Kate Bush

            I’d left the oven on when I went to bed just after midnight on Friday. It was slightly open with a pair of underwear hanging to dry from the handle of a pot. When I got up to pee around 2:00 they were dry but I kept the stove on because it was really quite cold and the landlord hasn’t turned the heat on yet.

            When I got up at 5:00 the apartment felt very dry. It was quite warm as I started yoga and so I turned the oven off. During song practice I opened the window a crack and by the time I was finished the temperature had evened out.

            Some writing that I’d done the night before got accidentally deleted. It was because I’d worked on the document on my laptop and it was copied to my flash drive. But when I opened up the file on my computer and copied the work I’d done to the original, there were two files with the same name. I think that when my computer asked if I wanted to open the saved document I thought it meant the one from the flash drive and I clicked “no” and so I had to spend almost an hour re-writing what I’d written. Fortunately it was mostly fresh in my memory.

            At noon I did my laundry. As I was going back into my building the skinny old guy that’s been panhandling every day in front of the donut shop since Wednesday was standing near my door. He started talking to me but the words just sounded like babble. Finally I told him I didn’t understand a single thing he was saying. Then he fairly clearly said “karma” and I realized that word had been among the babble beforehand. I repeated “Karma?” and he nodded, saying, “He knows.”

            I’ve been listening to the Kate Bush discography. After listening to her first three albums I'd say that Lionheart is the best so far, with The Kick Inside a close second. They’re both a lot better than Never Forever, though that one has its moments.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I watched an episode of Perry Mason. In this story, an oil executive named Conway finds a woman named Rose sneaking around his desk. She claims she had just been passing by and had seen that his desk had needed tidying. It turns out that she works in another department and he has someone escort her there. Later she makes a call to Warner Griffith to tell her that she’d stolen the papers that he’d wanted. Later Conway notices the file is missing and is upset because it’s crucial for his re-election as head of the company. A loud and aggressive woman named Amelia steps into his office and says she’s one of the shareholders. She demands to know what he’s doing to protect himself from Warner Griffith. She doesn’t want Griffith to win the election. She leaves. Shortly after that, either another woman or the same woman using a different accent calls him and tells him she has vital information that will help him win the election but she’s sure his phone is being tapped and so she directs him to a specific phone booth in another building and says she will call him there at 19:00 to let him know where to meet her. He goes there and she calls to tell him to meet her immediately in room 709 at the Hotel Redfern. At the hotel the elevator operator is sitting and reading a book. She does not look up at him but takes him to the seventh floor. In room 709 he finds Rose’s dead body with a gun beside her. He picks up the gun and puts it in his pocket, then he wipes everything he’d touched and leaves. He takes the stairs down to the sixth floor and then pushes for the elevator. The operator, once again without looking up, comments that he’d walked down from the seventh floor. The police have received a tip and Tragg is just walking in when Conway leaves. Conway goes to see Mason, who tells him he wasn’t very bright to have taken the gun. He explains that he’d panicked when he saw that it was a gun belonging to the company. Conway suddenly remembers that the voice on the phone sounded like that of Mrs. Griffith. Mason turns the gun over to the police and tells Conway to rent a room in a motel for a while. Mason goes to see Mrs. Griffith and tricks her into admitting that she called Conway but she says she will deny it. She says she didn’t send him to room 709 and knows nothing about a murder. She says she called his office but he didn’t pick up her call to the phone booth. Mason wants to know why she offered to help Conway and she shows him a picture of Rose. She gives him Rose’s address. Mason goes to Rose’s building and finds sticking out of her mailbox a letter showing her husband Fred’s return address. He goes to see Fred. He shows him Rose’s picture and tells him she may be dead. Mason talks to Warner Griffith who says he can prove he was in Phoenix at the time of the murder. Tragg second guesses Mason, finds where he’s told Conway to lie low and arrests him. Amelia comes to see Mason and claims that she followed Conway to the phone booth. Mason doesn’t believe her. She says Burger the DA sent her to him and so he knows not to accept her testimony. In court, Mavis the reading elevator operator is on the stand. She has a very strong New York accent. She says she was reading a book when she took Conway to the 7^th floor. Mason asks her the name of the book and she answers, “You Could Die Laughing”. Mason wonders how she could recognize Conway if she was engaged in a book. She says “By his feet.” Burger asks if she has any documentation for her ability to recognize feet. She says, “Well, not outside of the tests they made of me at Stanford. They called me phenomenal. A quirk of nature. There was also the write-up in Time-Week about when all those professors from the University of Chicago came and …” Burger cuts her off. Mason takes Mavis to Mrs. Griffith and gets her to look at her shoe closet. Mavis identifies a pair of shoes that she let off on the 7^th floor. Mrs. Griffith admits that she went to confront Rose but found her dead. Upon seeing the body she suddenly wanted to protect her husband and so she called Conway to set him up and then she called the police. In court Mason gets Mavis to look at Fred’s shoes. Before she can identify him he admits that he killed his wife because she wouldn’t come back to him. It always seems to be that guilty people on TV admit committing murders way too easily. It turns out that Mavis couldn’t recognize Fred’s shoes because he wasn’t wearing the shoes he’d worn the night of the murder.

            Linda Griffith was played by Marie Windsor who was known as “the queen of the Bs” because she got most of her work playing bad women in B movies. She was in Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 noire, “The Killing”. She was so convincing that people used to send her Bibles in the mail. She was a lifelong Mormon. She started out writing jokes and sending them to Jack Benny. When he met her he was stunned by her good looks and immediately got her signed with Warner Brothers.

            Amelia Armitage was played by Jacqueline Scott, who was Dr David Kimble’s sister on The Fugitive. She was also in the finale for that show, which in 1967 had the highest viewership in history.

            Rose was played by Pamela Duncan. Who was a B movie player and appeared in “Attack of the Crab Monsters”.

            The most interesting character, Mavis Jordon was played by Natalie Norwick, who played several parts on Dark Shadows and was also in one Star Trek episode.

            There was a book called “You Can Die Laughing” by Erle Stanley Gardner, the writer of the Perry Mason stories. It was from his series of detective novels, “Cool and Lam”.

            I felt all day that a cold was coming on and by the time I went to bed it had come on.