Frank Aletter

            On Sunday morning I memorized the first verse of "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian.

            I memorized the second verse of "Plus doux avec moi" (Sweeter with Me). There's one verse and two choruses left to learn. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I've been in the morning in forty-one days. I ate a lot on Saturday. 

            I finished scrubbing and scraping the glue from the tiles I'd ripped up in front of the stove. I moved the stove and started working on the glue from the rest of the removed tiles. I got most of it up from the first three floorboards and there are twelve left. Most of the boards under the stove don't have as much glue as the ones at the front, so it shouldn't take as long. 

            While I was working I was listening to some partial downloads of Jimmy Buffet recordings that had been on my torrent list for a year. He's a good but not very interesting songwriter and has a good band and so after listening to each album I removed the torrent and deleted the file. At one point I looked down the hall and saw that the door to the deck had been closed and so I went out to open it. Benji was out on the deck and when I opened the door again he complained that I was disturbing everybody. I told him all he had to do was ask me to turn my music down and I would have and I said I would now. But he started swearing at me and I reminded him that I don't swear at him. He said, "Fuck off a million times!" I reminded him that I've always been nice to him and he accused me of deliberately playing my music loud to bother him. I've been playing my music loud for twenty five years and all anybody had to do was to ask me to turn it down. I reminded him that I have asked him from time to time over the years if my music was too loud and he had said no, but now he denied that I had ever asked him. His behaviour seems extremely passive aggressive. I told him again that it's a very simple thing to just ask me to turn it down but I think he is indignant that I couldn't read his mind. Anyway I turned my amplifier down from 16 to 8. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before lunch and that's the most I've weighed at midday in forty days. I had Breton crackers and five-year-old cheddar with a glass of limeade. 

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

            I weighed 85.8 kilos at 16:52. I haven't been that hefty in the evening in forty one days. 

            I went out on the deck to chisel some more fossils but only got a small piece done before it started raining. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:56. 

            I reviewed the videos of my performances of "Megaphor" from June 23 to June 26 of this year. From June 23 to June 25 I played the acoustic. On June 23 the take at 12:00 was quite good but one of the chords near the end sounded discordant. On June 24 the take at 4:30 was pretty good. June 25 was one of the best and it was clear that I was happy to get it in one take. On June 26 I played the electric and the take at 6:45 wasn't bad. This was the first time I was able to review four sessions rather than three of "Megaphor" in half an hour and so my performances were obviously improving by the end of June. 

            In Audacity I tried to work on my project of Sleep in the Snow with drums and then I noticed that the file has some distortion. I tried the effect of removing clipping and it lowered the volume to an extreme degree and when I raised the volume the distortion returned. I listened to the other files of the song and they all have the same distortion, including the master file on the compact disc. I wondered if the problem was my speakers but other recordings sound fine through them. Since I never noticed it before maybe it's not that noticeable. 

            I finished scanning the last two individually cut frames of black and white negatives from spring of 1988. I scanned a sleeve containing two strips. One had my friend Tom busking and the other had my ex-girlfriend Brenda sitting by the water down by Harbourfront. Another sleeve I started has more shots of Brenda and some random stuff.

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, honey-garlic sausage and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 3, episodes 22 and 23 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Joe wants the Shady Rest to get some of the business of putting up juries that the Pixley Hotel has. He calls up the Pixley Hotel and scams them by saying that he's the head of the Order of Buffaloes and wants to book the hotel for their convention. The Pixley Hotel then pushes the jurors out and so the court has no choice but to put them up at The Shady Rest. Kate and Joe have to give up their beds to jurors and the dining room has been confiscated for both eating and deliberating. The jurors go through an incredible amount of food. Then Kate has to care for the baby of a juror and the livestock of some farmer jurors. Days go by until finally Kate gets an order from the judge saying that the jury need to either come to a decision or start eating at the Pixley Diner. They make a decision right away. It turns out they'd been stalling in their deliberations because they wanted to keep enjoying Kate's cooking. 

            In the second story a Mr. Benton arrives as a guest and he claims that he is with a Mr. Dobble but Kate sees only Benton. Kate wonders if she is losing her mind and keeps trying to see Mr. Dobble to prove otherwise. No one else has seen Dobble either but Kate is the only one who has been in a room when Benton is talking to Dobble. It's driving Kate nuts and so finally she asks Benton to leave. He says he booked the room for two weeks and won't have the money to pay before then. She tells him he won't have to pay. Later a detective from the Hotel Association comes to Kate with a picture of Benton and says they know him as Skip Tracy. He goes to hotels claiming to have an invisible friend and then when he's asked to leave he just moves to another hotel, never having to pay. But later Kate and Betty hear saxophone music coming from the now vacant Mr. Dobble's room and they run. 

            Benton was played by Frank Aletter who worked first in theatre on Broadway. After playing Stefanowski in "Mr. Roberts" he was asked to play Gerhart in the film version. He appeared in very few films but worked a lot on television. He starred as an astronaut in "The Twilight Zone" episode "The Parallel". He also played an astronaut in the short lived sitcom "It's About Time". He was married for sixteen years to Lee Meriwether. He also starred in the sitcom "Bringing Up Buddy". He co-starred in the serial drama "Danger Island", which was part of "The Banana Splits Adventure Hour". He played a supporting role on the sitcom "Nancy".