Friday 1/5/24
Today should be a productive day. Perhaps my Boston Ballet beanie will come, too.
Twenty degrees outside now at four in the AM. The wind is very vocal. Around the corner of my small street is an even smaller street and the wind is particularly expressive there. The church bells tolled at 3:59--they are always just a little early. Nothing is promised--not even bells ringing on the hour. Control what you can control, which is more than what most people have in mind when they say control what you can control.
At this early hour there is always the electronic chiming of an opened car door from down on my street. Is it the same person every morning? Must be. Where are they going at this hour? I heard those car chimes on Christmas morning, too, at this same time. Is it someone who works every single day like I do? Are we here on this same small street? They must think they're the only person up and at it, because they cannot hear me.
Today is twelfth day of Christmas, for those who recognize such things. The Eve of Epiphany. Seems like a good eve.
The other day I sat in Starbucks and came up with forty ideas for pieces for this year. I've added ten or so more. That is what I do: I just sit there and say, "Okay, think of ideas," and in ten or fifteen minutes I have a page's worth. They cover, of course, all kinds of things.
Thought I had lost the ongoing "Eye of Green" as if the document hadn't saved and went into a panic the other day but I had saved it, dropped it in the wrong folder, and what's more I had printed it out around Christmas to make notes on the page. I don't normally make mistakes like this where I'm discombobulated. Stay sharp.
Arnold Schoenberg was a big fan of Hopalong Cassidy films.
Yesterday I did my 100 push-ups and ran 3000 stairs at City Hall. Just couldn't wait until 1 for the Monument to open.
Really good hockey game between Finland and USA. Finland is a bear to play against. They went up 2-0, the US came back, then got the game-winning goal fairly late after another highly dubious call. Then again, the Finns were put on the power play shortly thereafter with a similar call. Some real ticky-tack officiating at the end of this World Juniors games. The US and Sweden play for gold this afternoon.
Glynis Johns died yesterday, aged 100. She was very good in Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel, and was the daughter of my man Mervyn Johns, who was Bob Cratchit in 1951's Scrooge and as such a big part of my book, and played the architect in 1945's Dead of Night.
49th Parallel is a curious film. England wanted Powell and Pressburger to make a movie to boost wartime morale in England, so they signed on and then directed their creative energies to rallying the US to join the cause, but by the time a heavily-edited 49th Parallel came out in the States with its titled changed to The Invaders, America was already in the war on account of the attack on Pearl Harbor from a few months before.
Hadn't spoken to her in a bit so called my mother yesterday to see how she was doing and discuss a few things. Near the end of our conversation I was outside of the Golden Goose, the market near me. Someone must have dropped eggs--or something similarly slick and yellow--just outside all over the cobblestone. I walked through it before I noticed--easy to fall.
Anyway, as I was standing there for a few minutes talking, I saw a woman in her eighties who was close by this mess, leaning against the outer wall of the market like she was struggling or couldn't go further. I asked her if she needed help, and she said yes, so I walked over and took her hand. She had two letters in the other one, and I asked her where she needed to go, and she said the mailbox. There was one some ways off on the other side of the street, so I said, "Let me mail those for you," and I took the letters and jogged across the street and dropped them in. I gave her the thumbs up, but I don't think she saw me, and I went back and asked if there was anything else she needed, and she wanted to walk to this spot where she could sit down, so I walked her there.
The proprietor of the Goose had come outside to load something into a car, and she must have known him because she addressed him by his first name and said something about the spill and how dangerous it was, and he said he knew, they had called the city twice already. That's weird. It's the city's issue? It was right outside his store and presumably had to do with his store. All the time my mom is on the phone, and then I said, "Okay, sorry, I'm back," and she's like, "Wow, you're really nice." She understands that that is another reason for these people to hate me as they do. It's all a reason for them to hate me as they do. All of the good things. There aren't bad things and I don't do bad things.
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