New Substack, meta post, lost tooth, how most publishing people are the truth's bitch, music, film, literature, flowers, a wedding, and more

Tuesday 7/1/25

My niece Lilah fainted yesterday. My sister told me she was probably overheated and dehydrated but I will check on her today.

Amelia, meanwhile, lost her first tooth yesterday! She was really excited and FaceTimed Grammie. My sister sent me a photo of Amelia sans tooth in a nice summer shirt with a watermelon on it and of course I offered my congratulations.

Was supposed to have the temporary crown put on today but Dr. Raffy had to cancel. I will see him next week.

A lot of nightmares last night. Woke up with one probably four times, and when I awoke for good to start the day my heart was going fast.

Sent my buddy Howard a download link to a brand new Beatles discovery.

I had that bit that goes, "I love coffee, I love tea, I love the Java Jive, and it loves me"--which is an Ink Spots lyric--from the "Over the River and Through the Woods" Thanksgiving episode of The Bob Newhart Show in my head this morning, and that got me thinking that there are no better Thanksgiving television episodes than this one and the "Thanksgiving Orphans" episode from Cheers. When you watch those episodes, it's as if you're watching people make memories that they'll always have. The characters I mean, but you know what I mean.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy was an important book to me when I was a kid. At first I was disappointed, because the book is about this boy named Almanzo, and not the regular characters that I looked forward to, but it became perhaps my favorite book in the series rather quickly. It taught me about hard work. Honest effort. Not cutting corners. Similarly, hockey practices were important to me in high school. The harder I worked at practice, the better I played in the games. You take these things and extrapolate. Much changes, but you come back to the same tenets. Writing wouldn't seem much like hockey practice, but it is.

A bit of book keeping as this entry takes a turn for the meta. I'm not sure how far I'll take this, but yesterday I created a Substack account for the writings pertaining to sports from this journal--that is, the Many Moments More journal. Why? Stick around until the end of this entry. As I said, we're going meta. The Substack is https://substack.com/@colinfleminglitsports. The people who do read it will do so without signing up for it thinking that would give me credit when instead it's paramount to make sure that never happens because it's me--I live this, so I more than understand what happens and why--but there it is.

A goodly percentage of the readers here are publishing types and publishing types hate sports because sports require ability and sports are played on level playing fields--needing to have ability and merit are just about the worst concepts in the world to most publishing people--and because not enough people know about this journal yet given that publishing has helped kill off reading to the point that people--and millions of people--have no idea what they might be missing. But that can change. Or you have to figure there's a chance. Until then, you know...you try to keep going. There won't be anything there that isn't here. And there may not be that much that's there. I don't know. Call it an exploratory expedition that may be concluded in short order.

The Sox beat up on the Reds last night at Fenway. Wilyer Abreau had an inside-the-park home run. People say the triple is baseball's most exciting play, but I think that's because inside-the-park home runs are so rare that they don't really get counted in that discussion. Carlton Fisk had an inside-the-park home run, you know. So did Dave Kingman. I'd rather be wrong and have the Sox win and do well than be right that they're not a good ball club. What matters anyway in these matters is the soundness of your reasons.

Brad Marchand signed his six-year deal with the Panthers. That's where he needed to be. That is the team for him. Can they win again? To do so in today's NHL would be one of the all-time great NHL achievements. I say no--four years in a row in the Finals in this league and age? But they should continue to be good and who knows, they may do it. They have something special there and it's energizing chasing history. The six years baffles me, though. Realistically, you're looking at two, maybe three--and maybe even just one--of Marchand being a plus player for you if you have him as a second or ideally third line guy. He's thirty-seven right now. I don't think anyone is expecting Marchand to play in his forties, so the term is perplexing to me.

Was looking at the Red Sox subreddit and this guy titled a post, "Are there any good Japs we can get?" Just went there and said that. Let the racism hang out in full display.

BC tries to sell me football season tickets. They had been pretty inexpensive, but they jacked the price this year by like 150%. Something like that. But it was at least 100%. I wasn't going to do that. What I planned for instead was to go to two or three games--which I do by myself because I am entirely alone--that would be sparsely attended anyway--you know, like $10 or $12 tickets--and that way I get to partake of some New England autumn and football, and I'll have a section of the stadium practically to myself and not be packed in with people who are with other people, which just makes me feel worse, given my situation and the reasons for it--that they are the results of good and great things, not shortcoming and transgressions. It's very hard to be alive when that's your world, because that's how this world works, and the better you get, the worse it gets, and everything has long felt--and perhaps been--totally hopeless for so long anyway.

This woman from BC emails me, phones me, leaves me voicemails. They really sort of put the press on. I emailed her back this past weekend, when I was given a final chance to buy these tickets--despite being told my final chance was some weeks ago (I guess they haven't sold enough, which, being BC, isn't shocking in the slightest), and I explained what I was doing instead, and thanked her for her persistence and kind demeanor.

That's a lot more than anyone else would do. You know what she did? She put the press to me again yesterday in email. Saying I should buy the season tickets and sell the tickets to the games I can't attend, and also touting the Notre Dame game. BC is bad at football. It's not like they had a resurgence last year. They are going to get smoked by Notre Dame. I'd rather take my copy of William Sloane's To Walk the Night, head out to Chestnut Hill and walk along the reservoir and visit my dad's bench and read between plays in the stands after ten bucks and watch them between Marist or Bentley or whoever it is 38-13 and be back on my way.

I do find that when I make an effort--and it's not really effort for me, it's just how I am--to show kindness and appreciation of someone else's efforts, or to do something to help someone, whatever it may be, there's almost always this element of regret after. The idea that it wasn't worth the bother. Now, that's not true--it is worth the bother, because it's important to me the person that I am. Nay, vital. That's one of the reasons I believe we are alive.

The Grateful Dead understood this. The narrator of "Uncle John's Band" wants to know, above all, if you're kind. Not nice--kind. That's a much bigger deal. You can be nice, too; you should. But kindness is--or ought to be--imperative to making you you. But it's fine. It's not a big deal. Save that these things add up, and they contribute to all of that which gets you down and worse, like how the world is, how it's going, how it keeps going.

It is almost impossible for someone who alters words so as to give them this kind of pun-based negative connotation not to reveal themselves as uneducated, lowest common denominator trash. For instance, when Terry Francona was managing in Boston, you'd see and hear people refer to him as Terry Francoma. Similarly, there are Red Sox fans of all ages who will call the Yankees the Skankies. People will actually type this out on the Red Sox subreddit. Adults. MAGAts is, of course, another one.

People want to be offended now in my saying the above, and talk about money and education and privilege. I don't mean going to college. There is scarcely anyone more anti-academia than I. No, education is about whether you want to learn more than what you already know, which you can do whenever you wish, or if you're okay with not learning anything. It's a decision as much as anything. I'm not talking being an expert. I'm talking being more educated. You don't know a particular word, look it up. See? Now you know it. What did that take you? Ten seconds? If you forget it, look it up again until you don't.

I'll see something like a title for an online discussion about the quality of the television program Rawhide and I'm anxious to get in there and see thoughts and observations and ideas. When I encounter that sort of thing, I'm excited. This stimulates me. I can hardly imagine going through life and not doing this kind of thing constantly. What must that be like? It must be so boring without mental stimulation. Granted, I click on this discussion--and this is an actual example from the other day--and it's just people quoting the theme song and terminally unfunny people quoting it and changing the lyrics ("my ass is soaked from the leather"). I open A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, and Related Genres, and my brain perks up to see the assessments, say, of the various Sherlock Holmes story collections. I move from one thing like that to another constantly. But people just sit there and watch bad, formulaic shows and stuff themselves and occupy a patch of sand on a beach or beside a pool just...staring. Or look at their phone. Text someone and say "literally" and "lol"? How can you live just doing that? As in, how can you manage?

As we talked about recently, so many of the Sherlock Holmes stories are implausible and nearly absurd, with "The Red-Headed League"--a favorite of mine, as I said--qualifying as genuine absurdity, but there is no Sherlock Holmes more preposterous than "A Case of Identity," in which a guy dresses up to fool his stepdaughter--who is five years younger than he is--that he's a suitor and who then goes missing on their wedding day hoping she'll wait for him indefinitely and this will keep her inheritance intact so the stepfather, back from the trip or whatever he said he was on, can get it. And she has no clue it's this guy? Who picked the name Hosmer Angel for his alternate identity? What a mess!

Saw this comment from Rosie O'Donnell:

“The Bezos’ wedding. It turned my stomach seeing all these billionaires gathering in the gross excess of it all. The show of it. Is Oprah friends with Jeff Bezos? Really? How is that possible? He treats his employees with disdain. By any metric he is not a nice man. And his fake fem bot wife who looks like that…"

People love that expression, "Read the room," and you can't be much worse at it than the billionaire class. Why would you go to something so stupid, tacky, shallow, fake, indecent, and pathetic, really? Because people think this is love and it's beautiful? The woman looks like she came out of a tube. No one loves anyone here. These people aren't capable of love or even anything that requires a human heart. Isn't it amazing how insecure people like this must be? People like an Oprah. You see this with publishing. How fragile those people are when it comes to anything truthful. They are the truth's bitch. They can't sit in a room for thirty seconds with their thoughts about themselves. And they need to be tongued and praised and lied to constantly, or else they have a nervous breakdown. They can't function, can't cope without those tongues and those lies and that praise. They don't have billions of dollars, but they're coming from the same place--a barren wasteland--psychologically.

Watched the 1949 noir, The Crooked Way, directed by Robert Florey and starring John Payne. Florey directed 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, a fascinating Universal horror with Bela Lugosi from the studio's first glory run that isn't discussed much even by vintage horror aficionados. Florey was somewhat like Edgar Ulmer in that you didn't really know what he was going to do or what kind of picture he'd make next, and we should add that he had quite a bit of artistic success in television. In the 1960s, you had a number of talented directors like Florey--and Jacques Tourneur, who were were talking about the other day--doing their thing on the small screen. Was a rich period for TV. People are like, "Oh, TV is such an art form now."

No. It was better then. The people doing the recency thing and trying to tell me The Sopranos isn't some one-note kind of cartoon minus the animation are people who typically haven't seen what was previously on offer. John Payne was so very likable in Miracle on 34th Street. In The Crooked Way he's an amnesia victim as a result of having some shrapnel in his head because of his war service, and you think, "Oh, man, another amnesia vehicle," but this one's a bit different. Payne's character had been a not-so-great guy, and now he's a pretty good guy. Life starts again, allowing that he isn't killed first. John Alton is the cinematographer, which makes the film worth seeing on its own, but it's well worth a watch anyway.

Downloaded an LP of Larry Williams rarities, three Bill Monroe Bear Family box sets (there's a fourth I need to track down), twenty-eight discs' worth of Marc Bolan and T. Rex, Charlie Parker's recordings with Dizzy Gillespie at Billy Berg's in December 1945 during their first trip to LA, Jerry Garcia giving a student a banjo lesson on April 14, 1964, and Captain Acid's remaster of the three-disc Beach Boys bootleg, Brother Rarities (1969-1976) that has a number of Brian Wilson piano demos. I did get that aforementioned incredibly rare Stone Roses show--more on this later--and then saw where someone claiming to be the taper was upset that this other person had made it available.

I don't understand why people don't want others to hear something like this. I mean, I do. People are so desperate for any kind of power. Look at publishing. That's why almost all of those people are there. In part. It's pathetic. This is what most would consider a lo-fi recording (though it's actually a pretty good audience tape) that has no commercial value. It's a piece of history. The only person who is going to listen to it multiple times--and many times over the rest of my life--is me. But you see this type of thing a fair amount. Control, power, wanting to feel important.

Walked a couple miles, did 100 push-ups, ran 3000 stairs at City Hall. Not easy--it was hot and humid. After I was done and resting on the nearby island for a few minutes, a married couple and their friends came out of City Hall. The bride stood on the stairs where I'd just been running and turned around and threw the bouquet over her head, which her friend caught. There were no parents in the group. The people--about ten of them--were of different ages, ethnicities, orientations, and yet they all seemed to be friends. Made me smile. Went to Trader Joe's. They didn't have any sunflowers but the last couple batches I bought died quickly anyway. Got some gerbera daisies instead. The Yardbirds' "I Ain't Done Wrong" was playing on the sound system. The song was one of three cut with Jeff Beck at his first recording session with the band. Those breaks are wild. The confidence these guys had. They were blowing up preexisting paradigms. There's metal--heavy metal--in this cut. As soon as they got Beck, they had it going on.

More work on "Comes a Day, Comes a Man." Close to being done now. This story reads like something that has always existed and always will exist. It's like an oracle that echoes through all time. Every age. Relevant to all, but new. Always new. Every line of it feels like a line everyone knows, grew up with, makes reference to, quotes, paraphrases. To say it's an all-timer of a story isn't enough. And yet, it's but another story here that when it's finished will be seen by no one, and maybe ever. A story that the world needs, a story unlike anything a person has ever made, for people. For the world. That no one else could do. And it's just going to sit here with me. I read it back and it's hard to believe that the lines in this story don't predate me, and practically people themselves.

I said this was going to be pretty meta, and it's going to end meta, too. This is what I wrote as a lead-in to today's post on the aforementioned Substack account, which references this very post. I don't want to leave any relevant writing out there, and this is the main record of what I'm doing, so it should be here and not just there at that other spot that I may not even be keeping around.

"I’m going to preface this entry—not that I expect anyone to see it given that I am barely dabbling here in this diaristic side project—by saying that this isn’t my actual journal. Over at my website, I maintain a blog—though I balk at the term, because that’s not really what it is—that was launched in 2018 and is now four million words long. As such, it’s the single longest work in history, and as a sustained undertaking of literature, there’s nothing else that’s similar. It covers writing, art, fitness, music, loneliness, endurance, sobriety, stair running, nature, ballet, film, history, how the world is and where it’s headed, politics, sports, the corruption up and down the whole of the publishing industry, and more besides.

"What I thought I’d do—as a kind of little experiment—is put some of that sports content up here in a separate format. In other words, either just repost stand-alone sports entries—as with that Dave Parker one from the other day—or pluck out some of the sports parts of entries that touch on assorted things, which is what I’m going to do now. Over on my regular site, the following paragraphs from this morning about sports are surrounded by others about nightmares, my two nieces, a brand new Beatles discovery, Bill Monroe, Larry Williams, a Beach Boys bootleg, a film noir from 1949, the Ink Spots, The Bob Newhart Show, Cheers, Jeff Bezos, Charlie Parker, flowers, Rawhide, Sherlock Holmes, the Stone Roses, Jacques Tourneur, the Yardbirds, this morning’s workout, Edgar Ulmer, The Sopranos, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a short story I’ve been working on.

"But as I said, I’m dabbling/curious, checking out other things, trying something else, or in addition to. With that said…"