Sweetness and light: stray leaves edition

Tuesday 10/20/26

Some sprinkled-in lightness because of course this journal contains much that is heavy and hard and there are heavy and hard things I need to shortly get to (things pertaining to publishing, other things). A break of that which is upbeat and/or light in the proceedings. Then again, there are entries wholly about various works of art being written with regularity. But this will play as interludial relief.

Turns out I did end up feeling not so great yesterday around midday. Because of the vaccines? I suppose? Is the effect that delayed? I don't know. I had a chill and was somewhat sore. Whatever it was, I donned a sweatshirt, sweatpants, my Boston Ballet beanie, put the sweatshirt hood up, made some hot peppermint tea (peppermint tea helps with aches and soreness), and stuck a wad of tissue up a nostril. It's coming up on four in the morning now and I think I'm back to usual.

We've had the most beautiful October so far. I can't recall a better one. Right now it's 41 degrees and I believe the high is supposed to be 62. It's possible that I'm making more of this October than I should because of its contrast with the awful summer months and their nonstop humidity. I'd like to have a strong week of stair running in the Bunker Hill Monument beginning tomorrow. Working hard and trying more makes me feel at least a little better.

I mean primarily with my work and my fight, but the stairs to a degree, too. I don't want to cede them too much importance. They are a helper in a larger cause, not as much an out and out thing in their own right. Well, they are, too. But I wouldn't say, "I worked hard this week" and be talking about running stairs. That'd be silly and I'd feel ashamed. Stairs aren't why I am here. But stairs help me stay here for why I am here. Does that make sense?

I'm thinking of going to Concord for Halloween. A walk to the Old Manse, the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and out to and around Walden Pond.

The Brewers and Rays will meet in the World Series, which means a franchise will win a title for the first time. I was a little surprised that the Guardians were able to able to get two games off of the Rays. The gap between them is considerable in my mind. Naturally I wanted the Guardians to win last night so that the series would go seven, but I thought the chances of that happening were low. Maybe fifteen percent. Cleveland gave their fans a great season in the end. You have to be happy with making it all the way to Game 6 of the ALCS (and coming back from down 0-2 in the ALDS, even if it was against a not particularly strong White Sox team) if you root for them.

This isn't a sexy World Series ratings match-up, but does the true baseball fan care? Of course not. Unfortunately, it isn't that person who truly cares and/or the person in the know, the person of awareness and taste, that anyone or anything cares about. It's the masses. The "average" person. The Lumpenproletariat.

These were the top two teams in baseball all year. We should be in for a long series. Too bad the Rays have that awful stadium. You want the World Series to look like the World Series, right? Hard for that to be the case in a domed stadium that is the sports version of a sad sack mall. It should be outside, it should look cool/cold, the fans should have jackets on, pitchers are blowing on their hands, and the tension and excitement of the fans has that October crackle.

The Patriots prevailed over the Jets on Sunday in a game that was closer than it needed to be. These Sunday Patriots games usually start now at the same time the Monument opens and you know I'm not going to ditch being at the latter to see the earlier portions of the former. Can you even imagine? "No stairs, gonna watch me some football instead." I'd be less able to live with myself. But I do follow the game while I'm in the Monument and unless I'm doing an extreme amount of circuits I am able to see enough of it.

Drake Maye says he's not "Checkdown Charlie," but he's better when he is to a degree as this richer man's version of a game manager. The Patriots are in good shape at 4-2. It'll be hard for them to grab a win on the road in Chicago this Thursday with the injuries they have and the quick turnaround.

But if they do win, I think you'll see them in the playoffs. You may very well see them in the playoffs regardless. It's the time of game, though, where if you're able to prevail you're really sitting pretty. For a while I've wanted to do a sports entry here about current happenings in the four major North American sports, but I haven't been able to. The sports history ones will keep.

I like when Bob Dylan sings, "I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain" in live versions of "Silvio," like the one from Chicago on October 25, 1998. That recording belongs in the Hall of Fame of Dylan recordings.

It occurred to me that November has great appeal to the true connoisseur of autumn. It is to the lover of fall what the strongest of black coffee is to the lover of coffee. There's a huge difference between people who hop on social media and tout fall and those who love fall. The touting often has to do with self-centric photo-ops in which foliage is this backdrop, a framing device, to the person who always makes themselves front and center. That's not a love of autumn. That's window dressing.

No, the true lover of autumn is wiser. They think with the season. About their mortality, time, but also the time they have remaining, however much it is, the fragility of life as well of strength and rebirth and coming back, what they should do to waste less and make more; make more of their days. I think that November is, if anything, an even greater facilitator of these thoughts and processes for the autumn lover.

I like seeing leaves in the harbor as I walk across the bridge to Charlestown, though this further stokes my yearning to see leaves in the ocean in Rockport but to see them as a resident rather than one passing through. The ocean seems to me a special place for a leaf to end up. You had this life on the branch of a tree, the world below, and now you're going off on a journey.

I was doing push-ups in the hallway this morning and some stray leaves have gotten in, which I also like seeing. Imagine what that's like for a leaf. How far you've gone. You're in this place that few leaves, relatively speaking, will ever know.

Watched the 2007 film, Wind Chill, for a Christmas horror film piece I'm doing. It wasn't awful. Wasn't that good either, but "not awful" is more than you can usually say. Then again, it's also nearly twenty years old. The chances of something from then being better than something from now are high. Watched 2012's ATM as well. I can write about that as a Christmas horror film, too. Started P2 from 2007. Is it just going to be this parking garage attendant menacing her?

Also finally finished the first season of Gilmore Girls. What did I think of it? Well, I watched it. But I can have all kinds of reasons for watching something or watching it on to the end. At one point the boom mic pops down into the frame.

Downloaded the Bernard Hermmann box set, The Film Scores on Phase 4, as well as the spoken word Boris Karloff album, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow/Rip Van Winkle, and four John Muir books: Steep Trails, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, My First Summer in the Sierra, and Letters to a Friend Written to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, 1866-1879.

I loved the Little House on a Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a kid. Then I got to 1933's Farmer Boy, and was initially disappointed at first. I'd gotten so into this female world of Laura, and now it was this new character named Almanzo Wilder rather than the people I desired to read more about. I was a completist, though, as a reader, and I was going to see it through to the end.

But it wasn't long until I fell in love with this book which had so much to teach me. Almanzo has all these routines on the farm that require hard work and discipline. Not taking any days off. Not cutting any corners. And those routines and that hard work and discipline acquire a rhythm. His good habits and commitment to doing things the right way are rewarding in and of themselves, in addition to how they help the farm. I can't overstate the impression that made on me. Perhaps it changed my life. I say "perhaps" because I could have gone on to be the way I was going to be regardless. I leave the possibility open, though.