Monday 5/2/22
Slept about five hours last night. Must have gotten up to go to the bathroom ten times. I just start chugging liquids. Have mostly staved off being sick, though, and am somewhat uncomfortable--stuffed up, throat. Aches are gone. Coughing. Bit hot. The tissues up the nose thing.
Wrote an excellent op-ed today about the most important quality in sports, which no one ever discusses, which is also the most important quality in life--or one of them, certainly. You won't get anywhere good without it. Tied this in to the start of the NHL playoffs. People would love this one. Hope they get to see it. I'll collect all of these topical pieces in a book or books at some point, but that's down the a road a piece and not germane now, more in the spirit of "everything he wrote will come out." Would like this to appear this week.
I maybe shouldn't run stairs today. Not because I can only breathe through my mouth--I'm sure I could still run a decent amount--but because it's not going to help me to become worse.
I was looking at the box score last night for Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, which is one of the two or three best baseball games every played. You either have it first or you have Game 6 of the 1975 World Series in that position. The Pirates won in the bottom of the ninth on Mazeroski's walk-off--baseball's ultimate home run--by a score of 10-9. So it was a crazy game. It took two hours and thirty-six minutes, and there was not a single strikeout. Think of the action, the pace. That's what you want to be watching, right?
I like reading box scores for all sports. They're edifying and relaxing. Therapeutic and informative. Telling.
Conservative estimates: I'd say that fifty short stories are currently underway, and 100 are some form of written in my head and/or laid out in notes. With all of the books, all of the work, I feel like I am presiding over a vast empire of art. An entire world. It took so much to get to this point where I could do and handle it all, keep it all, work it all, realize it all, hold it all straight. If I was allowed to have what I deserved to have twenty years ago, let alone ten, I would not be what I now I am. They have made me stronger and better. And that is how I am going to change everything.
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Later. I've felt like ass most of the day. Nothing big. Just uncomfortable. Cold, then hot. Hot right now. Haven't been able to breathe through my nose. Could be the COVID. I have no idea.
Worked on a new story called "Swoony and Moony." It's told by an elderly woman who lives with her granddaughter and her dad. The story starts with the grandmother inviting her granddaughter to watch Laura with her on the TV. The girl--who is in high school--refers to these old black and white movies that the grandmother watches as "swoony and moony." She thinks about staying, but she's making plans with her friends. The grandmother describes their relationship, which flows into a description of her relationship with her daughter, who we know isn't alive anymore. We don't know exactly what happened. We're given an indication that she struggled, but the actual cause of her death could have been a number of things. And the story becomes this exploration of what people think love is and what love actually is. The grandmother describes these questions people ask her now, ironically, about love, that they never asked her when she was married--so we can presume she's outlived her husband, and if you do some of the math from various remarks she makes, we can roughly figure out her age--or when she was a mother. And the questions she now asks herself about love. She gives us a kind of working definition, and all of this, too, is hinged around the watching of this movie, Laura, which itself is a movie about what appears to be a death, and isn't a death. Or, a woman coming back as if she were a ghost. You don't have to know that about the film for the story to hit; but it doesn't hurt to know it. There are a lot of things in these stories, on different levels.
Listened to Nick Drake's Peel session and the Vaccines' Planet of the Youth. Even on a day when I do nothing, I do more than these so-called other writers do in thirty years.