Anson Mount

            On Saturday at 3:00, I felt something on my shoulder and picked off a young, healthy bedbug. After killing it I got up to wash my hands. When I came back I did another search and found a second one on the bed. I lifted up the head of the futon and saw another one crawling. I think the spores must have worn off since I haven’t seen that many healthy ones since the end of the winter. I’ve got to get the landlord to bring pest control in again. I didn’t get much sleep after finding the bedbugs. 

            I finished posting my translation of “Mickey maousse” by Serge Gainsbourg and then listened a couple of times to his song “Juif et Dieu” (Jews and God) in which the main point is that god is a Jew. 

            I did another video recording of my song practice, and my second audio recording using Audacity. I put the camera a little higher this time so the pop screen wouldn’t obscure my face. I’ll check later to see if I was successful. 

            Six songs in, my B string broke so I had to stop the camera and pause Audacity while I changed it. The camera normally records for half an hour but when I started it again it recorded for another 29 minutes. 

            I weighed 84.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            I called my landlord to tell him to call pest control. I had expected the usual blaming and arguing but he surprised me by saying he would call them. 

            In the late morning, I went down to No Frills where I bought seven bags of grapes, a bag of roti, a loaf of organic spelt bread with wild rice, four chicken legs, a jug of bleach, a can of dark coffee, three bags of milk, and a container of skyr. The friendly middle-aged cashier with the eyebrow piercing pointed out that the skyr had reached its best-before date. I went back and sorted through several more that had expired until I found a fresh one. I thanked her for caring for me. 

            When I got home there was time to mop the floors and the water was still dirty afterward. I’m waiting to see the bucket's contents relatively clean before I get down on my knees and start scrubbing the east side of the kitchen floor. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch. I had a toasted Montreal-style bagel with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:00. 

            I got caught up on my journal at 18:00. I uploaded the video of my song practice and there were two this time because I’d stopped re-cording to change my B string. I ended up with twice as many songs recorded before the battery decided to shut down. I had elevated the camera enough that the pop filter didn’t cover the lower part of my face. I also skimmed through the Audacity audio of the recording of my song practice. 

            I worked on my Movie Maker project, trying to synchronize the studio audio of the line, “Serve another cold meal in the restaurant of shock therapy” with the concert footage. I had to keep playing back, freezing, and replaying that section of the Riot Gallery video to try to match the frames of me singing that line with the frames of the copy of the same concert on the editor so I would know what my moving lips are saying. In some of the frames, I’m starting to be able to read my own lips but not always. I worked for an hour and I think I got it close to the point where I won’t need the Riot Gallery video for comparison and they’ll be close enough to start fine-tuning the synchronization.

            I made pizza on two halves of a Montreal-style bagel with roasted garlic sauce, a ground beef burger sliced edgewise in two, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the first episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. 

            The story begins with Chris Pike at his big cabin in Montana. His ship The Enterprise is in the repair dock. He’s not answering his communicator. He is troubled over having seen a vision of his own future death, which we saw in an episode of Star Trek Discovery. Since he is not answering his attempts to communicate, the admiral arrives by shuttle to tell him that his Number One has gone missing while making first contact on Kiley 279. 

            Spock’s girlfriend T’Pring has just proposed to him and he has accepted. They are about to make love when Pike calls to tell him the Enterprise is going after Number One. 

            On the Enterprise, we meet the young Uhuru who is right now only a cadet. 

            Pike’s temporary Number One on this mission is Lieutenant Noonien-Singh, who is apparently an ancestor of the future Noonien Soong, who created Data. She is very independent and she clashes a bit with Spock. 

            They arrive in orbit around the planet where Number One has disappeared and detect a warp signature from the planet, even though the civilization below is at the technological level of Earth’s 21st Century and therefore not warp-capable. The warp technology they use is not for space travel but for weaponry. They did not develop the tech from scratch but from observing Federation technology through their telescopes. 

            Nurse Chapel is a civilian geneticist on the Enterprise. She alters the DNA of Pike, Spock, and Singh to disguise them on the planet. It’s a painful process that requires anesthesia but Singh refuses it and deals with the agony. Spock’s genome is resistant to alteration and so his disguise may be more temporary. 

            The planet is controlled by two warring factions. Pike and his away team manage to reach the prison where Riley is being held and release her. 

            Pike orders everyone but himself and Spock beamed up. Since Federation technology has escalated the conflict he can’t in good conscience leave without trying to correct it, even though doing so is against what will soon become known as the Prime Directive. Pike and Spock reveal themselves as aliens and meet the president of one of the warring sides. She does not listen to Pike's arguments for peaceful negotiation and says whoever has the bigger stick wins. Pike orders the Enterprise to descend below orbit to hover visibly above them and tells her that he has the bigger stick. 

            The presence of advanced aliens compels the leaders to meet for the first time. Pike interrupts their meeting to show them what happened to the Earth when it became locked in a civil war in the 21st Century. He tells them that if their planet can unite they may join the Federation. They agree.

            Lieutenant Samuel Kirk joins the crew of the Enterprise. I assumed this is James T Kirk’s father, but looked it up later and learned that he’s the future Captain Kirk’s older brother. 

            Captain Pike is played by Anson Mount, who started out in theatre as an actor and as a playwright. He won the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Prize for “Love Liza?” He produced and starred in the award-winning film “Cook County”. He starred as Black Bolt in the Inhumans TV series and appeared as the same character in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. He played Cullen Bohannan in Hell on Wheels, which he also produced. He is also an assistant professor at Columbia University, teaching audition technique. 

            I searched for bedbugs before bed and didn’t find any. Nor did I notice any before getting up.