Conlan Carter

            On Saturday when I got up at 5:00, the guy on the cherry picker was already above my window fixing the roof with the landlord watching from the sidewalk. The guy looked at me when I was doing yoga. He was letting stuff drop down to the sidewalk and so I wonder if it's legal to do that kind of work without a covered scaffold to protect pedestrians. 

            I memorized the first verse of "En rire de peur d'être obligée d'en pleurer" (No Good Crying it's Best to Choose Laughter Always) by Serge Gainsbourg, and adjusted my translation. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where the only grapes that weren't too soft were two bags of black grapes. I got a case of mangoes, a chuck steak, some freezer bags, Basilica sauce, black bean and white corn salsa, chili sauce, olive oil, honey, kettle chips, three bags of skim milk, and a small container of skyr. 

            I read a bit more of the Medieval poem "Pearl". I'm not sure if the Gawain Poet actually wrote "Pearl". "Gawain and the Green Knight" is heavily descriptive and in my experience poets that tend toward that much description apply it to all of their work. "Pearl" is not even close and it also doesn't feel like the same style. But scholars who have studied them more deeply than me think that it's the same writer. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            My neighbour Shankar's wifi network went down for the first time in months. 

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

            When I got home Shankar's network was still down but I was able to go on D-Link. 

            I weighed 84.4 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:09. 

            I finished reading "Pearl". As far as I can tell, the speaker's daughter died at the age of two and since she was pure she was made one of the 144,000 virgin wives of god or Jesus in heaven with a spiritual body in the shape of a beautiful young woman. She's the Pearl the speaker lost. He cannot approach her but he is allowed to follow her on the opposite side of the river where he can see her home, the spiritual form of Jerusalem on the other side where god and Jesus live. 

            I collected all of my English in the World lecture notes into one document. Next I need to edit out all the superfluous information from my journal entries. I have an assignment that's due on December 3 that requires making a listicle on Outer Circle of English countries, so I need to organize my notes so I can see some patterns. 

            I made pizza on Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episode 21 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            Granny has dressed Elly up for her date with Fred in her own old late 19th Century style courting dress, with a wide brimmed hat. When Fred arrives he thinks her costume is a joke. Since they can't get on his scooter the way she is dressed, they have to take the old family truck. 

            Meanwhile Lafe Crick arrives with his son Dub. Lafe's plan if for Dub to court Elly so they can get hold of Jed's money. Dub is so lazy he doesn't like to open his eyes when he's wide awake. Lafe says, "Look at me boy!" Doug says, "What fer? I know what you look like." Lafe is constantly hitting Dub with his hat. Jed welcomes them but doesn't want Granny to know they are there. He puts them in a bedroom upstairs. Jed tells Jethro to push Lafe's car out of sight but he ends up pushing it over a cliff. It goes down in flames and the footage is obviously from an old movie. 

            When Lafe is pretending to work in the back yard he meets Drysdale and Jane. When Drysdale hears Lafe has a son he says he would like to put Dub in his executive trainee program. Not knowing Dub is already there, Drysdale gives Lafe a few hundred dollars for plane fare to fly Dub out to Beverly Hills. 

            Granny sees Dub and calls for Jed but Jed plays with Granny's mind and tells her she's seeing things. He says the same thing when she sees Lafe. 

            Fred brings Elly back early because there are no lights on the truck. Jed asks, "What you wanna do, read?" 

            Lafe dresses Dub up in the second-hand big city courting clothes he bought for him and he basically looks like a hillbilly pimp. He has a wide brimmed hat with a long feather sticking out from the band, a striped suit with a bow tie and white boots. When Granny sees the Cricks in the kitchen she decides that she was seeing things after all and walks away. 

            Dub was played by Conlan Carter, who was a pole vault champion in high school and went to college on an athletic scholarship. He studied musical comedy for three years before going to Hollywood. He played C.E. Carruthers on "The Law and Mr. Jones", and Doc on the hit series "Combat". His first movie role was "Quick Before It Melts". After earning his commercial pilot's license he gave up acting. 

            I searched for bedbugs and when I dug the toothpick in a hole on the upper left corner of the frame of the old exit door at the head of my bed, the tip came out black. I don't know if it dipped into the corpse of a bedbug or a live one. A little further down the door a found a live black one crawling and when I killed it was dry inside. On the other side of the door frame, as I ran my toothpick along its usual search route, I noticed the tip had turned red. Obviously I'd killed a bedbug but I couldn't tell where.