De-layered

Saturday 12/6/25

Sometimes in the very early morning I can hear the trains and their horns all the way from North Station. The trains aren't running then, of course, but are being moved around the yard.

I did ten circuits in the Monument yesterday, so that was better, though it did take a while. Still ramping back up. But my cold is gone. No rattling in the chest. A bunch of middle school field trippers had stuffed their jackets between the spikes of the fence at the bottom of the Monument, which struck me as a good idea, though it's technically against the rules, and I decided to follow suit.. It was twenty degrees, but the layers I have on weigh me down and that's been impacting how I do on these workouts.

I took off my fleece, my sweatshirt, and just had on a T-shirt and of course my sweatpants. This was much better. Wasn't long before I was dripping anyway, and soaked through the shirt. Not having those two extra layers made a big difference. I think this is what I'll do moving forward in these colder months.

I worked more on "Dead Thomas" last night. I don't think anyone else would understand how someone could work so much on a single story. They'd be inclined to think it's some quick thing you write, at least relatively speaking. I write sentences that no one could touch. Sentences a person wouldn't ever consider altering them if that's how they were. I go into all of these sentences and I keep working them. I improve them.

Then I keep going back in until I can improve them no more. I'm aware of how many times the word "of" is used on a given page. And if it's five and I it should be four, I figure that out. I'm just doing something completely different. It's not writing. Or it's not just writing. The level of imbrication and the amount of imbrication is endemic to me.

If there was some mold of what was happening in my brain that you could take out of my head and fit to someone else's brain so that they were "wearing" those thoughts, could feel their textures, they'd think, "Oh, yeah, I'm not doing that, that would never enter my mind otherwise."

Working on it here before five on this Saturday morning, too.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” my dad said in the final flickering of his life as he flew through the air for that last flash before hitting the ground—it was nip and tuck—and I knew he was gone.

We didn’t get a call that night. They don’t call anyway. They come to your door. I think they try to make the knock polite but firm. A friendlier knock starts you off with a better resting heart rate so there’s less chance that the news you’re about to be told actually kills you.

But when they came and said what has to be said by someone, I heard those words like I already knew what they were and had only been waiting for the news to be made official.

That’s what I mean by he reached out to me.

Judy Garland pitch produced a "no." This was the pitch:

I'd like to write something on Judy Garland's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which I esteem as our finest popular musical Christmas offering, which transcends the idea of Christmas music. I write on Garland a lot. I even write op-eds on her. Along with the Grateful Dead, Powell and Pressburger, the films of Laurel and Hardy, and the music of Nick Drake, her artistry is what means the most to me. 

People often fail to consider what this song meant in the winter of 1944. Victory in Europe wasn't assured. Garland seemed to be channeling into the fear and doubt of not knowing what would become of the world in a very real way, under threat of real evil. 

I'd like to focus on a remarkable recording--and I can send you a link to it, so people can hear it themselves--of Garland first performing the song live, which she did on a radio broadcast in December 1944. Simply put, it's one of the most intimate, remarkable things I've ever heard. She even gets the title of the song wrong when she introduces it. 

I think Garland was every bit the singer--and, in some ways, more--that Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were. And you can hear, I think, why someone would hold that view when you listen to this live performance of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." I'll talk about some of the original lyrics and why Garland wanted them excised. 

It's an American masterpiece. And my favorite work of musical Christmas popular art. 

Alabama would need to beat Georgia today to make the playoffs. You have the top ranked playing the second ranked team in Ohio State and Indiana, which doesn't really mean a lot because of the playoff. It's anticlimactic.

But college football is broken. It may be more popular than ever? I don't know. But that's because we're dumb and simple, getting dumber and simpler by the day, we have no standards, we'll take whatever is pushed at us and think we like it because we know nothing else, or have unknown the things we once knew. That college football has the word "college" in it is a joke. Just make a football minor league.

Celtics had a nice win last night over the Lakers. They're doing okay. I do think Jayson Tatum will return this year. How effective he can be--and how often he can go--will be the story. I think what you'll see is something along the lines of Michael Jordan's return in the 1994-95 season, except this is Tatum instead of Jordan, and in one instance you have a player returning from injury and in the other a player simply returning. I think they can reasonably reach the Eastern Conference Finals if things break right. And maybe more. But more would, in my view, be extra, a bonus.

I wonder how much longer Jaylen Brown will be on the team. He's scoring a lot and shooting well. Next year will also be his age thirty season. I don't think--I could be wrong--that the Celtics organization look at Tatum and Brown as a duo, but rather Tatum as the guy and Brown as the complement. Tatum feels to me like their one true horse in the race. I could see Brown wanting to leave to be the guy elsewhere, and the Celtics wanting someone younger to pair with Tatum. But I could be quite wrong. Brown's been good.

Beatles pitch I wrote and sent this morning:

Top ten songs the Beatles didn't cover--or that we don't have recordings of as such--that would have made for awesome Beatles covers. The early rock and roll and soul stuff. Songs they could have done on the BBC, circa 1963.

I have the ten worked out. Fun piece. So we'd be highlighting those songs themselves in their original versions, maybe look at some other covers, talk about the Beatles' history as fans with each given song, and even get into who would have done the singing in some instances.

I don't want to spoil my top choice, but let's just say there's a cover of that song by someone else who was pretty good, and when you hear their arrangement and performance, it's not hard to envision how this could have been one of those perfect, matchless Beatles covers. (Hint: It's a girl group song.) I've wanted to do this piece for quite some time. Got it all planned out. Very cool and different and fresh sort of piece. 

One of the songs is a number they jammed on for upwards of twenty minutes in Hamburg, but never elected to cut in the studio or trot out on the BBC. Good stuff. 

I was wrong about BC and the transfer portal. My bad. I was surprised to see that the quarterback entered said portal yesterday. I think this was a stupid move for him. On to his third school. This was his first season. He did okay. Put up some numbers. Wasn't great, but what quarterbacks are good in their first seasons? Matt Ryan wasn't. Doug Flutie wasn't.

When a guy does okay early on, he's often a guy who is really good come his last two years. This guy was trending that way. And you just leave. For school number three.

You like this? Why would anyone like this? Why would any sports fan like this? Then he leaves the next school after next year? If he had stayed, he could have had a nice year in 2026 quarterbacking a six, seven, maybe eight win team and putting up numbers. Then you're poised for a better year. Maybe have some draft stock.

What was the issue? That you got benched a couple times? The team was 2-10. A 2-10 team is almost certainly going to use more than one quarterback. It's the nature of the 2-10 beast. There's an attempt to shake things up. It's not personal. This guy was mostly the main guy. He probably would have been the sole main guy next year.

I question whether these BC quarterbacks and Bill O'Brien can't get along. He is demanding and hard on them in ways they don't like, the relationship sours, the kid leaves. Being demanding with a quarterback would make sense, going by his background if nothing else. You have such an easy out these days if you're a college football player. You just leave.

Want more money? Leave. Want playing time? Leave. Feel you were "disrespected"? Leave. Don't like how you were tucked into bed at night? Leave. Get somewhere new and then leave there for your new reason. And, most likely, you wash away, like silt down a drain, and out into the world you go. This kid looked to be O'Brien's guy. They had Alabama in common.

The transfer portal enables fantasy. I don't mean fantasy sports, I mean fantasy for players who are most likely at the end of the road, playing-wise. They think that can maneuver themselves into a situation that will allow them to get to the NFL. And many are blinded by the idea of money, like they've made it now, they're big time, or whatever. It's an awful mix. You could think of it as the football version of a hook-up culture, and endless situationships. Unstable, unhealthy.

I just saw, too, that BC fired someone whose title was the football chief of staff. The football chief of staff? Really? We sound like idiotic children who don't even know how to play games right. The football chief of staff? Must we do everything so moronically? Why? It's like there's a rule and if you don't abide you'll be vaporized.

Everything I once liked about college football is gone now. But there really isn't anything I can't say that about. Everything gets worse. That's the fundamental principle of our world now. Everything gets worse.

Downloaded all available episodes of the radio programs The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe, Rogue's Gallery, and Richard Diamond, Private Detective, as well as Rod McKuen's New Carols for Christmas and Perry Como's Complete RCA Christmas Collection.

Watched The Mezzotint last night in the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas series from 2021. The M.R. James story is one of my favorites. I've seen this installment before. Was just rewatching. I get the big change in the plot and why it was done--and I totally understand why someone would think it should have been done and ought to've been a part of the story all along--but I prefer it as it was.

I like that there's no jeopardy for the characters in the story and that they're instead watching something else unfold, as though they're meant to see it. That's not an issue for me--I think it works in this story. The companionable nature of that story lessens once you have the monster coming after one of these professors. And that companionable nature is in large part what makes the story work as well as it does for me.