Tuesday 3/26/24
Why don't you just drink five more cups of tea, he says to himself.
I'm still working on "Friendship Bracelet." Should be tomorrow now. Takes as long as it takes. We're not just writing some story here.
When I joined an M.R. James Facebook group, I naively thought that people would discuss the work of M.R. James and maybe sometimes have something intelligent to say. What ends up happening in reality is someone takes a photo of like a piece of toast and says, "Doesn't that look like a scary face at the top?"
Spring training is interminable--there's no reason for it to last as long as it does--and yet here we are two days from the start of the Red Sox' season and it has snuck up on me. I can't envision any team in the AL East being worse. Who finishes below the Red Sox? The Orioles? They won 100 games last year and appear to be on the rise. There is no one I can pick the Sox to be better than. They're starting on the West Coast with a bunch of late night games, so the ratings on NESN should be extra bad.
A Caitlin Clark observation: You can definitely get her rattled. It's one thing to get pissed and perform with what I call the good anger, it's another to get rattled. When you are rattled, you are not at your best.
It is impossible to rattle me. Once, yes (but only to a degree). Now, no.
Called my mother because I have not spoken to her in a bit. Checked in.
Having worked on "Friendship Bracelet," I walked to the Starbucks to get some fresh air and sit and gather with a cup of coffee. At the table next to me were three women having a work meeting. Two of them were with the same company, and the third was either looking to get hired by that company or was possibly going to be working in conjunction with it while with another company. They drove me out of the joint.
Why must we talk like insincere, inauthentic, fake-ass drones now? You can't help but overhear what is being said at the table next to yours. "I'm so elated to hear about your journey." Shut up. You're not. "I'm so glad we were able to lean into all of this with so much joy." And my favorite: "It's literally symbolic." Lots of fake laughter, plenty of corporate speak from uneducated people who can't go three words without a "you know," fake hugs.
With the death of language comes the death of communication. With the death of communication comes the rise of mental illness and the death of healthy interactions. With both comes the death of relationships. With the death of relationships comes the death of growth and self-knowledge. With the death of self-knowledge and growth comes the death of usefulness as a human. With the death of that comes the death, however protracted, of what it means to be human, or should and could mean. With that death comes the rise and eventual takeover of the machine. It's actually happening now. This is what it looks and sounds like. And it's all around us, in everything.
Rosier, but still looking back: clips from the first season of Cheers--the best season--keep popping up on my Facebook page, and I've been playing them, though I've seen the episodes dozens and dozens of times. Later I can blow some people up on here by going into the time I proposed a book by me about Cheers for their academic press's series of volumes on TV shows. These clips are sharp. They had everything working well that first season. Scripts, directing, casting, performances, timing. The show really could have just been that first season and it'd be notable all the same.
I watched 1957's Beginning of the End, a Bert I. Gordon production about killer giant grasshoppers, which I'm considering writing about. I've said this before, but almost all 1950s sci-fi/horror hybrids are very watchable. Surprisingly so. Some--like The Thing from Another World, and especially Invasion of the Body Snatchers--are artful. But most won't let you down, unless you're hung up on how believable certain things look. You shouldn't be. That's not the point. Use your imagination. Be in the movie. Besides, Beginning of the End was filmed in Horrorscope!
