David Zelag Goodman

            On Wednesday morning I continued gathering images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. I have 126 so far. 

            I weighed 89.55 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since February 13. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice and a couple of times it stayed in tune for three songs in a row. The problem with my new rechargeable Snark guitar tuner is that the charge doesn’t last more than a couple of days. But it might last longer if I shut it off after using it. I’ve been used to the old non-rechargeable that shuts off by itself. This also shuts off by itself but not as soon. I had to recharge the Snark during song practice and kept unplugging it from the USB to retune. It was fully recharged about three quarters of the way through the session. 

            Around midday I started painting the lower bathroom shelf with the “blue bliss” colour. I covered the top, the sides, and most of the edges of the underside where the shelf meets the wall. The top needs another coat but I might have the whole shelf done on Friday. After that there will be the trim between the wall tiles and the wall, the door and the frame, the bathroom rack, and the bathroom mirror frame to paint with that hue. 

            I weighed 91.15 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco. I bought six bags of green grapes with a price match of $4.14 a kilo and some petroleum jelly. I walked over to Metro where they had non-dairy ice cream. I got a vanilla flavoured kind that’s cashew based by a company called Nora’s that I’d never seen before.

            I weighed 90.4 kilos at 18:55. February 13 was the last evening when I was that easy on the scale. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:49. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity, then extracted to my hard drive some pre-verbal vocalizations by my daughter, plus a rehearsal of my song “Seven Shades of Blues” with Yehudah Cullman on the cello. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of iced tea while watching the penultimate episode of the first season of Combat. 

            A soldier named Lawson is transferred to K Company and he has a reputation for being a one man army. Sure enough, when they are all held down by a sniper in a tree, Lawson sees the sun glinting off the sniper’s rifle scope, moves in and takes him out. Later when they are held down by two machine gun nests that are shooting from inside a barn, Lawson waits until the machine gun swings away, runs into the barn, dives and takes out all of the Germans. Despite his success, Saunders chews him out because being in a squad is about teamwork and not grandstanding. He tells him he could have gotten himself killed because they were all firing at the barn. Kirby is worried for another reason, which is that if K Company gets a reputation for having a super soldier in the squad they are going to be assigned with more dangerous missions more often. 

           The other men confront Lawson but he tells everyone they are going to be fine if their mothers told them they are coming home. Lawson’s mother told him that he would die in the war because it runs in the family. His father died in WWI and his grandfather died in the Spanish-American War. He believes he is fated to die. 

           The next day the squad is sent to destroy two German armoured vehicles. Saunders says for Lawson to go to the bridge and wait for the first car to come but not to try to take it himself until they use their grenades to destroy the second one. He does wait and after the other car is in flames he tosses a grenade inside the first one. But his grenade is a dud so now he is pinned down until the others get there to destroy it with their grenades. 

            The story started off interesting but the conclusion is weak. The implication is that Lawson’s death wish has been cured but not very convincingly. 

            It was written by David Zelag Goodman, who studied playwriting at Queen’s College and then at Yale Drama School. The title of this episode was “High Named Today”, which is the same name as his play, that had a short run off Broadway. His first feature film screenplay was The Stranglers of Bombay in 1960. He was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing Lovers and Other Strangers. He co-wrote Straw Dogs, Monte Walsh, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Fighting Back, and Logan’s Run. He wrote Farewell My Lovely, Man on a Swing, and March or Die. He wrote eight episodes of The Untouchables. He was often consulted as a script doctor and it was apparently his idea that Glenn Close’s character should die in Fatal Attraction.