2025, week two

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(D.C., Jan 10)

We left Los Angeles early Sunday morning. I’m a little ashamed to say that I whined about it. Nothing all that terrible happened; we just woke up before dawn to make an 8:06 a.m. flight, boarded the flight, and had to get off because a mechanical error made the thing un-flyable. My wife kept my grumbling to a minimum, just some synchronized eye-rolls with the other passenger who’d booked our legroom-friendly row. She wanted one SoCal hamburger before we flew, so I bought one, walked the terminal, and sat back down.

One day later, we stayed up in the dark as the friends we’d stayed with fled their home. One week later, they were back, home intact. But they’d picked a bad time to gut their roof and replace its insulation. Ash from burned homes and forests floated in, wrecking all their hard work. They couldn’t complain about it, and they wouldn’t. Everybody knew someone who had it much worse. Generational wealth destroyed, heirlooms lost forever, pets and family members dead.

I didn’t complain, either, about anything. Back to work, in D.C., I covered the boring-on-purpose certification of the Electoral College vote, did some interviews, wrote 4000-odd words of stories.

(D.C., Jan. 6)

We’d ordered animal-safe road salt, and sprinkled some down the block, where nobody had bothered to shovel. (Not trying to over-sell my good works here — this was days after it iced over.) Over the weekend, as I thought about the people who’d lost all their possessions, I started purging books again and giving away clothes. I imagined flames consuming a pile of old graphic novels I’d bought at a convention and never made time to read. What a waste; better to put them in the free library.

Why not finish this thought yesterday? A very middle-aged reason: I had a drink. We have been getting rid of old wine and liquor bottles, some very old, some “saved” for so long that the tartaric acid floated up and the cork went rotten. I mixed a Bombay No. 2 (cognac, cointreau, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth), all the components still potent and tasting like liquor. I poured an aged rum that I remembered liking, and spat it out. The cork didn’t do its job, and all the flavor rose up to live with the angels. I made a White Russian, a drink I learned about from “The Big Lebowski,” annoying my parents, who knew — I was 16, I didn’t — that The Dude’s ardor for this drink was a character flaw.

That was it. Two drinks and I conked out at 8 p.m. on a Sunday. Probably for the best, as we had two much busier weeks coming up. Just needed to keep the log.

The Best Thing I Read: It was “The Old Man and the Sea,” which I’d missed when I was young, and knew would be a quick, perfect read. I downloaded it to my Kindle before taking a train to see “The Brutalist” with friends. They were on time, but I was early, and I stood in the theater bar finishing it. When my first friend arrived, I proudly told him what I’d just done.

“I think I read that in summer camp,” he said.

Fair. Same friend got off a good joke during the previews; we saw the new Clark Kent going to work at the Daily Planet, and he wondered why the modern Kent worked at a newspaper, instead of a right-wing site with a heavy focus on violent crime, the kind Superman actually fought. “No one’s telling Superman — hey, I notice you’re not doing anything about wage theft.”

Back home, I entered my usual fugue state and read as many old graphic novels as I could, for the pile of stuff I didn’t need anymore. The only potential keepers were Ben Passmore’s collection (which I’d gotten signed, and which captured the earnest liberalism of the Trump years in an interesting way) and Larry Gonick’s “Cartoon Guide to the Environment,” one of the most-remaindered entries in his collection of comix that un-complicate something that kids find boring.

Books read
Anders Nilsen, “Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow”
Ted McKeever, “Mondo”
Ron Wyden, “It Takes Chutzpah”
Ernest Hemingway, “The Old Man and the Sea”
Harlan Ellison, “7 Against Chaos”
Ben Passmore, “Your Black Friend and Other Strangers”
Garth Ennis, “Unknown Soldier”
Summer Pierre, “All the Sad Songs”
Larry Gonick and Alice Outwater, “The Cartoon Guide to the Environment”
William S. Burroughs, “The Cat Inside”

Books purchased
Stendahl, “The Charterhouse of Parma” (kindle edition on sale, ostensibly to read before we take our only vacation this year, to Italy)

The Best Thing I Watched: “The Brutalist,” the best of Brady Corbet’s three Big Movies that end strangely. “The Childhood of a Leader” finished with a flash-forward to the dictator’s rule and a shot filmed by a falling camera; “Vox Lux” ends with the discovery that Satan saved the life of Natalie Portman’s pop star; this ends (spoilers etc etc etc) with an epilogue that reveals how well everything worked out for Lazlo Toth, who had a fruitful design career after the conflict and drug addition we spent three and a half hours watching.

The Best Thing I Heard: Also from “The Brutalist,” a lovely euro-pop song that you never see coming, a really cute act of deflation.

No over-thinking, just posting! The weekly journal is back, baby.