Hypnotism

            I’d planned on going downtown on Friday to pick up a weekly planner for 2019 from Staples, but the streets were wet and I had my journal to catch up on. It’s not really much of a rush to get the planner anyway.

I also want to get some E and B guitar strings, since I don’t have any spares right now if one breaks, but I can do that at Long and McQuade, sometime soon, which isn’t a long ride.

I got caught up on my journal that evening.

A few days ago I experimented with starting a Yahoo group because I want to have alternatives to my Facebook groups in case I get kicked off permanently. I started with a Serge Gainsbourg group but no matter how I tried I couldn’t post a cover photo. For an unknown reason, after not trying for a few days, I was able to do it right away. I didn’t do anything differently and so maybe there was a waiting period or maybe my connection was weak before.

I completed my download of the current season of Doctor Who and downloaded the Black Panther movie.

I watched a weird episode of Peter Gunn. A wealthy man named Arnold Simpson is in his back yard at nigh rounding up his cat when someone shoots him in the shoulder from the bushes. At Mother’s Edie is singing “S’wonderful” by George and Ira Gershwin. 

Arnold’s wife Jane comes to see Gunn about the shooting because Arnold refuses to call the police. At first Arnold doesn’t want Gunn’s help but Jane and his friend and physician Professor Wyler convince him otherwise and once he is assured of his discretion he gives in. Arnold says he thinks that it’s Frank, his former partner in a mine that is trying to kill him because years ago Frank was caught in a cave-in and Arnold chose to run rather than to try to save him. Frank was rescued but badly hurt. Arnold recently received an angry letter from Frank. The address is a mining town about 70 km away. Gunn goes to talk with Frank and finds that Frank has died. When Gunn gets home he receives a strange call from Arnold. He sounds almost like he is talking in his sleep and repeats himself several times. He wants Gunn to pick up a package for him at a bar called the Blue Pheasant. Gunn goes to the bar, gets the package from the bitter bartender and takes it to Arnold, who still seems like he’s in a trance, but asks for the package several times. Gunn steps out of the study to let Arnold open it and there is an explosion. The package had contained a bomb and Arnold was dead. Gunn goes back to the bar, finds out the bartender’s address and pays the bartender’s very flirtatious old landlady to lend him the key to the bartender’s room. He finds the bartender dead and a knife narrowly misses Gunn’s head. He fights the assailant in the dark and follows him out onto the fire escape in the heavy rain. He punches his attacker and sends him over the railing. On the street Professor Wyler is barely alive after the fall. He confesses that in treating Arnold for nerves he used hypnosis and found out about the mining incident. He’d decided to blackmail him and then he and Jane decided to kill him. Arnold was hypnotized when he asked Gunn for the package. Gunn was supposed to also die. Wyler killed the bartender because he was the final link. At this point Wyler dies.

A woman tried to hypnotize me once but it didn’t work. She claimed she’d learned how to do it by mail and I thought it would be interesting if I could be compelled to write poetry while in a hypnotic trance. As she tried to put me under I was supposed to imagine myself descending a stairway and looking at various paintings on the walls of the stairs but I got too caught up in the details of the paintings and never went under. I think she just wanted to get laid.