Sunday 5/5/19
It is Cinco de Mayo--arriba--so, naturally, I was drunk again. That's not true. Even when I would drink twenty or twenty-five units of alcohol per day, I was not inebriated. Which was a larger problem. But, 1078 days without a drink. And since we are doing metrics: yesterday was at 89% humidity when I walked my three miles and climbed the Monument ten times; today it was at 84% when I walked four miles and climbed five times. The Red Sox pulled to 17-18, which is the closest they've been to .500 since the second game of the season. But this is the important Red Sox number of the day: 0. That is their run differential after today's game. A little while ago, they were like -45. Nothing says more about how good a team is than their run differential. It is the most telling of all team stats. The Sox sit five game out of first place in the AL East. They will get better, the Rays will get worse. So, basically, it's practically even right now. I see a lot mediocrity in MLB this year. Will not surprise me if no one wins 100 games and the AL East is won with 93 victories. There is now no reason for the Sox not to win this division going away. If they come close to the capabilities of their roster. I wish Bradley was not on this team, though. And anyone who wants to tell me what a great defensive player he is--stop. He's average at best in the field. He's below average for a center fielder. He makes so many mistakes. Five highlight reel catches a year does not a great outfielder make. There's a hell of a lot more to it than that. He's the worst starting defensive outfielder on his own team. And he is one of the worst hitters in baseball, period.
I read Orson Welles's play, Moby Dick--Rehearsed. Bet you didn't know that Welles wrote a play. Bet you didn't know it's one of the finest in all of American theatre. I'll write about it for The Daily Beast. This will be the first of what should be three Melville-related pieces I do this year.
I went to a screening of vintage cartoon shorts at the Brattle today. They ran the same one-hour program on the hour throughout the day. There was Bugs Bunny as Captain Horatio Hareblower--I wonder how many people would get a Horatio Hornblower reference now--and Bugs Bunny as a Bunker Hill colonialist. And also this 1938 Disney short, Ferdinand the Bull, which is pretty good. I like how it ends. The last line is simple but effective in the context. The world was not a "gendered" back then as people now like to insist it was. More people were themselves, whatever that self might have been. The irony is that all of the self-serving blating right now has pushed gender and gendering to the fore.
Gendering was never a thing in the past because people didn't actually care. You were just what you wanted to be, or what you were. Plenty of girls did "boy things"--we tended to really like those girls--and plenty of boys did "girl things." I was even a Brownie. No joke. It wasn't a big deal. I was a pretty good soccer player--best in the town, type of deal. Not as good as I was at baseball, and of course I wasn't as good at baseball as I was at hockey, but pretty good for a while. And there was this girl named Roberta who was the other best player in the town. We were like rivals. She was really good. And some Saturdays she would get the best of me, and other Saturdays I'd get the best of her. It was fun. Never did it enter my mind--and I don't think it entered anyone's--that this was a boy v. girl thing. We were just two really good players. If you are a millenial who spends a lot of time screaming yourself hoarse about things you don't really care about--because it's not like you screamed about them four years ago--you might be surprised how things tended to go not all that long ago.
Next Sunday, on Mother's Day, my friend Ben--who is a classical composer and also a really good writer--and I will go to a screening of Psycho at the Brattle. They screen it every day for Mother's Day. Cute, right?
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