Avian life and death on the road to the station

Saturday 4/12/25

Days without stair running. Not good. Got up late today--five in the AM--and then was at the desk straight until three o'clock. Raw out, windy, cold, raining. But that's no excuse. Wrote so much nonfiction over the past two and a half days.

A tale of avian life and death on the road to South Station Thursday. I walked there and back twice, which totals six miles. Coming back on my first leg, there was a beautiful woodpecker dead on the sidewalk, about ten feet from a building whose front featured a bank of large windows. The bird must have crashed into one. It wasn't there minutes before when I'd first gone by. Rarely do I see woodpeckers in the city proper. Sometimes there will be one out in Charlestown by the Monument. On that same return, I encountered a turkey outside of the Boston Harbor Hotel, strutting about. Never have I seen a turkey this deep in the city. There were no others, just the one, which is also unusual. The bird seemed not to have a care in the world, and carried itself with the same attitude as a person about to pop into the nearby Starbucks easy as you please.

I think I'm going to introduce my niece Lilah to some music by Janis Joplin by sending her a link to the second performance from Monterey of "Ball and Chain" and she can see what she thinks.

A few nights ago I was on a jazz site looking for some things, and I came across a work of mine about the Savory sessions--these were live radio performances between 1935 and 1940 taped off by a collector--and I wasn't happy with parts of it, so I pulled up the file--which dates to 2018--and I will change what needs changed so that it reads as it should. The piece ran in JazzTimes, but the bigger point with so many of these pieces pertains to their place in books.

If you want to play-act that you're some intellectual or aesthete, you will always be vulnerable to exposure by someone who is legit. Don't dissemble--be things.

We've had a return snap of winter lately. I walked five miles Wednesday in two separate walks. Much more like spring on the second, though I happened to be on the sunny side of the street--not figuratively--that time, and it was one of those days where the sun made a big difference. Other days, the temperature is just the temperature.

Stayed up on Wednesday night to watch the Red Sox drop their third in a row at home. They look like the team I expected them to be. Bad fielding, and they strike out so much. Fourteen times last night. The game went to extras, and in neither inning--with a runner starting on second--could they scratch across a single run, when all you really need to do is not keep whiffing, but they couldn't. This team's approach isn't a good one. Part of that is on Cora, but I suspect it has much to do with the analytics department. Plus, in this winter-like weather, you're not going to win games if you're reliant on home runs. Takes a lot to get the ball out of the ballpark.

They were drilled yesterday by the hapless White Sox, 11-1, in a game in which they committed five--that's right, five--errors. This team is exactly what I said it was. Same shit, different year. They strike out ten times a game, can't catch the ball, bitch about things like the weather. The manager isn't a good manager, the analytics-driven front office hasn't a clue about how games are won (and how the game is played, for that matter). I already hate watching them--or how they play, I mean. This brand of baseball.

The Celtics lost in Orlando in their final road contest of the year. Had they won, they would have tied the record for road wins in a season, which would have been a nice record to have, I suppose, but not a very important one. Health, of course, is the bigger deal with the playoffs around the corner. NB: Road records aren't remembered like home records, for some reason. Probably because home records stand out more, with just the two or three losses that some teams have managed.

Number of emails received about Wednesday's folderol. They all dealt in the same themes, as one would expect, given that someone who conducts themselves in that manner and maintains those attitudes and beliefs--with several people pointing out that he didn't express any disapproval whatsoever with Sedaris's disgusting views, which surprised me not in the slightest--doesn't exactly leave much doubt or wiggle room as to the kind of person they are, with much made about this charming fellow's arrogance, anger issues, and stupidity, alongside suppositions of possible senility (he's only seventy-three), questions raised of the drink (it was fairly early in the day, but you never know), and general bafflement that someone could be so lacking in judgment and put that lack of judgment on aggressive display.

Would like to get pieces written about Bach, Aretha Franklin, the Grateful Dead, Bride of Frankenstein, in the next little bit, and also finish a piece I've let sit around for too long on Children of the Stones, the BBC television series from 1977. Push through this stuff, and then work hard on book things. Jazz book, Beatles books, fiction books. There's just so much. I need to do a lot better, find a way to stay at it longer, so it's not just in these daily stretches of eight or ten hours, but stretches double that.