The levity of noir, The Golden Girls, bird business, Grateful Dead tapes, some films seen, bad baseball, grammar miracles

Monday 7/6/26

Miami is nice, so I'll say it thrice.

I’ve never not been glad to have The Golden Girls come on. A part of me always goes, “Oh, good.”

Who says anything thrice?

Exactly.

Film noir doesn’t offer a lot of levity, but a guy will come upon another guy he doesn’t know who got shot and is dying and can barely speak and he’ll rasp out the entire story of how he got here to the stranger who found him. Or two guys will be in a car that went over a bridge and into the water and it’s filling up and they can’t get out and one guy tells the story of the film. The levity is in the set-up.

I sat in the cafe yesterday through the late afternoon/early evening reading Jerry Garcia interviews for the "Dark Star" book.

The better you get, the worse your life becomes. That is how the world works now. The better you get as a person, the more alone you are. The better you get as an artist, the more hated you are, the worse it goes for you. The stronger you get, the more isolated you are. The more interesting you become, the less there is for you, the less anyone wants you in their space, in all the forms that spaces take.

Seeing someone make their subjects and verbs agree almost feels like a minor miracle now. The same as the correct usage of then and than. A and an. The pluralization of common nouns with the use of apostrophes. The correct spelling of the word "heroes" does count as a miracle now. The ceiling is the cellar of technically-not-illiterate. Talk about your notes from underground.

Do you really not get that all of our problems come from how willingly stupid we are? Everything goes back to that. The willingly stupid are miserable, too. They're the cause. A single person like Donald Trump has nothing on the millions and millions of the willingly stupid and what they've turned the world at large into, and the world for people at the level of the individual. I mean the level of a single person. There basically aren't individuals as in people with their own identities anymore.

How many posts do you see a day from a woman with less brains than a rotted stump posting yet another photo of herself with a caption of, "Falling in love with myself," or some such. Of course you are. That's not even a human. Narcissism and vapidity with a head and two legs and two arms.

I watched three blue jays gambol in Charlestown yesterday on a side of the hill. Watched them go about their business, their interactions. Watched them goad each other, kick up disputes, settle them. As they were doing this, a couple starlings were off on an errand and a single house sparrow hopped on the grass nearby, sometimes stopping to tilt his head to the side and observe, wait, reflect, not paying any mind to the nearby jays and just being present.

Walking in the Seaport the other day, I noticed a sign outside a church detailing upcoming events that were to be held there, with one of these events being a weekly AA meeting on Tuesday. I've never seen a church in Boston with a sign mentioning hosting an AA meeting. I don't consider myself an alcoholic. I'm not an alcoholic. I drank more than many and maybe most of them, but as in everything, what I am is specific only to me. I never went to a meeting. It's not something I'd do for a solution. For me, that comes from within. With something like this.

But I thought maybe I could help someone and looked into perhaps being a sponsor. I'm not eligible for this, though, because I never did the AA thing and the steps. Ironic I guess but it makes sense. I'm just someone who can help people in his ways, which isn't necessarily the same. I know I could help someone, but it wouldn't be through citing steps.

Watched some of the Twilight Zone marathon over the weekend. Read a bit from Finnegans Wake. Listened to a lot of Grateful Dead. 11/8/70 Capitol Theatre, 11/16/70 Fillmore East, 11/13/72 Kansas City, 12/11/72 Winterland, 8/6/71 Hollywood Palladium, Garcia by himself in the studio in what is said to be 1970 but could be 1969. Listened to many episodes of The Great Gildersleeve. Watched Blonde Ice. It's a film noir from 1948. She sucks. Watched The Innkeepers. Horror film 2011. Eh, whatever. Watchable, I guess. Watched Man Finds Tape, another horror film, from last year. Couldn't end fast enough.

I never have anything to do with fireworks and wouldn't even if I wasn't in this situation and was back in Rockport. You wouldn't be able to get me to go to them. Completely uninterested. Same as with golf and casinos.

The Red Sox swept the Angles who are an embarrassment of a franchise. This means that the Sox are now eight games under .500 and four back in the Wild Card. What a state of...bad baseball. You can be ten games under .500 in the American League and be five back in the Wild Card as of today. It's not parity. It's bad baseball. It isn't baseball. It's guys swinging from their ass, pitchers throwing from their ass for the brief amount of time they're in there.

Throwing, not pitching. The art of pitching is no more. The finger points of baseball that make baseball baseball are rarely in evidence. Willson Contreras had a key three-run homer last night. He's been great. Easily their offensive MVP. Sonny Gray improved to 10-1 with his win the night before...and somehow isn't on the All-Star team. Hell, he's a top three Cy Young choice right now in my view. Suarez--who left with an injury last night--and Chapman were named to the All-Star team.

The two most deserving guys for the Sox are Contreras and Gray. Chapman doesn't deserve it this year. I guess Contreras and Gray they could be added, but then what? You have four guys on the All-Star team from this team? That's not right. They play the White Sox next, starting tomorrow. The Red Sox play decently on the road, so maybe they can take that series against a resurgent Chicago ball club.

My mom sent me a photo of my niece Amelia having Fourth of July fun (and chips). I guess it was really hot in Chicago as well. My mom was supposed to go to the parade with my sister's family but she chose not to, which I think was the wise decision. She didn't need to be sitting out there for a couple hours with it being 97 degrees or whatever it was.