Wednesday 1/15/25
People are usually only interested in themselves, and it is from that truth which stems most of their problems and varieties of discontent.
F. Scott Fitzgerald makes this punning joke on Spinoza in "The Crack Up" which I've always enjoyed but there is hardly anyone alive right now who'd get it.
I said it early on and only keep being proven correct: The Celtics are not a good home team. When a team is not a good home team, that suggests to me that they are complacent and entitled. When you are these things upon a level playing field--which is what pro sports are--then you tend to fail in what is or said to be your ultimate objective.
Amelia/my buddy turns five-years-old on the 23rd. I sent her a shirt--or, rather, we did. It's from both myself and the Little Ghost Girl. The shirt is black. There's a personable ghost on the front and the word "Boo!" Thought it would be a winner, too, come the fall and Halloween season.
There is no content warning for life and there should be none for art.
The Bruins released a quarter-century team/line-up. On this team was Charlie McAvoy, which is a joke. Usually, the Bruins would be better off without McAvoy than with him. The most overrated Bruin of all-time. If I was running that team and I understood--because it's true--that this core needs to be blown up, that a shake up is needed--I'm talking moving forward now, because this year is a punt--he'd be the first guy I shipped out of Boston.
I'd be open to moving anyone on that roster. I don't think there's a serious "you must keep this player" player in the bunch. McAvoy pulls you down given what he's expected to do--by them, not by me--and what he delivers (or doesn't) with those expectations and with what he's tasked. He'll never be a complete player and he's not good enough in any area to have that be his whole game. Defensively, he's a turnover machine, but worse--a turnover machine at the least opportune times. Send him packing. But there he is on this quarter-century team. Ignorance.
I really like John Dehner and respect him as a glue guy who was such an important piece of so many great radio programs and episodes and I'm glad he got a chance to carry his own series, but the radio version of Have Gun, Will Travel with Dehner as Paladin really doesn't work. The character doesn't come off. It's this two-dimensional cross of machismo and cultural refinement--he's an Alpha male who also likes the ballet--doesn't work and this Paladin is hard to like, let alone connect with. The TV version with Richard Boone in the lead role is much better. I've had on the Have Gun, Will Travel radio program of late when I go to bed and I wish it was something it's not--quality-wise, that is. This is one of the few examples of a TV show predating its radio counterpart. 106 radio episodes in total.
In "The Crack-Up"--the first essay, that is, of what's a three-part essay series--Fitzgerald says that all of life is a process of breaking down. I don't hold with this, nor do I agree with it. I saw today where this woman--on social media--wrote that she had suffered a heartbreak from which she could never come back and this she knew. I don't believe there's anything one cannot come back from. But what I do believe is most people will not do what is necessary, for as long as it takes, for as drastic it may be, for as involved an overhaul of one's self as could be required, to do that coming back. But it's always on the theoretical table.
As for life being a constant process of breaking down: Sometimes Fitzgerald wrote like Bob Dylan. What do I mean by that? Dylan always went for the rhyme over the sense. Fitzgerald privileged the pithy, memorable summation over the truth, though Fitzgerald may also have believed, in this instance, what he wrote. He and I are made of much different stuff, and that also colors the contrast here. You can be breaking down, breaking down, breaking down--for however long--and then halt the breakdown and commence the rising up. That's me saying that. Fitzgerald never thought such a thing.
If I was teaching a class on writing and had to assign texts for reading and which we would then discuss, I'd assign some stories by Ring Lardner early on. He has no need to be pretentious and yet he's artful and gets to the stuff of human experience. Pretentiousness and artful do not mix, have never mixed, cannot mix. They do not exist in the same anything. I would also assign things that people think--before they know better--have nothing to do with writing. I'd have the class watch Game 3 of the 1987 Canada Cup Final and Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, listen to Chuck Berry's "The Promised Land" and the Grateful Dead's 4/8/72 "Dark Star," look at Winslow Homer's The Fog Warning.
I had mentioned earlier today that "Dead Thomas" now stands at 7200 words. I never say never--because I don't know what will happen or what could happen when I am at work on a work--but I wouldn't expect it to get much longer, if any. Something a bit unusual happened, though, in creating this soon-to-be-final version of the story.
Normally when I revisit something with the understanding that I could be significantly altering it, I create a new version. I leave the old in the sub-folder of whatever year in which it was composed, and that new version will become the final version and go into the seasonal sub-folder of whatever year in which it is completed.
I didn't do that with "Dead Thomas." I took the original, and began work from there. As a result, the original story was lost. Not really, though--I had sent it to some people via email, and there is also Time Machine. I did want a copy for the historical record. My friend Norberg read the first version and pronounced it one of the best things he'd ever read. It's funny, because I scarcely remembered it at all by then--I think this was, oh, two weeks after I'd written the story. I write a lot in two weeks. That could have been fifteen stories + nonfiction pieces ago.
When he said that to me, I went back to the original "Dead Thomas" and had a read and was knocked sideways. It was really good. And for anyone else, that would have been that, allowing that they'd been able to write the story in the first place, which they wouldn't have.
Well, that was 2021. I retrieved that original version today, and put it in my records--in the 2025 folder sub-folder titled "misc.," with the story itself saved as Dead Thomas (from 2021). That original version is 2800 words long, as it were. So we've gone from 2800 to 7200. That's a bit different. My prediction is that this man, having thought what he did regarding the former is not going to be able to handle how good the latter is. I barely can, if I can, and I wrote it.
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