Saturday 7/9/22
* Was pointed out to me today that I have large circles under my eyes, which this person attributed to lack of sleep. I will work on it. I slept a lot last night. I went to bed at ten and was up at twenty of five. That's almost seven hours.
* Ran 5000 stairs, did a personal best 200 push-ups. First set was of thirty. I'm getting a little bit better.
* Worked on a story called "How Dark Does Night Get?" which is about two stars in the sky, an older star and a baby star. It's very good.
* Went to Haymarket. Acquired celery, oranges, peppers, plums. Drank a lot of water and green tea.
* Have details to add about Amory in The Year of Doing Nothing and Everything. Couple texts came in telling me how amazing the excerpt was. One person said they have to read more. They need to.
* The Monk/Blue Note and 'Round Midnight pieces were added to The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Essential Power and Artistry. The best jazz book ever written. I am more than confident in saying that. It's 83,000 words long. What I need to do is go through it, smooth out the references to dates and anniversaries, that kind of extremely topical thing, and fix instances of factual overlap. Realistically, this is the work that is done after the book is on a schedule for publication. It's a lot of little stuff. Well, not that much, I bet. It requires me going through it, hard. The way I do. I could do that comfortably in two weeks. That's a pretty thick book. Jazz as literature, literature as jazz. If you love jazz, this could be your jazz Bible. If you don't love jazz, you're apt to after. And even if you have no interest in that, the prose, the ideas, the life in this book, the human connectivity, stands outside the bounds of what is or isn't playing in your headphones. You could read it having never listened to any of the music, and love it. That book is a feat, man.
* I have a yen for espresso. Perhaps after I shower I will go down to the Starbucks with a book.
* I like the guy in Big Timber who fixes the equipment. I wish I had skills like that. I don't in the slightest. He usually works at the mill but there was one day he has to work in what they call the bush--up in the mountain where they get the logs--and he says that he only had three hours of sleep because he was out late playing in a beer league hockey game. That is my kind of guy. That's when those guys play hockey. In the middle of the night. It's cheaper to rent the ice then. I think there's something romantic there, don't you? You're still skating, you're still playing, you probably have your old equipment, and it's midnight in this empty rink, with other guys out there doing what you're doing, still doing it. Maybe an ex-teammate or two. There's always some guy who was awesome, who made it to DI. Something like that. Might have been twenty-five years ago for him, but he's still smooth, even though he was a third line checking forward who scored ten goals over his Hockey East career. I like the saw at the mill in the show. How it just goes through everything. I find it inspiring. I feel like the pages of this journal are a saw lately. I'm going through you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
