Humberly Gonzales

            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords for the second verse and half of the third of “À la manière de Brassens” (In the Style of Georges Brassens) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the second and third verses of “Ballade Des Oiseaux de Croix” (Song of the Birds of the Cross) by Serge Gainsbourg. There is only one verse left to learn and so I should have it nailed down tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. The heat is off today and if it’s like this next Wednesday I’m going to look into finding someone to fix my guitar. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went over to Vina Pharmacy where my prescription was ready. I had requested the renewal two weeks ago but earlier this week learned that the fax number for my doctor’s office no longer exists. I then looked him up and found that Bloor Medical is gone and that now he’s at Forest Hill Family Health Centre. I couldn’t reach them by phone but their website had a note welcoming Dr. Shechtman’s patients and so I gave Vina the fax number. He responded pretty quickly to renew it. I’m due for a physical early next month so I’ll also get more exercise riding up to Avenue Road and Eglinton.

            I rode to No Frills were the red grapes were super cheap but there weren’t many bags of good ones left. I got eight mostly small bags. I also bought a pack of raspberries, bananas, a Canadian beef sirloin tip roast, mouthwash, Arm and Hammer toothpaste, two packs of five-year-old cheddar, three bags of skim milk, a jar of PC salsa that’s supposedly Canadian, a box of saltines, a big box of Twinings Earl Grey tea (which is British), two containers of Siggis skyr (which they said was Canadian but I see now it’s a US company), and a jug of Pure Leaf iced tea (which is by Lipton which is Dutch owned now), and a bag of Miss Vickie’s barbecue flavour chips. When I got to the cash I discovered that one of te milk bags was leaking and so the cashier sent someone for another. It took him so long he could have milked a cow while all of my line was waiting. When I got home I had to wash the milk from the lower bag of my trailer.

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 14:30. I had saltines with peanut butter and a glass of iced tea. 

            I took a siesta at 15:05 and woke up at around 16:45. I didn’t take a bike ride.

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:23. 

            I flushed out my ears and the left is always more plugged, plus I always have to come back a few minutes later and do the left again because at first after being flushed it feels even more plugged. The second time usually does the trick. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Seven Shades of Blues” I finished making a video montage for the instrumental of clips from the BBC documentary When Hippies Ruled the World. I then added the clips from Blackboard Jungle to fit my line, “Mom and dad want baby’s freedom, the child wants mom and dad’s”. For the second half of the next line, “Man wants to be the angel that desires to be a man” I isolated the clip from Wings of Desire of the angel’s wings disappearing. Next for the first half I need the clips of the trapeze artist wearing the angel wings. This brings me back to where I was in this project on March 22. So now I’m a little less than a month behind whereas 8 days ago when I discovered that I’d absent mindedly deleted the project I was six months behind. I’m eight video clips away from getting everything back that I lost and I have all of the videos and a good idea of the clips I need. It might only take a couple more days to get caught up. 

            I had a bowl of lima bean chili with a slice of toasted sandwich bread and a beer while watching the first two-thirds of Star Trek: Section 31. 

            The story begins with a flashback to when Philippa Georgiou first became the Emperor of the Terran Empire. They made it to have been a dumb contest when it should have been her clawing her way to the top. We begin in the present of this future story with a Section 31 agent receiving Georgiou’s profile. The timeline is not the same as it was in Star Trek: Discovery. It says she was brought from the mirror universe in 2257 and that’s true but then it says she joined Section 31 when she got here. She was never in Section 31 in our experience. Maybe after jumping to the future with Discovery and then returning on her own through a portal to the time they’d jumped from she joined Section 31. Apparently this story takes place in 2324, so 67 years after she first came. That’s disappointing. I would rather see how she adjusted when she first came back to the 2250s and how she joined Section 31. Now under the name Madame du Franc she runs a very popular night club on a space station in the border territory outside Federation space. The team has to contact Georgiou and get her help to gain control of a super weapon that one of her guests possesses. The team leader is Alok and he is from Earth’s 21st Century he was modified during the Eugenics Wars. He convinces Georgiou to rejoin Section 31 for this mission. Georgiou’s hotel guest Dada has the weapon in a round case. Philippa attaches a phase pod to the case so that it drops from Dada’s hand whereas Philippa can touch it because she is wearing a phase pod in the same space time frequency. But a Trekdalorian (my word) who also has a phase pod steals the weapon after a long semi impressive martial arts fight with Georgiou that is annoying obscured by the phase effect. The Trekdalorian is confronted by a beautiful member of the team who has the power of seduction but the assailant easily kills her. Georgiou gets her foot caught while phasing through a wall and the Trekdalorian acquires the case. He opens it to show her that the weapon is one that she ordered created when she was emperor. She says it’s impossible because she had it destroyed. Then the Trekdalorian beams away. She explains that she called the weapon The Godsend and it creates a chain reaction that incinerates everything in its path, destroying entire quadrants. She had it destroyed because she could potentially have no empire if it was used. She and Alok interrogate Dada who is from the mirror universe. He says the convergence of two ion storms created a portal from the mirror universe to this one. Their ship is sabotaged and one of the team is working with the enemy. Garret, the Starfleet observer on the team says she found a garbage scow they can use for a ship but it’s missing one part. They find Zeph the mechanoid team member murdered. They connect a tricorder to his suit to see if he recorded his murder. Zeph’s blood is found under Garret’s fingernails and a strand of her hair is found on his body. The footage reveals that Zeph killed himself. That’s the two-thirds point in the story. Section 31 was supposed to be a series and so it feels extremely rushed. I think we were supposed to slowly get to know these characters so we would give a fuck when they died. 

            Melle was played by Canadian actor Humberly Gonzalez, who studied at the National Theatre School in Montreal. She has a recurring role as Dr. Ivy Turcotte on the Canadian series Nurses. She played Joni in the Canadian film Stay the Night. She starred in the video game Star Wars: Outlaws. She says she’s queer but she’s in a relationship with a guy. Unlike “gay” the word “queer” is extremely vague. I would think that one would need to be queered in order to be queer, otherwise it defeats the meaning. Mary Wiseman of Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Academy has made a similar statement that she’s queer even though she’s in a heterosexual relationship. It seems to be a trend but a heterosexual claiming to be queer is like a white person claiming to be black.