconds. He says he got rich from uranium and as soon as Pearly May put on her first pair of shoes she started putting on high tone airs. Mrs. Vanderpont takes a big swig of the jug and suddenly she's happy. Jethro sells the diner to Mr. Vanderpont.
Mrs. Vanderpont was played by Ysabel MacCloskey, who performed with the Pasadena Playhouse and was an original member of the American Conservatory Theatre. When her husband was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany she acted in an opera company there. She was in her fifties before she worked in film and television and The Beverly Hillbillies was her first screen gig.
It's now been thirty-three days since I've found a bedbug, although I did think I smelled them in the middle of the night. I turned on the light and looked again but found nothing. But sometimes the rancid grease from Popeyes downstairs smells like bedbugs to me. Hopefully that's the odour I picked up.
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