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Whee

Saturday 2/5/22

After five in the AM. Been working for a few hours. Wrote a short story. Need to return to it. Gave an interview for a podcast yesterday about the Sam Cooke book. Realized there was a piece on Coleman Hawkins I left out of the jazz book, so will put that in. Went to run stairs yesterday but when I got there I decided that they were probably too icy and wasn't worth risking injury. Got peppers, strawberries, and bananas at Haymarket.


***

Awful news out of Blacksburg. A shooting, people off to the hospital. Guns. Guns guns guns guns guns. You see guns everywhere. Hunting has never bothered me, I think because I look at it as depicted in Westerns, or in literature from the 1700s and 1800s. It's how you provided for your family, acquired some of what you ate. There was a oneness with the land, of going deep into the woods in search of game. I'm sure that was therapeutic, too. And it was also a way of coming of age. That never bothered me, even as a lover of nature.


You go on these dating sites, though, and it truly is something to behold how many women have pictures of themselves standing over something they just killed. That's in an entirely different spirit to me. I could not interact with any of those women.


I sent a link of the 1979 animated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to my sister because I thought the kids would like it. Nice winter viewing. Exploring in the old house, going into the wardrobe, then ending up in the snow-covered land, and hanging with Mr. Tumnus. That's good stuff.


Watched The Stepfather (1987). That guy! The tag line could have been: "He just wants to find his forever family!" Nice, right?


I made a list of other stories up for consideration with There Is No Doubt. I know a lot of what will definitely be there. You could make the thing 400 pages, easily. Or 220. The way I look at this is that creating material now--all of it--just gives me more options later. And it will certainly give me excellent options when this does change, and I will also be able to more than match any demand with my supply. I don't even think about what it must be like to be every other writer, scratching out nine bad stories in sixteen years, and then putting those in a book which should really be titled, This Is What I Finally Scraped Together And Was All I Could Manage.


I saw yesterday where a woman mentioned on Facebook--she did more than mention; she all but had a gala parade--that she had reached 2000 days sober. Good for her. I observed the love fest--200 likes in an hour. I looked at her profile. Predictable. She was simple, non-threatening. Wrote her prosaic whatever.


A friend and I were talking, about how if I had posted the same thing--not that I was ever non-sober, but I did clear 2000 alcohol-free days back in December, or whenever it was, and didn't even really note it, save how I do my thing where I keep track of the number on here--that no one would have hit the like button--this is true; it's simply how it goes because of what I am--and sixteen people would have defriended me because they would prefer me to die. That's also true. Part of the reason I am not active on Facebook. I am fairly certain I would be dead if I had kept drinking like I had been drinking over these last five plus years, coming up on six. You wouldn't be able to physically endure this drinking that much, and the physical part is easier than the mental, emotional, psychological, spiritual parts. I would have had a heart attack. But I knew that's where I was headed, and I knew I had to stop if I was going to beat these people.


I find that it is best if someone is going to interview me that they listen to interviews I have given. That you be ready. Because it's not going to be like talking to anyone you'd talked to. It will be an entirely different experience. It's going to be high energy, high intellectual energy, with someone who talks differently, and the game really must be raised. It's not the usual just trying to fill in the time and reach the end. I've had experiences where someone doesn't know what to say, and you get the silence, the deer in headlights thing, an "ummmmmm...".


***


Later again. I am still reading "The Everything." This is pretty rare for me, though it's more common of late. This story is "Fitty" good. No one is going to come close to this. If you gave this story--all 2500 words of it--to an alien, I think that alien would know what it means to be human, and what we're doing down here. If you can read it right. Because there's so much in it.


The nameless female narrator at once point uses the word "since" as a synonym for because or "as a result of." That made me think of a conversation I had with someone about fifteen years ago regarding the temporal nature of "since," that it's not an outright because. Think of the song, "Since I've Been Loving You." The "since" is temporal. But people will talk this way. One must understand that every single word of my work is ruthlessly vetted in this fashion. There is a a point and a point on top of a point, and more so, for why it is that word and not any other, with every single word.


Someone sent me this about Scrooge: "If you’ll indulge a little more praise, I really can’t remember enjoying a book so much or being so sad that I had finished. I will definitely be reading it again."


That was nice of them. I appreciated it.


I have no clue who Joe Rogan is, for the most part. Joe Rogan, Neil Young, David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, this side, that side, roar, war, who cares? What do these people really mean in the grand scheme of anything? And there is no sincerity. There are only poses. And ignorance. This side, that side. The sides don't ever even really care about the other side or what they're supposedly doing or not doing. That's not the real motivation.


I also have no clue what cryptocurrency is. None. Could not interest me less.


Lastly: the NHL All-Star Game is awful. Doesn't even look like hockey. Barely resembles a morning skate. What is the appeal of this? How does this grow the game? Seems to me that it highlights the worst parts of the game, that you wouldn't see in a game. And spare me the skills on display argument. The skills are impressive because of the speed at which they're done. This is gliding down the ice with twenty feet on all sides of you. Whee? Is this whee? Whee. Looks ridiculous to me. You can actually have a real game. Might as well, right? Everyone's there. Baseball and hockey used to have really cool All-Star games. The football one has always sucked, and basketball has been at best so-so. Just play the game, play it fairly hard, play it to win. Simply don't be a dick and try to put someone in the third row, but you can have a good, strong game with great players playing together.


Tumnus is a good dude.



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