Anthony Rapp

            On Sunday morning I memorized the third verse of “Chasseur d'ivoire” (Ivory Hunter) by Serge Gainsbourg. There's just one easy final verse to learn and then I have to finish revising my translation.

            Around midday I went out in the snow to pay for my phone plan. Someone had obviously smashed the glass of the door of Freedom Mobile because there was now plywood covering it. I told the clerk, “I like your new door. It's very rustic.” He said someone had smashed it on New Year's Eve. I asked if there was anything to steal there and he said there isn't. I asked why someone would break in if there was nothing to steal and he said, “The next time I see him I'll ask him.” There was already some money in my account and so I only had to pay $16 and change for this month's plan. 

            I went to No Frills where I bought three bags of oranges, a half-pint of blueberries, a jug of orange juice, Greek yogourt, skyr, eight non dimmable LED bulbs, one dimmable bulb, and another PC reusable shopping bag.

            I weighed 87 kilos before lunch. I had Breton crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            I didn't take a bike ride in the afternoon because the roads were still messy from the snow and besides I'd already ridden to the supermarket.

            I weighed 87 kilos at 17:45. 

            I downloaded a one-minute video of live wires touching with sparks flying in slow motion. I imported it into my Movie Maker project and converted it to grey scale. It looks really great in black and white. I cut the first few seconds off and I'll edit it some more tomorrow before inserting it into the video I'm making for my song “Instructions For Electroshock Therapy.” 

            I sorted through another folder of my collected writing and threw out several pages of hand-written stuff has already been copied into digital format. I used to hand write my daily journal and so I accumulated a lot of paper. What's left in the two folders I've gone through is mostly writing from the 80s and 90s. Eventually I would like to digitize all of the handwritten stuff. I think there are four more folders to go through but one of them is stuffed with at least twice as much material. 

            I worked on making the graffiti clearer in my photo “Anti Gravity's Rainbow.” 

            I grilled a pack of hot Italian sausages in the oven and had one topped with ketchup, mustard, dill pickle, and sweet chili sauce, wrapped in naan. I had it with a beer while watching episode six of the fourth season of Star Trek Discovery. 

            In order to better understand the dark matter anomaly, Discovery goes into the sub-space rift left in its wake. What they find seems to be the darkest and most silent space they have ever encountered, seeming to contain absolutely nothing. But when they send a robot probe out it dissolves. Now the void is closing in on them and they can't navigate out. Stamets lets Book try to use the spore drive to jump out but he is hit by an energy surge and afterwards he is confronted by a hallucination of his angry but long-dead father. However Stamets can learn more about the anomaly now by studying Book's brain patterns. It is learned that the anomaly must have come from another galaxy. 

            Meanwhile, Zora the ship's computer, which has become sentient because of the spore data, has begun to feel emotions. This coupled with her other duties is starting to stress her out. Grey senses this and asks her to play a game with him. This calms her down and she becomes more sensitive. She detects a hull breach just before it happens. One crew member dies. With the breach of the hull imminent Michael has everyone but herself beamed into the transporter's pattern buffer so without solid bodies they will be protected. Michael stays with the ship according to tradition while wearing a space suit. She is alone with Zora who guides the ship through as the heat becomes more intense and Michael's suit may not protect her. Zora offers to sing Michael a song as they go through and she sings “Stormy Weather.” She has a very good voice but when a singer with a British accent tries to use African American inflections it just sounds off. Anyway Michael wakes up in sick bay and the hull is repaired by programmable matter. 

            This episode was directed by Johnathon Frakes, who of course played Will Riker on Star Trek the Next Generation and since then has directed several Star Trek episodes and movies. 

            Stamets is played by Anthony Rapp, who started acting in regional theatre at the age of six. He created the role of Mark Cohen in the Broadway musical Rent. He is the author of a memoir entitled “Without You” about his relationship with his mother who died of cancer. He also appeared in the original Broadway production of Six Degrees of Separation. In his first movie he co-starred in Adventures in Babysitting. He also co-starred in A Beautiful Mind. He leads a band called Albinokid. I found another small, sick looking bedbug around the upper hinge of the exit door and what seemed to be another dead one in a crack further down the door.