Wednesday 12/29/21
I probably shouldn't have gotten the flu and booster shots yesterday, because I was sick and coughing heavily, but it took a while to get them scheduled and I thought, "well, you are a Zulu warrior." I tried to hide my cough at the pharmacy, got the shots, got sicker, had a long night of coughing, fever, being cold, and listening to many radio episodes of Gunsmoke. In one of them, Matt, unarmed, walks up to a guy with a gun who says, “I can shoot you.” Matt responds, “My business is dying,” and then kicks his ass. That's what I like. Ran 2000 stairs yesterday but I won't run any today. I've given myself a health deadline--I will be recovered by tomorrow. I won't be the bitch of some cold or virus or whatever this is. (Hmmm. You have a different attitude about many things, sir.) I mostly decided that "Jute" will now be going back into Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives. I had thought about placing it in the ghost story book, but I definitely don't have to, as there are plenty of those works, and "Jute" was perhaps the first story I wrote for the radical undertaking that is Longer. It put me on my way. I discovered something that no one had done before with that story, and then I was on the road. The Wall Street Journal had to call me today to do edits because I was AWOL, lying on my back watching films and coughing angrily because you can't accept a cold--you have to push it out of you. Do I actually believe this? I actually do. I'm a big believer in the power of the mind. The Wall Street Journal piece is on Sam Cooke, and I'm happy with how it came out. By happy I mean it's strong. Saw Jennifer's Body, and it was watchable, but the script needed work. I get that it's trying to be satirical, but the lines of dialogue still have to more or less work as in be plausible. Even in Meatheads, people could talk that way. You're not taken out of the story--or the humanity, which is story itself--by the dialogue. In this film, though, there are lines like, "You give me a wettie" and "Nice hardware, ace," the former referring to vaginal wetness, the latter the size of someone's penis. It's just not believable. It sounds out of touch, a boomer trying to be hip with the youth kind of thing. You can flirt with being over-the-top and remain believable. That is, you can let the intentions be plain, but also have the credibility of believable dialogue.
