Wednesday 1/15/25
I had an extended, life-like nightmare about my ex-wife last night. It seemed to keep going and going, stretching for hours. Like a horror serial. We were back in the house in Rockport, preparing to make a bid though we'd been apart for years. On the scene again after all of that passage of time. And she was just talking about herself, playing the victim that she never was, with that narrative hard-wired into her such that it was a form of total narrative, the life-narrative. And like nothing had been done to me, I couldn't possibly have been affected at all, never mind as I was but what she had done. I went to bed with a frightful headache--easily in migraine territory--and woke up with my skull pounding. I've probably had ten Advil capsules in the last half day, but it has been that bad.
So I've been away, haven't I? At least from these pages. The reason for that was the computer--the replacement of the machine from 2013 that I had started using in 2016 with a refurbished model from 2023. This necessitated the help of the Admiral. He and the Captain are leaving for Florida for three months this morning so was also up against it time-wise. This went terribly and ended up being a five-day job.
We couldn't migrate the content from one machine to the other and time and again we had to start over, reboot the new operating system--which is actually one operating system back. He made many calls to Apple support. We had a case number, we triaged along, we passed up to several senior people. Thursday, Friday, Sunday, and Monday mornings the Admiral picked me up in Boston and drove me to their new place in Middleton that I had helped them move into back in August, then each night save the last he brought me back, computer-less, to this disaster of a living space in Boston.
On Sunday night a senior help person at Apple had us try and migrate from an external drive rather than going machine to machine, but once again there was a spanner in the works--some traitorous application, probably, which kiboshed the whole thing and caused us to start again. Then it was a matter of dragging and dropping the folders, trying to avoid any with applications in them, which I started doing Monday morning, having resolved that I was going to stay in Middleton as long as it took to return to Boston with a working computer.
That meant I spent the night in Middleton, having worked on the machine all day, with still more to go. By that point is was me doing the work and there was a lot to cover, snags along the way, fixes required, things that would have been easy to forget that would have been costly, so I made sure to stay and get it right, or what I hope is right. Then I ended up going forty-three hours without eating. I don't take food before two in the afternoon.
They offered to feed me, of course, but my dietary requirements are so specific on account of my Zulu ways. I slept on their couch in my jeans, and then came back to Boston in the morning. My wallpaper on this new machine is a shot of the harbor in Rockport, with Motif #1. Previously the wallpaper had been a shot I took of this same harbor--from the opposite direction--when I went to Rockport alone on that horrible--they're all horrible and will be until they aren't--Christmas in, I believe, 2012 or it could have been 2013. A different photo of the harbor in Rockport is also the background on my phone. This is one of the many ways I remind myself to keep fighting so I can get back to Rockport. I sit at the desk, there is the photo, there is the place, and I try.
That old machine cost me, I would estimate, twelve hours a week over this last year. I couldn't have both the web and a Word document open at once. To open Microsoft word took a usually a half hour, sometimes more. I was restarting the machine from the power strip upwards of ten times a day. The rainbow-colored pinwheel of death was a constant.
There was much I couldn't do, access, run. I think it's pretty obvious, I should think, that I go fast. Even if I'm taking five months or whatever it was to write a story as short, word count-wise, as "The Bird," everything here is constant motion, rhythmic pace, dynamic palimpsesting and often what was going on instead was akin to Charlie Parker launching into an atomic laser-solo only to be stalled out on the fourth bar and have to sit there tapping his foot--or head in hands--until he could begin again.
I've shaved now. Saw myself in the mirror at their house yesterday morning and I looked awful. Haggard, unkempt, not full of life. Sunken in general. I was also dehydrated, going on coffee and nothing else. No water at all. All of these factors I'm sure contributed to the migraines.
A high school student had been in touch asking if he and his partner could interview me for a school project they're doing on Sam Cooke but I don't see anything since I wrote back so I hope I haven't thrown anything away without meaning to in the disorder of the past week.
I haven't been able to work much--and now I have to look over some possible images for a lengthy piece on Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow that is all set for publication otherwise--but I did pitch a Valentine's piece that I will be doing on various horror films that make for apt viewing around and on that day. I'll include Brian Desmond Hurst's--he who directed Scrooge--1934 adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart, Jean Epstein's 1928 adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, the 1931 Spanish Dracula, 1960's Tormented with Richard Carlson, 1941's The Devil Commands--a Boris Karloff picture that is based on William Sloane's (the author of To Walk the Night, my favorite book) The Edge of Running Water--and The Mummy (1932) and King Kong (1933). I think those will all be in there.
Something I'm interested in exploring, too, and will do in this piece, is the idea that horror film fans tend--ironically or not--to be romantics. Or are more likely to be romantics. And yet here they are loving these grim tales of death and hauntings.
I had been running stairs before getting picked up in the morning, but those workout had been all over the place--1000 stairs one day, 5000 another. No stairs in the Monument save on Saturday--when I thought I'd be going to Middleton where the computers were and was essentially on stand-by but did not--when I did a two circuits later in the day after having already showered because I'd done some stairs at City Hall in the morning. Walked three miles or more a bunch of days. But like I said, it's been a hodgepodge on the fitness front, too.
Read a story called "The Day the Children Vanished" by Hugh Pentecost--which is from 1958--that I thought well of. Some mistakes could have been cleaned up, but that would be very easy to do. It's a locked room mystery that takes place outside on a road in a town involving a station wagon--which serves as a school bus--and its disappearing driver and children.
Saw that the Bruins beat the Lightning last night 6-2, but as always, I checked the box score where I discovered that the Bruins were out-shot two-to-one, which means, often, that one goalie had a good night and the other goalie didn't. In other words, the score isn't indicative of the run of play. Swayman must have had a nice game, though.
There was only one browser that worked on the old machine. You couldn't use Firefox or Safari, or Chrome, the last of which I've been eying for a while because there's an extension you can download called the Grateful Dead Grabber, which allows you to quickly harvest soundboards off of the Internet Archive. What I had been doing up until then was cracking open the page for whatever gig to get to the developer's page, then scrolling down through all of the code to find the mp3 codes and then downloading each song that way. This wasn't a huge issue--there was a time when you had to get in the car, drive the rare record store that sold bootlegs, locate--as in treasure hunt--your wares, then drive back--but it wasn't lightning-fast either.
I have Chrome and the Grabber now, and wow, wow, wow. This is excellent. Perfect for my purposes.
Someone asked me who the best band of all-time was. The answer is the Grateful Dead, the operative word being "band." What is meant by that word. I would also say that the Dead make for the richest listening life. Listening to them over the course of one's life gives you more than you get from any other band. They could be the only band you ever listened to and you would be okay on the getting score, if you will. They are the only band, in my mind, about which that can be said. I'll also add that Thoreau, Emerson, and Delacroix would feel similarly if they'd been around and I had to guess.
I am ready to work harder than ever. Significantly harder than ever, not a touch. Because I have to. Having fixed the computer situation will help, but I must dig deep and push myself like I haven't pushed myself before. I must get out of this space, this apartment. I have to get to Rockport.
Do you know how many books and stories are in my head? It's uncountable.
Last Thursday before leaving for Middleton to begin setting up the new computer, I got a last bit of work in on the old one. On that machine--which, again, I began using in 2016--I wrote 600 stories. I wrote "Fitty" on it, "Big Bob and Little Bob," "Dot," "Best Present Ever," "Thank You, Human," all of these works of art. And then books. The pieces, features, op-eds. Every op-ed I've written was written on that machine. And the whole of this singular journal. Until now. This is the first entry on the new machine. She is a blazer. So fast as to be almost-instant.
For that last session I returned to "Dead Thomas" for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. The part from the session before--which featured in the prose off that is the entry before this one in this journal--about the stitching was conceived of and executed in less than a minute at the desk. No prior planning, had never occurred to me, hadn't been in my mind, and some seconds later, there it was.
Something similar occurred on this last morning with the old computer. I saved the story, shut down the machine, the computer work began, and the file sat untouched in its Winter 2025 folder. Some days later, when we'd finally progressed far enough that it was time to subscribe to Microsoft Word, the soon-to-be-finished overhaul of the masterpiece that is "Dead Thomas" was the first file I opened, and instead of saying that it was 7200 long, it was instead 6800 words. This was when I was importing from Time Machine rather than doing the direct migration.
Those were brilliant words, so I was panicked. As it turns out, I had pasted them into this very record for a prose off I'll be doing shortly--who will be on the end of a beat down this time? Will it be you, if you're one of them? Could be!--so it had been preserved, but it was also in the file where it should have been on the old machine--a lag between Time Machine back-ups, apparently, which is not how I meant to have that set up, so this will require some detective work as part of the ongoing things to get right/sorted with this transition here in the new machine's early days--and then I emailed it to the Admiral and had him forward it to my email.
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