Thursday 5/6/21
I've started following some North Shore/Cape Ann places on Instagram. That region is like Xanadu to me. Paradise. The images can go right through me. Simply the snapshots. I see the lobster traps, the fishing shacks, the barrels and bushels of the harvest, the nooks of the craggy shore, and my desire to be there is almost overpowering. If my work was reaching all of the people it was supposed to reach, and getting the recognition it merits, and I was changing and impacting this world as befits that work, I could even be there alone and be happy. I could have nobody. It could just be me, doing that work, knowing where it'd get to in the world, then walking to an inlet, a beaver pond, riding in the car to pick up pots for plants, just to smell the wood, the mulch, the fields, the sea. It would be enough for me, being alone that way. I don't know that I could ever find somebody, even if my life was amazing and I had access to just about everyone, who wouldn't bore me. My mind is just such a gargantuan thing. That's why it seems like it can only feed on art and truth and beauty. They are all that can begin to satisfy it.
I awoke at two in the morning. I had gone to sleep starting to figure out a major new story, a longer one. It's about these two guys who are long-time announcing partners with a fictitious AHL hockey team. But what it is most about is the value of one's word. In the middle of the night, I sat there and worked on it in my head some more. Starting to come clear. A lot of long, big stories--big in various ways--are some form of in-progress right now.
I watched Night of the Living Dead in the middle of the night, too, and listened to a five-part episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and was up before six.
I wrote an op-ed today about the most influential position in all of the four major North American sports--and it's not the quarterback. Hopefully I can sell it. I also wrote a new short story called "See Me See Him Seeing Me." And I completed everything I needed to do with "Pillow Drift," a straight up, no BS masterpiece. Major work. Was 4400 words long in the end. Described it thusly to someone: "It's a work of horror. An intense horror of what people can do to each other, and also the ageless terror mysteries of Old New England. It's a story in which weather possesses supernatural agency, and a story about love."
Regarding Night of the Living Dead--I'd say pay attention how much the beginning owes to Rio Bravo. Which also makes sense--the farm house is the jailhouse. But I'm talking about hte opening sequence of Rio Bravo--very similar to the beginning of the Romero picture. Also, the film was heavily influenced by the way the radio broadcast--the broadcast within the broadcast--is used in Welles's War of the Worlds. Right now I'm watching the 16 mm cut of the movie, Night of Anubis.
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