Much barking. Distress and alarm. Sigh. Get the maglight . . .
Birch sat statue-still on the wet dark lawn, staring at him. Who knows how fate may bring them together, to grapple in mortal woe, as the summer runs.
Clammy again, with incessant drizzle. An annoyance, albeit minor, but when there’s nothing else to bedevil you at the moment the small displeasures can fill the entirety of your mood, at least until you shift into something else that will open the windows and let in a fresh gust, a clean breeze. Usually I can make that happen in the morning by getting cracking on something. This morning the peevish mood was replaced with absolute, stunned, disheartened disbelief.
I hate to do this and can't really say, and it might be for naught and all that, but I have had this feeling twice before, and I've been right. And at the moment I feel a great deal like that car in the parking lot up above.
Had some enjoyable chats today about the last column, the one on Minnesota's favorite superhero. According to a survey. There's always a survey. When I wrote about my exhaustion with superhero movies, I was thinking of Matt down at the gym, who LOVES this stuff in all its iterations, and we talk about it in granular nerd detail. I was thinking he might take issue with the whole "Oh, grow up" portion of the piece, but then thought hey, what are the chances he reads the paper. I walk in today and the first thing he says, after Welcome, Sir, is "and I prefer Captain America," which I knew, and it's one of the things I find admirable. Good choice! So we laughed about that for a while, and then I went to torture myself on the machines.
This was about two hours into the corruscating irritation that characterized the morning, and it was settling into a brooding funk. I decided to up the weights on the lat pull-down to where they’d been a month ago, before I had to lay off because my forearms were killing me, and as I huffed and made Gym Faces and brought those 100 pounds up and down (90 is easy, 100 is hard, there’s no in-between) I thought again that this will always be hard, and I suppose that’s good. But at some point I may think that I set myself up for constant hardship and self-denial because I invested about $170 in new pants.
Really. When I dropped the weight and got lean, I bought six pairs of pants from Amazon in a few hues and colors. They fit, unlike the others, which were always a bit baggy - the short man’s curse. I’m on the last hole of the belt and it’s not tight, because I foreswore things I used to eat out of rote habit.
A sandwich and some chips. That’d be nice.
No! The pants investment will be squandered!
Lest I sound too monastic and spartan in my ways, I long ago decided that Tuesday night would be A Foretaste of Friday. The best way to indulge properly is to pace your sins and parcel them out. Set some rules. I never have a drink before 10, for example. I just don’t. I have ice cream, a great love of mine - chocolate with ribbons of peanut butter - on Saturday and Sunday, and as you know, and are probably fulsomely bored by having such knowledge, the weekend is a time of breakfast indulgence. It makes these things special, keenly anticipated. But Tuesday night I’ve finished half of the week’s work, and so I have a single malt, and a dish of ice cream. There is a warm happy feeling Tuesday afternoon when I’m in the ab crunch machine, staring at the cheerful blonde who is forever rowing across a river on the screen of the machine on the other side of the room, knowing that I have no deadline tomorrow, and two small joys ahead. And so I crunch some more. (Eighty pounds is doable. Ninety is a back-cracker.)
And then it’s thumping on the treadmill, which I once hated, but now love. I listen to the Apple Music channel that serves up music I hadn’t heard, and duly enter the name of an unfamiliar tune and artist into the Journal app, so I have a record of all the new things I encountered. At this point whatever mood I had has turned around, and after the free weights I am done, another hour banked. More work, then home, then the nap, an act of legislation that abolishes the afternoon.
Just like it was a year ago and hence perhaps as it shall be a year hence, except . . .
Except I had this little queasy sluice on Jan 1st that 2024 could not possibly live up to the standard set by 2023. We were compelled by events to travel - Mother-in-law’s 90th party, Natalie’s graduation. Plus the show in England. Plus the return to England for the Palin dinner. Plus Cancun. Bled the coffers, it did, but we live and got out there, and I have extraordinary memories of it all.
And now, I thought, walking to the showers with a twinge in my back, this. This again. I’m 2-0 for this, but what will happen this time, years later?
The amusing thing about the people in movies who say “I’m too old for this shit” is that they never really seem too old at all, right? But the minute you say that, though, perhaps you are.
Well, I’m not. But it's not my call.
Update:
And Birch is at the back door, staring with keen intent. It is all there is in the world.
I don’t like the YouTube experience, at all. But there are so many interesting things buried in its depths. Give me five minutes with my streaming services and I’ll eventually find something to watch, with diminished enthusiasm, but give me one minute on YouTube and I’ll find something I really enjoy.
The old old TV is a necessary corrective to the idea that it was all good and golden because of the Values or something. Nnnnnoo. Ford Theater: a story of a young girl who comes to the Big Apple to be a model. It could be interesting for the rudimentary lesson on 1955 office interiors, at least as TV wished to portray them:
Of course she waltzes right into the industry, and is mad at the agency’s boss but she also loves him madly. It’s a comedy, of sorts. Fluff for the female audience. Do they end up together at the end? BUT OF COURSE
Watch it and you get a recommendation for anotger old show you never heard about. I have to pass this along. It's the most un-strange "spooky thing" show I've ever seen.
A British show. They’re very short. About three minutes. They’re like the paperback books of collected “unexplained phenomena” from that guy, what’s his name, Frank something. Edwards, that was it. Here’s one. When it goes to grey, that’s it.
Maybe the car flipped and the projector was pointed up? Why would anyone call the local bar to tell him?
Watch a few, and see if you can predict where they're going.
It’s 1952.
We’re doing StarTribune newspaper ads again.
I don’t know why this would be the case. About being more convenient, that is.
Powers was a department store downtown in the long row of big stores. It was the closest to the old retail core, a few blocks away from the epicenter of shopping. The rep was upscale but not too much so.
I had no idea what the word meant, so I had to look it up. Metroplite: “A dress fabric spun from tussore silk with random irregularities in the surface texture.” Okay. Must have been the mode du jour.
15 dollar suits at Juster’s! And Juster's was a nice store.
When I was a little kid, I always thought Ed looked like a thug. A tough guy, a low-brow brute.
You were invited to meet him at the airport!
Cars deliberately designed for modern living, whatever that was supposed to mean. I mean, I’d prefer that my car was deliberately designed, as opposed to conjured without reason or intent, and I imagine most everyone did.
Four-engine service. Implication: we can lose a couple and still get you there.
Connies were the first pressurized-cabin design to get widespread use, he said, trying to paraphrase Wikipedia instead of copying the line for some reason, and this meant they could get up above bad weather. No small thing.
Fifth-largest carrier in the 50s; merged with United in 1961.
For some reason, Tuesday was the travel ad day. TWA and Northwest have ads for their own four-engine fleets and destinations. Then there’s the old way:
The Winnepegger, which would get you there eventually. “You’ll like this new car!” So the others are the same old rolling stock, eh.
In October 1904 the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railway (Soo Line) and Canadian Pacific Railway began overnight passenger service between the Twin Cities and Winnipeg, Manitoba. The train consisted of a mail and baggage cars, two coaches, a sleeper and dining car.
The train went by several names over its 62 years: Manitoba Express (1904–1909), Winnipeg Express (1919–1928) and the Winnipeger (1928–1967).[1] It commonly was called the Winnipeg Flyer.
The level of obsessive detail in that entry is typical for train pages. For train enthusiasts.
Between 11:00 and 7 AM, it made 22 stops, so forget about a solid night’s sleep.
Why yes it is unnerving, very much so
Nevermind the Multiplying Girl - what's going on with Imp Kid?
This is the strangest ad in the entire paper, and its discursive style is almost a throwback to the styles of many years ago.
Now I wonder if there’s a whole series of Fink Conversations. I’m certain there must be.
(Later: there was. They ran monthly, on the first Tuesday. I’m collecting a batch for . . . oh, because I must, I suppose. They started in 1952, at least in the Tribune. I wonder if they’d been running elsewhere for years.)
One mistake, and now her future is loveless and sexless
There was a time when they had to tell people to hang up the phone. Decades after its invention. DECADES.
You too can lose weight - with milk!
By the way, wasn't everyone supposed to be thin in the 50s? People actually dieted?
