Ruth and Jerry at the cafe, work, art, reading, music, film, television, radio, more stairs, baby rabbit

Tuesday 6/10/25

I saw something that moved me Sunday at the cafe after I'd gone there to read. These people were at the table behind me, so until they left and went their separate ways outside of the front window where I was sitting, I only heard them without seeing them. There was a woman named Ruth, a real spitfire somewhere well into her eighties. She was full of vim. Tough, spunky, frank. Her friend was a man named Jerry. He sounded more down. Resigned.

Ruth was asking him these questions, and she learned that he had lost weight because he wasn't eating that much. She tried to rallying him up, but in this smart way where they were in the same boat, we all were, but it didn't mean that had to keep you down. She made this crack about being old, but also like it didn't really apply to her, or no more to her than someone thirty years her junior. And that was why. Because she was like this. It was a very interesting form of acknowledgement. That she could say this thing, credit it as being true, but also not be limited by that thing. Or not as limited as the thing itself would suggest.

You had the sense they hadn't seen each other in a while, or as much as they wanted to, or maybe as much as they were both now realizing they should have. Eventually, Ruth asked a young woman sitting at the table next to them if she could enter Jerry's name in her phone. You could tell it was because she'd be checking on him. The woman did this, making sure she had the number right. It just made me feel good to see some kindness and decency. There is still some out there.

I finished "Honest Best." That's a real piece of work. And now it just sits here.

I had an idea that I'd finish "Just Pants" on Sunday, but I didn't. Worked on it before I ran stairs. Thought about an aspect as I ran stairs. You have to understand that I don't stop. There's no stopping in my life. There is no downtime. All I think about and tend to is my work. Creating. The art. And all of these other things pertaining to it, like with the people of the publishing system, and where the world is at right now. The situation I'm in that is worse than hell.

So when I came back from doing those ten circuits in the Monument, I took a seat at the desk--I'm still in the clothes, soaked--and just like that I'm working on the story again for a bit until I get up and take a shower. I left the story alone yesterday and returned to it this morning--starting at about three--and I made changes. I took out about twenty words, incorporated a part of a paragraph into a paragraph that had been a couple of paragraphs before it, changes some of those sentences, created a different transition with what remained of the paragraph that had the content taken from it. Went like this:

It was probably a year or two, at tops, and he was pushing a couple of decades. But the pants looked the same and for all intents and purposes were the same. They hadn’t coarsened or worn thin. The blue had gotten no lighter. The waistband remained undimmed. You could rightfully term it vermillion. Tongue of fire. And comfort is comfort, especially when there’s much else that isn’t.

He’d feel ashamed—more ashamed—if anyone was aware of the true circumstances and provenance of the pants, but considering that he was alone each evening and no one possessed this information or would unless he volunteered it, he continued to wear them. Life was a mess. An additional dust ball in a corner didn’t matter if eventually everything could sparkle, which was an idea he tried to keep around so that someday he might believe it and, ideally, bear witness to the payoff.

Then there was the regularly attendant bugbear that he often felt like it was hard to do anything, including wearing different clothes every day. But at least people couldn’t tell that a given pair of scrubs wasn’t a fresh pair of scrubs, which made them like camouflage after a fashion. They just happened to be blue the same as the sky, and you didn’t know what the sky might be hiding.

I did work more on "Friendship Bracelet" yesterday. If that story doesn't make you pretty much fall down or back in your seat and weep, I don't know what to say. You hear that expression of checking to see if you have a pulse, a word which I'd amend here to "soul." It's such an important story, too. I know that nothing has ever treated the subject of bullying like this story does. Bullying has never been talked about or presented or handled this way. It's a completely new perspective. And this story will also likely sit here with me, unseen. Until and if it isn't.

I finished a 3400 word essay on the 1983 film, Sleepaway Camp. It's really good and I'm glad to have it. From the essay:

These are major truths, or it feels that way; about how the world works, what happens as we get older. The big difference between grammar school and middle school. Camp is necessarily very physical; bodies come to the fore. When bodies come to the fore, exploration occurs, even if that’s a private, personal affair. Counselors are the parental figures who can also be a version of our friends. They’re not our older siblings who must tolerate us, as per parental dictates, or else suffer the consequences (being made to go to bed earlier, for example). Counselors are closer to Peter Pan than Wendy. They may eventually become Wendy—but it feels for the duration of their summer job that there’s a world they don’t want to leave behind, which they’re not fully a part of anymore, despite that world being unable to run as it does without them, and as such they’re some of the first adult figures with whom we’re closer to being on equal footing.

Our social system is expanding at camp, though it will also be curtailed when mom and dad arrive to tote us back home. Promises are made to stay in touch, but practically speaking, summer camp ends with a series of lies for almost all involved. We’re not going to know these people anymore, save in how they—and our experiences with them—have touched us. And as apprehensive as we were to head off for summer camp in the first place, those days after may have a postpartum aspect of sadness—even depression—to them. We’re blue for a period following. Ah, but then there’s school again, the leaves change, and so do we once more, whether we know it or not—probably not. Camp played its part.

No horror film depicts these feelings and ideas so well as Sleepaway Camp. Horror films themselves are a staple of the summer camp experience. Kids talk about scary movies they’ve seen. Horror films are watched on movie night. Ghost stories are a camp hallmark. Fear is exciting. Someone has a scary story and someone else tries to best them with theirs. Qualifiers rule; e.g., “I swear to God,” as if the hyperbolic suddenly becomes literal.

My friend Howard sent me digital files for a number of albums I've been looking for: Mosaic's The Complete Capitol Four Freshmen Fifties Sessions, the Kinks' At the BBC (the five-disc version, that fifth disc containing some very rare off-air recordings), the 13th Floor Elevators box, Sign of the 3 Eyed Men, and two Christmas soundtracks--one for Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and the other for Rankin/Bass's The Year Without a Santa Claus (which of course contains the Heat and Snow Miser's glorious songs to themselves--too much!) I will listen to Christmas and Halloween music at all times of the year. I love those seasons too much--there it is again--to avoid them until the calendar says it's their time again. The Christmas albums are bootlegs--the official soundtracks have never been released (unlike with 1964's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer).

Howard and I like a lot of the same things. I sent him some rare Beatles footage yesterday and today I happened to encounter something he posted about the animated 1953 film, The Tell-Tale Heart, which I'll shortly be writing a piece about. Maybe I'll do it today.

Have downloaded quite a few country box sets, mostly from Bear Family, by the likes of Webb Pierce, George Jones, Faron Young, Ernest Tubb, Marty Robbins, Bob Luman, Frankie Laine.

Also snagged a complete edition of Ravel's works, a set containing all of the recordings from 1923 that Louis Armstrong made with King Oliver, and the deluxe edition of the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible.

I watched Leo McCarey's Going My Way the other night. Barry Fitzgerald is quite good in it. I believe it was last year at the Brattle when I went for a screening of Union Station and the person who introduced the film said that a little Barry Fitzgerald goes a long way, and I thought that a wrong and needless remark. McCarey, as I've written, is one of the great American auteurs, or should be thought of as such. John Ford, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey. He's not less than them.

I have been listening to the Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley Sherlock Holmes broadcasts from the BBC every night and morning for the past month or so. They're my favorite Holmes/Watson pairing. Little has been written about them, and what has been written seems to me like it was done by someone who never actually listened to these programs, like just knowing about them--which is more than most people do, including historical radio buffs and those into Sherlock Holmes--is enough and if you say anything that's more than anyone else so it doesn't matter how correct you are because you get points for the mention.

For instance, I've seen Hobbs's Holmes described as avuncular. That's wrong. the explanation being that these programs often aired during BBC air slots meant for children, and this was a kids-friendly Holmes and Watson, not so much a dumbing down as an aging down, if you will. But it's just not true. I like quite a few actors as Holmes and Watson, both on screen, on television, and on radio, but I don't think anyone has done it better than these two.

There's a very rare occurrence across the expanse of Sherlock Holmes productions in the Hobbs/Shelley December 19, 1966 episode of "The Crooked Man": Watson calls Holmes by his Christian name. It's just once early on, and you have to be listening for it. My surmise is that this was an accident on Shelley's part, but it's a sweet touch to treasure.

Read what was billed as a locked room mystery by Martin Edwards called "Waiting for Godstow," which I found to be inept and embarrassing. You know when someone doesn't have a story to tell but they're going to put this thing out there anyway. It's like they hope no one notices. Which is easy enough to do in publishing, because no one does. No one cares. No one in publishing is reading something "head on," to see what it is and what it's got. But this guy trying to impersonate--and that's what it feels like--a horny, middle-aged woman is so awkward, to say nothing of the bad--and nonsensical--Beckett reference. But there was 150 things in the story that any component editor would have red flagged. The thing needed a lot more work and it couldn't have been saved anyway, because, again, the writer had no story. If you don't have a story, you're just counting on cronyism, hook ups, and apathy--that is, no one caring enough to give your work any kind of an honest look or consideration.

Very few people have more than one story to tell in their lives. And very few people have a single story to tell. That's one reason why almost all authors tell the same story again and again. Only the names are different. The rub never is. It's TV, but take someone like Ricky Gervais. He had one story to tell and that was The Office. Nothing else he's done comes close or will come close. That was it for him. Through a confluence of factors no doubt. Who he was, how he thought, his own experiences, what he experienced at a time of his (working) life.

I did run more stairs yesterday--5000 at City Hall. Also did 150 push-ups.

Was reading in a park late yesterday afternoon. There was a baby rabbit just sitting there on the lawn. The grass went up higher than it did. Maybe it thought it was hidden. Would have been an easy meal for a hawk. But I don't think it had given any consideration yet to protecting itself. I could have petted this rabbit, but of course I didn't because you don't want to cause an animal any undue anxiety. But it sat there the whole time I read, sometimes munching on the grass, perfectly at peace.