Ethan Peck

            On Sunday I memorized the first verse of “Juif et Dieu” (Jews and God) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I tried to video-record my song practice again but the camera couldn’t read the memory card. I checked to see if I’d deleted the videos from the card that I’d uploaded yesterday but it looked like I hadn’t, even though I was pretty sure I had. I deleted them again, but the camera still couldn’t read it. I plugged the card back into my computer and the files were still on the card. I tried to format the card and it said it was formatting. By this time I’d used up forty-five minutes of song practice fiddling with the memory card. I rushed through practice by singing and playing mostly one verse and chorus for every song. At 8:30 the card hadn’t formatted so I just canceled the process and decided I’d try to buy a new one later today so I can record tomorrow. I assume the old card has just become corrupted. 

            I negotiated with my digital scale after it told me I weighed 86.1 kilos. I said I did not agree and it said, “How about 85.9 kilos?” But I was still skeptical, its final offer was 85.6 kilos so I settled on that before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I mopped the floors, and afterward, there was time to mop them again but I was out of Murphy’s wood soap and so I walked over to the hardware store to buy another bottle. I know that they are closed on Sundays in the wintertime but I was curious exactly what point in the year they start and end Sunday operations. I learned they open at the beginning of May and then stop at Christ-mas. I mopped the floors again. 

            I weighed 85.8 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. On the Bloor bike lane just before Bathurst an old man on an electric bike with a trailer pulled up beside me. He said to me in an Eastern European accent, “Do you know that when you are pedaling your wheels are turning?” I thought he was talking about my frayed back tire that looks like it’s moving from side to side. I asked, “You mean wobbling?” He smiled and said no, then repeated what he’d said before. I realized he was joking and I smiled and said, “Yours too!” It reminded me of when I was a kid and my mother and I spent the night at the home of an old friend of hers. When I went to bed he said to me, “Don’t forget to close your eyes before you go to sleep” and I thought that was hilarious. 

            I stopped at Staples to get a new memory card for the Nikon Coolpix that I use to shoot the video of my song practice. I walked around for a while but couldn’t find them. I thought that maybe they would be with the cameras but it looked like Staples doesn’t sell those anymore. I see now online that they do, but I didn’t see them in the store. I finally found the memory cards and the cheapest one of that size, for $10 has a capacity of 32 gigabytes, compared to the 8 gigabyte one that Nick Cushing gave me with the camera about five years ago. I wanted to double check with an employee to make sure I had the right sized card, but finding a Staples worker on the floor is like hunting for rare game in the jungle. I finally tracked one down and he confirmed that it matched the old one that I showed him.

            When I got home I put the memory card in the camera and checked to see if it would record and it did, so I’m good for another video session on Monday morning. 

            I weighed 95.3 kilos at 17:15. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:45. 

            In my Movie Maker project of creating a video for my song “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” I was able to synchronize the studio audio of me singing “Serve another cold meal in the restaurant of shock therapy” with the concert footage. But after that, when I sing, “Let’s fry some frontal lobes” it goes out of sync again and so I’ll have to find a video clip to match that line. I would think it might not be hard to find a video of someone frying brains but it might be more difficult to find them being fried without being cut into little pieces and breaded first. I’ll start researching that tomorrow. 

            I worked on a poem about the odour of bedbugs from my series, “My Blood in a Bug.” 

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

            A comet is on course to collide with the desert planet Persephone 3 and scientific assessments by the Enterprise predict that all life on the planet will be destroyed. The Enterprise bridge crew plans to divert the comet’s course away from the planet but are very surprised when they fire torpedoes and the comet puts up shields. 

            They send an away team of Spock, Singh, Kirk, and Uhuru. On the comet, there is a large egg-shaped structure with writing on it. Kirk touches the egg and receives a near fatal electrical shock. Although his condition is stabilized they need to get him to sickbay but the shields of the comet are up and they can’t beam back to the Enterprise. 

            As a linguistics expert who knows 32 Earth languages, Uhuru is tasked with trying to decipher the symbols. 

            Meanwhile, the Enterprise is confronted by a large, fast spaceship with far more advanced weaponry. Pike talks with its captain who says they are the shepherds of the comet, which they call M’hanit. Their task is to make sure that no one interferes with the comet’s course. Pike argues that millions will die but the shepherd says that if the comet kills everyone on Persephone 3, then that is its will. 

            On the comet, Uhuru continues to try to decipher the glyphs, and as this is her first away mission she is nervous and begins to hum a Nigerian folk melody. The egg begins to respond to the music. She tries singing more complicated music and the comet drops the shields. The team is beamed back to the ship. 

            The Shepherds attack them for interfering. The Enterprise manoeuvres so close to the comet that the Shepherds hold back for fear of firing upon it. Spock pilots a shuttle to use high intensity heat to melt the ice on the comet and alter its course and as it bypasses Persephone 3 it releases water vapor that descends on the planet as rain. The presence of water will cause the inhabitants to thrive and advance. Uhuru analyzes the symbol on the egg in terms of music and then extrapolates it into a language. She finds evidence that the comet knew that Spock was going to alter its course and it was predestined to occur. 

            Spock is played by Ethan Peck, who is the grandson of Gregory Peck. I didn’t know that but as soon as I read it I could see the family resemblance.

           He began as a child actor, and played the younger version of Ashton Kutcher’s character on “That 70s Show”. He played the son of Jimmy Smits’s character on “Marshall Law”. He co-starred in the films “Tennessee” and “Adopt a Sailor”. He co-starred on the sitcom “Ten Things I Hate About You”. He starred in “The Curse of Sleeping Beauty”.

            Before bed, I searched for bedbugs and found none. Of course, they could have visited me with their painkiller-laced bites while I was sleeping.