Air strike, fiction, Paddington Bear, Lonnie Johnson, December dates, repeatedly being kneed in the balls, Prestige jazz, noir

Sunday 6/22/25

US launched strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

How bad is it if the world comes to an end at this point?

I don't know that it's that bad. Is whatever this is right now better? Is whatever this is right now continuing to get worse and worse better?

I'm not someone who believes in doing something just to do it. There has to be purpose. Meaning. A point. At the least, a goal.

A hope. But more than a hope. That the hope will become an actuality.

It's like the way we live is itself a desecration of life. We're already genociding humanness, even if people don't realize that's what's happening.

What do they realize?

I've been working on "Still Good" since one this morning. It's shortly after six now. There has been a lot more work to do in it than I expected. Quite a bit of cutting. Sometimes when you cut, you have to suture. Other times you just cut.

This story can't have a lot of qualifiers. It has to go pretty straight, pretty linear. When a sentence does linger a bit, it really needs to pack a wallop, and they have to be properly spaced and judiciously used. The rhythms of the voice must be maintained throughout.

Voice is a key part of any story that works, but such is the voice of this story that it has to go its particular way. It can be a little different with first person--which this story is--but each third person story also has a different voice from every other third person story. That I do, I mean. The rhythm is established in the first sentence with this story. The voice. It's going to take time and focus to finish this one. It might be for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. I don't know. The important thing is to get it right. Insofar as anything is important, which I don't even think is a valid or relevant concept anymore.

I finished "An Afternoon of Unsurpassed Clarity." That was a fairly quick one--Wednesday to Saturday. You could sit there and read that story twenty times in a row.

My mom babysat for the kids Friday night. They watched a Paddington movie, which Amelia likes. Sounded like a recent movie that has a sequel or two. I think I saw that somewhere. I texted my sister a link today to the complete Paddington series with Michael Hordern, and the note, "For Amelia." It's really a delightful series.

Downloaded eleven sets of Lonnie Johnson music--his complete solo output from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, plus his Smithsonian Folkways sessions, and also Victoria Spivey's complete recordings--he's on there a bunch, too.

I have this theory that there's just a little something extra going on with music made around Christmas. I don't mean Christmas music, per se. I'm talking recording sessions and concerts. Free Jazz. Miles Davis and the Second Great Quintet at the Plugged Nickel in December 1965. The Grateful Dead on 12/19/69 at the Fillmore Auditorium. But some Christmas music as well. Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" on the radio for the first time is one of the most enchanting things I've ever heard.

Got some unripened bananas. As per my new banana knowledge.

There always seem to be these new studies coming out about alcohol, saying that there is no amount that can be recommended, which is a strange way of putting it. But you are much better off with none. It's not worth the risk.

Finished the antibiotics yesterday. Didn't have to take any of that painkiller. I'll see the dentist again tomorrow. I have a feeling I'll need to make at least one more trip out there.

My legs have a different shape than they used to. I'm not really sure why. I've been running stairs for a long time. They were more up and down before and now it's like they're more cut-in, if that makes sense.

Did ten more circuits in the Monument yesterday. Kind of a bear. Grinding through it. They set up the mist shower thingy up on the hill. It's nice to stand in that after I'm done. Today marks 3262 days, or 466 weeks, without a drink.

People are almost unilaterally witless now--you'll need to be a little smart to come up with something funny--but I don't know what's less funny than every single social media post by so-called comedians.

on the brink of WW3

Comedians: come to Pete’s Pasta Palace tonight! Show at 7!

Even when they don't mention comedy in the post, you can always tell that if you click the bio you're going to see the word comedian. And also probably writer.

Same guy:

When god sees a window, he opens a door, but TEACH a man to window, he’ll eat for a lifetime

I bet if the marines got to know me they would like me

A lion doesn’t concern himself with quitting a job before having another lined up

Nothing mid about this life crisis

Haha no the plastic surgery looks great! You absolutely look like a human being!

100 barbers vs giving me the simple haircut I asked for

The cure to male loneliness is pulling off the perfect heist with the fellas

Guys in the summer are like “what if I bought a shirt with pineapples on it?”

Great stuff, man. That's awesome. Just post after post of it. And lots of people will follow you for that because it's so fucking stupid and they're so fucking stupid. That's how it works. And then there are people who are too stupid to be able to understand that's how it works.

Garnishing my wages sounds delicious

The comedy king. I once saw someone describe reading William Giraldi's fiction like being kneed in the balls over and over again. This is like that.

There's a veritable endless amount of things that go into writing. You have these words, and the next word has to have a given number of syllables. I know how many syllables a word has to be before I write it. This is more musical than music what I do, more mathematical than math. It can be a little irksome sometimes that it takes me a while to finish a story. But it's not like I can do anything with the story right now anyway. And when I'm actually working on it's not irksome. It doesn't get "old." These works can't get old. Even as I'm sitting there working on a paragraph of one of them for the latest time or making yet another pass. My writing isn't what other people are doing. Completely different thing.

The Prestige label was great for jazz in the 1950s. It didn't have a lot of money, so you had to get in, cut your session, no fuss, no muss, and that was basically going to be your album. It was mostly about the music. Speed was important. Which meant you needed to have your act together. This was important for Miles Davis, especially with where he was--after what his career had become--in the mid-1950s. The First Great Quintet was the ideal band for this Prestige set-up. Coltrane benefited a lot from what the label offered, too, both with Davis and on his own.

Been watching so many horror movies for this book, but I sneaked in another noir yesterday, 1948's He Walked By Night. Effective. As with Tension that I saw last weekend at the Brattle, Richard Basehart featured. Any movie with Whit Bissell is usually good. The real star, though, is John Alton's cinematography. You also get Jack Webb. Probably director Alfred L. Werker's best film after 1939's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, though Anthony Mann did take over for him.