Catlin Adams

            On Friday morning Word behaved fairly well at first as I worked out chords for a couple of songs. But then when I was trying to transcribe the chords to “Malaise en Malaisie” (Malaise in Malaysia) by Serge Gainsbourg Word froze again. When I came back nothing I’d done had been saved. In the end, I only got the chords added to four lines of lyrics. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning, I took my bedding and clothes to the laundromat. I took my comforter too just in case of bedbugs. As I was gathering everything, I ran my finger along where the walls meet at the bottom of my bed and killed a bedbug that had made a nest there, but it was black and looked ill. I remember three weeks ago when I did my laundry and had to wade through the snow in the parking lot of the plaza where the laundromat is. There’s still lots of snow along the sides. 

            My keyword assignment is due in six days. From the list of prompts I picked the word “Monstrous.” I did a search of my Word document of the text of Heart of Darkness and found that “monstrous” appears four times. Now I have to find one of the assigned articles that also use the word and then figure out a short essay to write comparing the two. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch. 

            It was raining in the afternoon and so I didn’t take a bike ride. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos at 19:00.

            I got caught up on my journal at around 18:00. 

            I converted all the pdfs of the essays we’ve had so far in Global Modernisms to Word documents so I could search the documents for the word “Monstrous.” Achebe quotes a passage from Heart of Darkness that has the word “monstrous” in it, but he doesn’t focus on the word. Only the Gikandi and Richards articles cite the comparison made by William Rubin between Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Heart of Darkness in which he specifically refers to “the African faces” conjuring “something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous such as Conrad’s Kurtz discovered in the heart of darkness.” I think I’ll use that for my essay. 

            I read the first few pages of “Inter-Imperiality” by Laura Doyle. She proposes that we can better learn about modern empires through a study of the empires that preceded them since ancient times. That makes sense to me. 

            I made a new batch of gravy and had some with a small potato and two chicken drumsticks while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            The first situation is a ridiculous fight between two spiritual men. The one from the temple upstairs had his quiet meditation disturbed by the bongo-playing of the guy in the temple downstairs who used his drums to focus on his meditations. They end up physically fighting over which of them has the most love.

             Next, when Malloy and Reed are on the road, a driver who sees them takes off at high speed so they follow in pursuit. They chase the car down a dead end and then when it can’t go any further the driver gets out. It’s a very attractive woman who says she did it for fun to see if she could beat them in a race. 

            Then they are called to a robbery at a liquor store after the owner tripped the silent alarm. Reed chases three young guys down an alley and then arrests them. But then they find out that the liquor store owner pressed the silent alarm when there had not been any robbery. The young men had asked for beer on credit and when he refused, they started trashing the place. Store owners with silent alarms are not supposed to press them for anything but armed robberies and so he could lose his alarm. When Reed went after the guys, he could have used his gun since the men were reported as armed, but his instinct told him they didn’t have a gun. 

            The last situation is when an elderly neighbour calls the police on the babysitter across the street for playing loud music. In the back, Reed finds there is a child in the pool. He dives in and pulls her out. Malloy gives mouth to mouth while we learn that the 14-year-old babysitter can’t swim and so that’s why she couldn’t save the younger child. The ambulance comes but we learn the child might not make it. 

            The racing woman was played by Judith Brown, who co-starred in Big Doll House. 

            The babysitter was played by Catlin Adams who co-starred with Steve Martin in The Jerk, with Neil Diamond in The Jazz Singer. As a director, she won a Directors Guild of America Award for an after-school special.