Shock Therapy Machine

            On Tuesday morning just after midnight I was finishing up something on the computer before bed when I felt something on my mouse hand. I looked and saw a bedbug. This was forty nine days after the one I found on June 8 and so I doubted the two bugs were related. This must mean that the bedbug came from another source. I found some books on the street recently but they don't look like they could have carried bedbug eggs. A few days ago my upstairs neighbour left a tripod in a carrying bag hanging on my doorknob. I took it into my place even though I don't need any more tripods and I did put it on the upper shelf in my bedroom. David told me last month that he's seen bedbugs in his place and so it's possible that the bag had bedbugs or eggs in it. It's also possible that the bedbug travelled through the walls from another apartment. 

            I went to bed and at around 2:30 I woke up because I had to pee. I decided to turn the light on and check for bedbugs and sure enough there was one on my pillow and another one crawling up the wall behind the pillow. They were all the same medium size and so that suggests they hatched at the same time. If they're old enough to lay eggs they may have been here for over a month but the place has been treated twice in the last month. After finding the bedbugs I couldn't sleep and so I only got at the most two hours. I was pretty exhausted during song practice. 

            I finished memorizing "Manu Manuréva" by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. I found one set so far. 

            I called my landlord to tell him he needed to call the exterminator because I'd found three bedbugs. As I expected he immediately started blaming me and saying he only gets these problems from me. I explained that I'm the only one who complains but I'm not the only one with bedbugs. I informed him that my upstairs neighbour David told me last month that he had bedbugs. He said he hadn't been aware of that. I told him that no one wants to say they have bedbugs because they are afraid of being blamed for them. I urged him to hurry up and call Orkin. 

            I weighed 89.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning because of the bedbugs I'd found I had no choice but to do my laundry a week early. In addition to my usual bedding and clothes I took my comforter and the two sets of bedroom curtains. I started removing the cover for my living room futon with the intention of leaving it off until I'm sure the bedbugs are gone, but there were so many cat claw holes underneath in the actual sewed on mattress cover that I decided to keep the outer cover on. All my shorts had to be washed and so I wore long pants for the first time this summer. At first it wasn't so bad because it had been raining but when the sun came out it got pretty hot to have my legs covered. 

            While my clothes were in the dryer I went over to the hardware store to buy poly filla. It was the first time I'd been there since they started allowing customers inside the store again for phase three of opening up from pandemic. I bought a 300 ml container of quick drying spackle. I had time to seal two holes on what used to be the exit door in the bedroom from where the locks used to be. I also filled in some gaps between the baseboard beside the bed and the floor. Since I still have my bedbug proof mattress cover on the bedroom futon, the only places I can think of where the bedbugs would lay eggs would be in the cracks of the baseboard and maybe the pillow. The pests have far fewer options than they did during the previous infestation. I'll fill up some more cracks tomorrow. 

            When I brought my laundry home I put my comforter in a garbage bag to keep in the kitchen until the bedbugs are gone. It's too big and hard to clean to risk keeping it on the bed. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos before a late lunch of kettle chips, salsa, yogourt and a small steak with a glass of orange juice. 

            I took a siesta an hour later than usual and slept naked as I'll have to do for all my naps until the bedbugs are gone. I didn't notice any more bedbugs than the three I'd found in the early hours of the morning. Tonight will be the test to see if my spackling did any good to hold the bloodsuckers back.

            After posting my blog it was too late to take a bike ride all the way downtown and so I just rode to Ossington and Bloor. I weighed 89.1 kilos when I got back at 17:45. 

            I worked on my poem series "My Blood In A Bug." Hopefully this new influx of bedbugs won't give me too much new material. 

            I watched all of the videos I shot last Friday of the surreal barbaric shock therapy machine that I made by sewing a leather covering over my Roland amp, topping it with my rusted Martian Bouquet sculpture and running electrical cords between the two. The third and final video, which I shot two hours later when dusk was arriving and with the curtains closed, worked best, especially with the red bicycle flashers I placed inside of each mouth of the sculpture. I got some interesting shadow effects on the wall behind the sculpture by shining my reading lamp up towards it and moving it around. It made the shadow of the twisted metal "bouquet" part of the sculpture look like sinister devil's antlers. But the light of the lamp also washes out the red flashing lights that are more effective for my current purposes than the shadow effect. 

           I imported the Shock Machine 3 video into my Movie Maker project of making a video for my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy." I placed the new video at the end of the timeline to edit before placing it into the main movie. For now I just need a few seconds of the darkest part of the video where the bloody red flashers are dominant, to appear when I sing, "Why don't we wait now to warm up the machine?" I'll work on that tomorrow. 

            I colourized two more damage spots in my photo of the skateboarder. 

            For dinner I had a potato with gravy and two tiny steaks while watching Mayberry RFD. 

            In the first story Mike has accumulated $35 from odd jobs, allowance and birthday presents and his father strongly suggests that he should give some of it to charity. He gives $10 to the local minister who tells him he'll put it towards a foster children's plan in Hong Kong by which $10 pays for a child's school tuition for a year. A little girl named Kim Lee becomes Mike's foster daughter and they begin to correspond. Since Mike has paid for Kim's education she sends him her report card. Like Mike, Kim's worst marks are in arithmetic but he encourages her to study harder. They become attached to each other through their letters. When Kim learns she is going to be adopted by a couple from the United States named Mr and Mrs Kenworthy and will move to Washington, she is not sure about it and asks for Mike's approval. He feels protective of Kim isn't sure either and so Sam arranges to take Mike on a trip to Washington and to meet Kim and the Kenworthys when they arrive. When Kim meets Mike she says she expected an older father but that it's okay. Mike approves of the Kenworthys and Washington. Mr and Mrs Kenworthy take Sam and Mike to dinner at the Capital Dining Room which is only for congressmen and their guests because it turns out Kim's adoptive father is Congressman Kenworthy.

            Mrs Kenworthy was played by Jean Howell, who played the wife of Jesse James in the movie "Hell's Crossroads", appeared in "Superstar", was in the cast of the show "State Trooper" and co-wrote the screenplay for the original "The Fast and the Furious" from the 1950s. She later became an environmental activist. She was married to Canadian actor Larry Thor. 

            In the second story Sam is at a conference in the big city when he runs into an old friend who now works for NASA. He has custody of some moon rocks that he is displaying in various places and Sam asks him to show them in Mayberry. But he says it's against the rules but he agrees to meet Sam in Mayberry. Sam says since he'll be there anyway he can show his friend Howard a moon rock. He agrees but stresses that no one else can know. Sam calls Howard to tell him but Goober happens to be eavesdropping and so soon the whole town knows. When Sam hears of the leak he cancels the whole thing and says even Howard can't see the rocks now. Everyone in town is upset with Sam and so finally Sam tries to persuade his friend again. While they are talking his friend gets a call from his boss telling him to display the moon rocks at the Mayberry Museum. At the show Sam meets his friend's boss and asks how he was persuaded to bring the rocks to Mayberry. He says the state senator intervened after reading a pleading and crudely written letter from a disappointed little boy named Goober.