David P. Harmon

            On Friday morning my left arm was a little worse again after having improved considerably two days before. 

            I memorized the first verses of “L'araignée du soir” (The Spider of Night) by Boris Vian and “Une Fille à la mer” (A Girl Out to Sea) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the last of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll begin a two session stretch of playing my Kramer. 

            I weighed 87.15 kilos before breakfast. 

            I started my weekly filling up of the kitchen sinks and while the water was running I wanted to start preparing to apply the second coat of primer in the bathroom. First though I wanted to take some photos of how the bathroom looks with one coat. After I snapped the photos I was changing into my painting clothes when I realized I’d forgotten about the water and the sink was overflowing again. I rushed to unstop the sink and sop up the water. It had just started overflowing and there was a stream heading west to the hallway. I used a lot of sponge towels and got everything dry. I was worried that I’d caused another leak or flood down at Popeyes but when I went downstairs there was no evidence of any falling water problem. It looks like I caught my absent mindedness in time this time. Maybe the $1400 I paid in damages last time went towards a more secure ceiling. I may have to stop trying to multitask when water is filling up a sink. By the time I’d cleaned up my mess it was too late to work on any painting today and so I’ll aim for Sunday. I’ll keep the shower curtain off so I can start sooner. I weighed 87.25 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I noticed when I came back that there was a little stream of water that seems to have run from the southeast corner of the restaurant. I guess it took my sink overflow a couple of hours to work its way down through Popeye’s ceiling. It didn’t look that serious and didn’t disrupt business. Later I looked and the stream was gone. The next day though I was about to head to the supermarket and it looked like the same stream was there again. But then I realized that it was not a stream of water but a reflection in the door’s glass of a long strip tar that had been used to patch the sidewalk. So it looks like there had never been a stream of water on Popeye’s floor and so maybe my overflow didn’t leak downstairs at all. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos at 17:50, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since August 11. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:15. 

            I put my camera on the tripod and stuck the legs firmly into the laptop compartment of my backpack with some shirts stuffed in around it. I tilted the camera down about twenty degrees, started recording, donned my backpack and then took my bike out to ride around Parkdale. I headed west and when I looked at my reflection in a store window it looked to me like the camera wasn’t tilted enough so I stopped to angle it down a little more. I rode on the street to Sorauren and then east to Dufferin, then back to O’Hara. Then I rode west again but slowly on the sidewalk to Sorauren and then on the south side I rode back along the sidewalk to Dufferin. Then I took the sidewalk back to O’Hara. I crossed the street and this time rode west on the south side to Sorauren, then east on the north side to Dufferin; then I crossed and went back to my place through the graffiti gallery that is the Milky Way and went home. I watched the video on my camera and I think the best part is from rolling through the Milky Way. I’ll upload the video tomorrow and see what I can piece together from it for my “Paranoiac Utopia” Movie Maker project. 

            I made a new batch of gravy out of the drippings from the pork ribs I grilled yesterday. I had some with the good parts of some rotten potatoes (I never saw such poor quality potatoes go to market when I was growing up on a potato farm) and three pork ribs while watching episode 17 of The Brady Bunch. 

            Carol sees Greg uncharacteristically just lying on his bed. His brothers have gone to the movies but he doesn’t feel like it. Carol takes his temperature but there’s nothing physically wrong with him. Mike discovers that Greg has failed his latest Math test even though he’s usually an A student in Math. Then Greg goes to the girls’ bedroom to ask Marcia what girls look for in boys. She says they should be rugged like Steve McQueen; dress groovy like Gene Barry; be romantic like Paul Newman; be innocent like Dustin Hoffman; be a man of the world like Dean Martin; but most importantly what is really in these days is a mustache. Greg tries but fails to grow a mustache. Alice finds a love letter that Greg wrote to someone named Linda lifting phrases from Shakespeare and Robert Burns. Carol and Mike realize that Greg is in love with someone named Linda and that’s why he’s so distracted. Carol checks the school yearbook and finds there’s not one Linda there. Then we see Greg being kept after school by his Math teacher so she can give him some personal attention and now it’s obvious that his Math teacher is Linda and he’s deliberately failing so he can be close to her. Marcia comes home with a new friend named Linda and Carol thinks that’s the one. But then Greg comes home and obviously doesn’t know her. Then Mike gets a letter from Linda O’Hara, Greg’s Math teacher, asking for a meeting and he and Carol realize the identity of Greg’s love interest. Mike meets with her and learns that her boyfriend is parked outside waiting for him. Mike recognizes him as star baseball player Wes Parker. He goes to bring him in and then Greg meets and recognizes him as well. Suddenly Greg is just as star struck as he was love struck and forgets about Linda. Wes tells him he’ll give him two tickets to a game if he gets an A in Math. The problem is solved but later we find Greg on his bed this time mooning over his substitute Biology teacher. 

            This story was written by David P. Harmon, whose first film credit was co-writing Johnny Concho in 1956. He wrote the movie Rock All Night in 1957. He wrote The Big Beat, Last of the Fast Guns, and Call to Danger. He co-wrote the movie L’intrigo. He wrote three episodes of Mannix, 12 Episodes of The Man Behind the Badge, 10 episodes of The Jane Wyman Show, 7 episodes of Studio 57, 34 episodes of Gilligan’s Island, 6 episodes of The Brady Bunch, and 6 episodes of Harper Valley PTA. He wrote the Star Trek episodes "Eye of the Beholder" and "A Piece of the Action". "A Piece of the Action" is the story of the Enterprise discovering a planet where the inhabitants have a society based on Chicago gangster culture of Earth’s 1920s.