Elroy Schwartz

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the first verse of “L'amour de moi” (The Love of My Life) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’m not sure if the second verse has the same chords. I know it doesn’t start with the same one. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second day of two. Tomorrow I’ll start a four session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning in nine days. 

            Around midday I used No More Nails to glue the molding where the bottom of the kitchen counter meets the Masonite that I glued to the floor. I also glued the molding that I’d removed from the back of the stove so I could place the Masonite under it. Next I’m going to sand the veneer of the cabinets below the kitchen counter to get them ready for painting. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before lunch. I haven’t been that light at midday in ten days. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. It was a lot cooler in my apartment than it was outside so I overdressed and found I hadn’t needed to wear my motorcycle jacket at all. 

            I spent about fifteen minutes chiseling black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:10. 

            I uploaded to YouTube the video of my August 11, acoustic performance of “Le temps des yoyos” and posted the links on Facebook and Twitter. I started a new Movie Maker project for my August 19 song practice from which I’ll make a video of my electric performance of the same song. I imported the two videos and the audio recording of that session. Tomorrow I’ll start synchronizing them. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor I worked at the end of the timeline on editing the clip of Ziegfeld Girl that I’d downloaded. The curtain closes on the dancers in the clip but I cut small sections of the end off and placed each one in reverse order, causing the curtain to open instead. The opening of the curtain becomes slightly jerky in my altered version but I think that works for my video. 

            I cleaned, scanned and cut two sets of colour negatives. The first surprised me because it had shots of my ex-girlfriends Heidi and Victoria. I had no memory of ever having taken their pictures. This would have been early in 1990 just before my place was burglarized and my Nikon was stolen. I wouldn’t put it past Victoria to have been involved but I suspect it was my ex-girlfriend Whitefeather’s sons that did it. The other set of negatives are all street and people shots, I assume from the late 80s but I don’t know exactly when. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken breast while watching season 2, episodes 12 and 13 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story one of Oliver and Lisa’s chickens is laying cubical eggs, but they don’t know which one. Also their toaster only goes down to start toasting when someone says out loud the number “five”. Then it comes back up again when that number is repeated. Oliver goes to Sam’s store where Fred and Newt are discussing that another farmer has a talking turkey. Oliver asks for a new toaster but learns that toasters that work when certain numbers are called are normal. Oliver wants to find out which hen is laying the cubical eggs and so he and Eb put them under surveillance in cages but nothing happens. Hank Kimbel puts him in touch with a Mr. Moody who has been trying to develop cube laying hens for years. Moody offers Oliver $1000 for all his chickens and he accepts. Lisa is very upset because she considered them her friends. Moody brings them back because none of them laid cubical eggs. The next morning Oliver gets up and tries to make toast by calling out “five” to the toaster but Lisa wants to know why he’s doing that. He goes to get eggs but none of them are cubes. He realizes he dreamed the whole story. 

            This story was co-written by Elroy Schwartz, who co-created with his brother Sherwood the short-lived sitcom Dusty’s Trail. He co-wrote the original pilot episode of Gilligan’s Island, which was lost and so that pilot never aired until it was rediscovered in 1992. He was one of the head writers for the series. He wrote for Groucho Marx, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. He wrote episodes of The $64,000 Question, The Six Million Dollar Man, and It Takes a Thief. He was also a licensed hypnotherapist with an office in Palm Springs, California. He did past life regressions, and wrote several fiction and non-fiction books. He was also a painter. 

            The second story is a Christmas episode. Oliver has always dreamed of having an old fashioned Christmas with a real tree. This is his first Christmas since he moved to the farm and that’s what he plans to do. But he discovers that everybody in the Hooterville valley uses artificial trees. Mr. Haney tells him that there is a conservation law in that state that prohibits the cutting of trees. He has to get a permit from Hank Kimbel. Doris thinks that Oliver is right about real Christmas trees and she bugs Fred about it. The night that Oliver and Lisa decorate and light their tree the Ziffels, Hank Kimbel and Sam Drucker all come to see it. They only leave quickly when Lisa brings out the fruitcake that she made out of hotcake batter and with whole, unpeeled fruit in it like a whole pineapple and whole oranges. We don’t know where Hooterville is but it is too warm at Christmas for there to be snow.