Tuesday 9/12/23
If there was a racist Hall of Fame, Jemele Hill would get in on the first ballot with like 83.7% of the vote. She might not be an inner circle member, but she'd be a no-doubter. Like a racist version of a Carl Yastrzemski or Ernie Banks-level Hall of Famer. You know, the big numbers: 3000 hits, 500 homers, but not shoulder to shoulder with, say, Babe Ruth. Hitler would be like Ruth.
She hates white people. All white people. Today I saw Hill clamoring for Colin Kaepernick to be the starting quarterback of the Jets now that Aaron Rodgers is hurt, or else...racism! Bad white people!
It really is remarkable how stupid this woman is. Way to go, editors at The Atlantic. This is a bad person and a bad writer, and I know that all of you at The Atlantic know it. Because you can't not know it, no matter how stupid you are. Hell, Jemele Hill knows it.
Kaepernick is about to be, what, thirty-seven? Hasn't played in the league in like seven years? Let's say you skated in a beer league, and then you stopped, and seventy percent of a decade later you thought, "I'm coming back, baby!"
How do you think that'd go? Probably not well, right? In the beer league. How do you think it'd go in the NFL when you already were one of the worst in the league at your position all of those years ago?
The first thing Jemele Hill thinks about everyone is this: What is your color?
It's often the last thing she thinks, too. If you are Black, and you steal, rape, plunder, murder, stab, shoot, she will defend you and whatever you did will be the fault of white people.
The only way that Jemele Hill won't support, hype, make excuses for, lie on behalf of, someone who is Black is if they oppose or get in the way of her racist grift. Then she'll have a problem with a person of color. But that's the only way.
A putrid puke of both a person and a "writer."
Look at people for what they are. Reward people for how well they do what they do.
And that's it. No exceptions. The less you do that, the more you suck.
Very close to being done with the revised/overhauled "The Giver of Care." Fine piece of work. It's like a poem and a prayer and a fable and a song and a story, and yet very grounded in real life.
Ran 3000 stairs each of the the past three days and am caught up on my push-ups. Lots of interaction on the stairs yesterday. A woman who had seemingly lived hard demanded of me in this angry way if I was "training for somethin'."
There were two very attractive women with doughy boyfriends who looked me up and down--spaced about ten minutes apart--and gave me big smiles. Make better choices!
Then there was another attractive woman, maybe twenty-eight-years-old, who was out of her mind on something, though it was like two o'clock. She had on nice clothes, was clean cut. If a woman can be clean cut, that is. Usually people reserve that term for a man. But she looked fresh, scrubbed. Healthy. Good skin. Youthful. Blood in her cheeks.
Anyway, she was taking her shoes off and sort of tipping in one direction and then the other, like she was going to fall over, on that flat ground before the last of the four decks of stairs at City Hall. She kept staring at me and I didn't make eye contact though I saw her plainly out of my peripheral vision. (Avoiding eye contact is generally recommended when you sense potential trouble or someone looking to create a scene with you as a central character.)
She kept getting closer despite barely being able to stand, so finally I asked her if she was all right. What was I going to do? If someone needs help they need help.
She responded by imitating me and saying the same words back. Then, she went up the last deck of stairs and sort of hid around the corner, so when I came up she could pop out, like she had caught me. Sure enough, out she came and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was just exercising. (NB: A lot of people, sober or otherwise, are baffled, it seems, by the idea of exercising, or perhaps it's the idea of someone exercising in this way, by running up and down stairs.)
She wasn't done. There was a tour group sitting on the stairs in the middle portion of the stairs, while the guide, dressed as a Colonist in 1775, gave his talk. Each time I got to the top of the stairs, this woman would start applauding, and everyone in the tour group would turn and look at me.
Another thought I had while running the stairs: Why isn't there a stomach bra? You're telling me that many guys couldn't use the support of a stomach bra? Same principle.
Sunday while running the stairs I FaceTimed for most of the duration with my nephew and niece, who had had a sleepover at my mother's (minus Amelia, who was deemed too young, which resulted in her being rather vocal in her dissent).
The other day on the stairs, an unbalanced man started screaming at me, "I see you every goddamn day out here and you never change!"
I don't know what he meant. Physically? Fundamentally? Existentially? He was even more angry with me than the woman who had evidently lived hard. Perhaps because he had lived even harder?
An Amelia postscript to yesterday's entry: She wasn't scheduled to be over my mom's yesterday, but she was pissed that she was excluded from the sleepover, so my sister dropped her off. When it came time for my mom to drive Amelia back home, she made this big thing about wanting to use her sister's car seat, which is bigger. She and my mom were in the garage for what the latter told me was a half hour, with Amelia insisting that she use that other seat. My mom said, "That's for a bigger girl," and Amelia responded, "I big girl." Round and round it went. My mother said that she'd get in trouble with "mommy"--my sister--if she didn't put Amelia in the right seat. Amelia didn't care. So my mother steps it up again, and says that if Amelia is in the wrong seat and they get pulled over by the police, she--my mother--will go to jail. To which Amelia replied, "I come see you."
I said she was idiosyncratic.
E.F. Benson's "The Bus-Conductor" (which was adapted for a sequence of the 1945 film, Dead of Night), Lucille Fletcher's "The Hitch-Hiker" (and The Twilight Zone episode of the same name, plus "Twenty Two" and "Mirror Image"), the 1962 film Carnival of Souls, and The Sixth Sense, are all essentially the same idea. Benson was first.
Wrote an op-ed today. Very good. This is from it:
And just because Williams—who was also a bluesman—was open about how much a person can hurt, that doesn’t mean that the hurt is perpetual. Whatever holds us back and abrades our insides, is given greater opportunity to do so when we make like it’s not there. Get it out into the open, maybe make it dance a little—a Williams specialty—and away we go.
Williams ranged into gospel, folk, airs of a nascent Republic, mystery-laden numbers of dark Appalachian hills. This was country music, yes, but like the soul of the American agrarian people, it had no limits.
If you want populist art, you won’t find any with broader musical reach. If you’re up late at night listening to Louis Armstrong’s 1920s sides, otherworldly Blind Willie Johnson blues, and Beach Boys Smile sessions and want to keep the musical high going, anything you subsequently play by Hank Williams won’t cause you to dip. He elevates the soul’s game.
I'll do an account hopefully soon of all that has been written and completed of late. The sheer amount is why I've been a bit furtive in discussing what I'm doing.
I had sent "What the Mouse Knew" to my friend Derek, who was actually in Europe with his family at the time on vacation. He has two kids. I had sent them "Best Present Ever" at Christmas, and they read it aloud as a family and he sent me a very nice note about how much they all loved it and what it meant to them. The did the same thing on their holiday with "Mouse," and the boy--the younger of the two kids--whose name is David, was inspired to do a drawing. He took some liberties, but that's good--got the imagination going. I want a kid this age to be able to get and love the story. The thing is, it's impossible for me not to write a story that's for adults. Even when I'm writing a story that is also for kids. If an adult was reading that story to their kid at bedtime, that story still has more depth and resonance for an adult than anything out there. It couldn't be "just" a kid's story. I couldn't write something like that. But a child can read this story and think it's the perfect thing for them. And an adult can think the same on their side.
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