Guy Wilkerson

            On Wednesday morning I worked out the chords for the first five verses of "Pour ce que tu n’étais pas" (For Someone You Were Not) by Serge Gainsbourg. All the verses have the same chords so far but it's just a matter of placement. After the sixth verse there's an instrumental that might noodle around the same chords and then two verses are repeated. I should have the song done on Thursday. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar for song practice and will do that for two more days. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in eighteen days. 

            On Tuesday morning I saw a bedbug just to the right of the old exit door and it had blood inside. That night I searched for them in all their old haunts for the first time in months and found a few, although none of those looked that healthy. Today I called the landlord and he refused to do anything about it because he says it's above his budget. He told me I'll have to call the city to get him to do it. I know from experience that individual tenants don't get much result from calling the city and so I went upstairs to talk with Shawn about the idea of forming a collective again. The last time Cole Webber came to talk about community organizing nobody showed up but Shawn came later having gotten the time wrong. He and David are free on weekends and so I'd like to see if Cole can come on a Sunday. I sent him an email. Unless the tenants work together we'll get nothing done. 

            I finished scrubbing and scraping the glue from the last of the floorboards under the stove. Next I have to get some sandpaper and level two pieces of plywood that I glued down in the depression that was in front of the kitchen counter. Once the boards are level with the rest of the floor I need to find some tiles. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:00. 

            I spent half an hour chiseling fossils from slate. I only freed up a few small green bits. Of the three discus sized pieces of slate that I broke off from a ridge in Kettleby about twenty five years ago, there's only about half a rock left. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:19. 

            I listened to the Ableton recording of my song practice for July 5 of this year and it has extreme reverb. It turns out that of the forty-some recordings I made since June 1, only June 1 doesn't have reverb and that's only near the end. I assumed that the delay I had heard when I'd had it set to monitor my recordings was only in the monitor. Online forums talked about how difficult it is to eliminate delay from the monitor and so I just assumed that by going directly through my speakers that I'd eliminated the problem as there is no delay that way. Last year when I recorded with a single track I didn't have this problem so I must have changed a setting and ruined my whole summer of recordings. I should have figured out the reverb issue from the start and made sure that I was recording clean before I went ahead and recorded for a month and a half. The only thing I can do now is just try to get it right and not record any videos until I have solved the audio issue. It's a disappointing shame because I had some good takes of my songs over the last six weeks. I followed a tutorial for removing reverb from a recording in Audacity but it didn't work. Tomorrow I'm just going to have to start from scratch and figure out how to make one good recording in Ableton before I try to make sixty hours of them. 

            I made pizza on naan with salsa for sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 4, episodes 8 and 9 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Kate is planning to produce the almost annual charity show with the main act being a duet between Billie Joe and Steve. But Salma Plout announces that she will be running the show this year because Sam Drucker, the chair of the committee appointed her. Sam is the entire committee. When Kate confronts Sam he says that Salma promised to pay her grocery bill in full and so he couldn't refuse. Salma wants Steve to sing a duet with her daughter Henrietta but he says he's singing with Billie. Salma says he's singing with Henrietta or not at all. He refuses to be bullied and says not at all but then Billie tells him she wants him to sing with Henrietta. When people find out that Salma is in charge no one wants to buy tickets. But Kate tells them they can come for free and then they'll pass a hat. The night of the show Salma is dressed as Cleopatra and has Charlie and Floyd carry her onto the stage in a litter but when she tries to speak she has stage fright. Kate comes to her rescue, gets the audience to applaud her efforts and then takes over. Billie and Steve sing after all. 

            In the second story, as Billie Joe and Steve become romantically closer Kate starts to see him as a potential son in law. She begins to worry about his safety while he's working as a crop dusting pilot. When she learns that Steve majored in journalism in college she talks Sam into hiring him as a field reporter. As there is no flying work right now Steve accepts the job. Meanwhile Joe orders some fake bugs and starts planting them onto farmers' crops until an emergency is called and Steve is asked to dust them. Because it's an emergency he doesn't charge anyone for his services. Even though the bugs are discovered to be fake, the farmers realize how important it is to have a crop duster living in the valley and they sign up for annual treatment. 

            Roy Turlock, one of the farmers, was played by Guy Wilkerson, who started out as a Vaudeville and burlesque performer. He played the character Panhandle Perkins in 22 PRC Texas Ranger westerns from 1942 to 1945, including Trail of Terror.