Thursday 10/29/20
Learned tonight that Travis Roy died. We were the same age. I saw him sometimes in his chair on my walks passing through BU, and one time beneath that underpass near the Pike. Sounds like he did a lot for a lot of people. It's important to read something like that. I am utterly baffled, disturbed, troubled, when I see people--and it's so many people in publishing, with no comprehension of reality--on Facebook saying they'll stop functioning if the election doesn't go their way, blaming the stress of the election on why they haven't been able to write three sentences in the last five months. (Something is always blamed; it's never them, it's never their complete lack of talent.) I mean, I also laugh at these people, to be honest, even though, naturally, it's the kind of person who hates me the most--because I am everything they are not and never will be--and tries to do everything possible to block my advance. And then you take some time and consider what someone like Roy went through in his life. Perspective. Is there any of it any more? I watched that hockey game. I remember how long he was down on the ice, but you just had this feeling right away that something was horrifically wrong. I admired this guy. Those were twenty-five very hard years of life, I'm sure, and yet he lived those twenty-five years trying to help people.
Walked five miles today in the rain. Pretty early--before the sun was up. I've been coming up with so many ideas, both with novels and stories. The are major works. A huge new phase. One of those works, I daresay, may come to mean more to me personally than "Fitty." I don't want to say what it is or what it is called right here, right now. But I do want this record to reflect what I knew I had here on this third-to-last day of October 2020. So I'll just say one thing: upstairs.
I was talking on the phone to someone for a part of my walk, and they told me that back in the summer their sister read Dark March. This person had a death in the family a few months ago--and I've been doing my work--so this was just coming up now. She had bought the book a couple years ago, I think, and had just gotten around to reading it. I believe this person writes some on the side, or wants to write. She said it was the best book she had ever read, and was now going to read it again. That's encouraging. The way things are right now, and how my life is, there just isn't much that comes in from anyone.
I saw the 1978 ecological horror film, Long Weekend. Pretty good. Two completely unlikable people, though. I can't connect with a film with only unlikable people.
Random baseball nugget: Joe Rudi finished second in MVP voting twice. That's is rather mind-boggling. Encountering many examples of ageism tonight with the White Sox rehiring Tony La Russa. He's seventy-six. It's not even mostly people saying that a man that age can't connect with young ballplayers--and I think that's hogwash; anyone of any age can, in theory, connect with anybody of any other age. But just that he's too old, he'll nod off, etc. But it's no problem for a president to be this old or older? Same people with no issue with that. Dylan is that old, and he's playing for more than two hours a night. Or he was. That's a hell of a lot harder.
On The Flintstones, Fred is always referred to as this fat ass, and yet Barney has the exact same body type, he's just shorter, and Barney is talked about like he's svelte. At some point, Fred should have been like, "He's every bit the fat fuck I am." What? That'd be too uncouth for him? Hardly. Well in keeping with his character. I'm surprised he didn't say it.