Veronica Cartwright

            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords for the second verse of “Turlututu Capot Pointu” (You Kill With Your Pointy Hood) by Serge Gainsbourg. I think that the chords for the third verse should be the same as the first and the fourth will be the same as the second. I might have it finished tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune the whole time. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my electric guitars. 

            I weighed 86.35 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I headed down to No Frills earlier than usual because I wanted to be back before 13:00 to meet Brian Haddon in front of my place. I bought five bags of black grapes, two packs of raspberries, some bananas, a double pack of New Zealand ground beef, three bags of skim milk, a jug of iced tea, two large containers of 0% skyr, one small container of 4% skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. My upstairs neighbour David was cleaning the stairs and told me the landlord is giving him a discount in his rent to mop the stairs and the hallways. I put my groceries away and hung up my trailer. I went back downstairs and was about to take my bike up when Brian arrived. 

            I introduced David to Brian. Brian came upstairs and saw my place for the first time in more than fifteen years. The last time he was in my apartment was when there was still fake wood paneling on the walls and vinyl on the floors. Over the years I’ve taken down the the paneling and tore up the tiles. I patched up all the walls and cleaned the wood floors over hundreds of hours of labour. Now my landlord wants to tear down the plaster walls to put up drywall and put vinyl back down on my hardwood floors, ruining years of work. 

            On the way to Mezzrows we stopped at Vina Pharmacy so I could renew my Betaderm prescription. 

            At Mezzrows Brian and I sat on the patio. We shared a pitcher of Wellington lager and each had the grilled brie cheese sandwich made with home made bread. It was very good. We talked about the video I recently made featuring Brian’s song “The Ballad of My Chest Cavity”. 

            This was Brian’s last beer for a week because he is going for his first colonoscopy next week. I told him the only unpleasant thing about it is the stuff one has drink leading up to the procedure. That’s why I just take the poop test every other year instead. 

            Brian and I walked down to Book People to see if my book has been sold but it’s still on the shelf. Ky said a few people have asked about it but what people tend to buy is books with pictures in them. 

            I walked Brian to Dufferin and Queen and saw him on the bus. We made plans to get together in August maybe at the Artful Dodger on my next haircut day.

            I took a late siesta until 17:45. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 18:12, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since July 9. I was caught up with my journal at 19:12. 

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. The concert video is always behind the audio and so every few words I have to delete little bits of it to bring it forward. I synchronized the video with the audio for the phrase “paranoiac armour”. Then I had to delete a little more of the video to line it up with the audio for “has been circumcised”. I’ll continue with that tomorrow. 

            In my “2024-10-06 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I deleted everything at the beginning except for the final take of “Leave the Naïve Alone’. I saved the project as “Leave the Naïve Alone (Kramer). I then deleted everything after that song and slightly adjusted the audio balance. Tomorrow I’ll publish it and upload it to YouTube. I grilled six hot Italian sausages then I sliced two of them and put them on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread, with marinara sauce, basil pesto, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the penultimate episode of The Bold Ones: The Lawyers.

            Brian Darrell arrives in Pilu, Colorado as Frank Garson. He makes the acquaintance of Mary Gaffney, the waiter at the local diner. Later he goes to a bar called the Bluebird Café and drinks at the bar all night. The next day he has breakfast at the diner and talks with Mary again. That night he goes to the Bluebird again and Mary is there for the first time so he joins her. He spends another day and goes to the Bluebird one more time but not all night. When he leaves, a man named Randy Burroughs on a motorcycle calls “Garson!” Randy tells him there’s a place down the road where they can talk and tells him to follow him there. Once they are secluded Brian asks Randy why he sent him the letter to meet him in Pilu. He tells Brian that he’s just learned that he inherited $17 million but he can’t step forward to claim the money because he is wanted for raping and murdering a 14 year old girl named Mary Shaw. He wants Brian to defend him but he refuses. He says his code of ethics won’t allow him to reveal the privileged information Randy has shared with him but he won’t help him either. The next day Brian drives out of town on a winding mountain road and Randy shoots out his tire with a rifle, causing him to go over a steep incline. But he survives and buys another car to head back to LA. On the way he meets Mary who is hitchhiking and takes her to California. In LA she gets a job at another diner. Randy also goes to LA where he finds a lawyer to represent him. Because of his inheritance it becomes a high profile case and it makes the news. That’s when Mary sees Randy on TV and then approaches Brian about him. Brian can’t discuss it or even advise Mary because of his code. She says she knows something that is very relevant to Randy’s case but Brian won’t let her tell him about it. However, Brian’s partner Walter Nicholls is less rigid in his own code of ethics so he helps Mary with her problem and she steps forward to testify in Randy’s trial. On the witness stand she recounts how Randy came to the diner every day and repeatedly asked her out for about two months until she said yes. On the date he got drunk. He tried to kiss her and she stopped him but then he asked for one of her stockings. She tried to get out of the car and he grabbed her, trying to remove her stocking. The lawyer mentions that three years before that Mary Shaw was strangled with her own stocking. Mary says she screamed and Randy threatened to kill her if she wasn’t quiet. He told her he killed a girl three years before for the same reason. She didn’t believe him but he said she’d better and her name was Mary too. Then she believed him and got away. Later she didn’t report his confession to the police because in the aftermath she didn’t believe it. Randy is found guilty. 

            Mary was played by Veronica Cartwright, whose film debut was in In Love and War at the age of 9. Her TV debut was on Make Room for Daddy in 1959. She played Jemima Boone in the first two seasons of Daniel Boone. She co-starred in Inserts, Goin South, The Witches of Eastwick (for which she was nominated for a Saturn award), Nightmares, Wisdom, Valentino Returns, Raven Dance, Sparkler, Call of the Wild, and InSight, She won a Saturn award for her performance as Joan Lambert in Alien. She’s been nominated for three Emmys for guest appearances on ER and The X-Files. She is the sister of Angela Cartwright who starred in Lost in Space.