Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Home is Where the Hearth is


            On Tuesday I almost memorized "Par hazard et pas rasé" (By Hazard and Unrazored) by Serge Gainsbourg. But when I had the second part memorized I forgot some of the first. Then when I had the first down again I’d forgotten some of the second.
            I washed a section of the kitchen floor on the left side of the mantle. I’ve been alternating cleaning the kitchen and the bedroom but I think I’ll work on the kitchen a little more. The kitchen floor has less paint splatters and so it’s less time consuming.



            I spent more than an hour doing research on the indigenous history of southern Ontario.
            I had chips and salsa for lunch.
            I watched half of the Naked City episode “Beyond Truth” but couldn’t make much sense of it since there’s no audio.
            I did some exercises and got caught up on my journal.
            I spent more time on Indigenous Studies research.
            I grilled a pack of chicken drumsticks and had two for dinner with a potato and gravy while watching the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.
            This story begins in the psychiatrist’s office of Dr. Arnold Gillespie. His new patient is Peter Jenson and he is telling the doctor about an identically recurring dream that he’s been having every night for the last week.
In the dream he wakes up with a wicked hangover in a strange hotel. He looks at the calendar and it says December 6 but the last month he is aware of is October. He calls up the desk and finds out that he’s in the Imperial Hawaiian Hotel while his last conscious moment was in New York City. He goes down to the bar where sailors are dancing with women. He asks one newlywed sailor who is there with his wife what ship he is on and he tells him he’s an ensign on The Arizona. Peter accuses him of kidding, since the Arizona sank at Pearl Harbour. Sailors stop dancing and look at him. Suddenly Peter sees a newspaper with the date December 6, 1941. It’s the day before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour. Peter fell asleep in 1958. He is a bookie for a living and so he goes back to his room and begins making bets by telephone on fights and baseball games based on his knowledge of the future. The ensign comes to see if he’s okay because his wife is worried about him. They invite him for a drink that night. While in the bar, charmed by the young couple, he tries to warn them of the danger. Finally the sailor punches him and the bartender knocks him out. He wakes up in his hotel room as the Japanese planes begin to fly low over Honolulu.
He tells the doctor that this is the point where he always wakes up. The doctor tries to convince him that it’s only a dream but Peter tells him that he tracked down the mother of Ensign Janoski and found that both he and his wife were killed at Pearl Harbour. Peter goes to sleep on the doctor’s couch and begins to have the dream again but this time the bullets from a Japanese plane kill him. Suddenly the doctor is alone in his office looking at an empty couch. His ashtray is empty. His appointment book shows that he has no appointments for that day. He goes to a bar and sees a picture of a familiar man behind the bar. He asks the bartender who it is. He is told that it’s Peter Janson, who used to tend bar there before he died at Pearl Harbour.
This was written by Rod Serling and it was just before The Twilight Zone started.
The host of the show is Desi Arnaz. He introduced it and then at the end he is about to tell viewers about next week’s Lucy and Desi special when there is a commotion behind a screen and he ends up in a Westinghouse fridge commercial. Then he is about to tell us about next week’s show again when Lucy walks on and tells us that it’s called, “The Ricardos Make Room for Danny” and the guest stars are Danny Thomas and his TV family.
Ensign Janoski’s wife was played by Carolyn Kearney who starred in “The Thing That Couldn’t Die”. She was addicted to xanax for two and a half years and helped found a twelve-step program for benzodiazepine addicts.


             Peter was played by William Bendix.
            

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