Hello and welcome to
, my Substack newsletter about growing older and facing the consequences.Written while listening to a “focus” playlist on Apple Music, eating chocolate, and being nagged about a trip to the long-awaited local dispensary.
The sun is shining, birds are chirping LOUDLY, flowers are blooming, pollen is dispersing, etc. etc. My home- and garden-improvement prone neighbor is making plenty of noise, starting when I’m still in bed on Sunday morning.
This is the last post of the month, in which I traditionally (at least as of March) recap everything I read, saw, watched, listened to and otherwise consumed with at least one of my 5 senses. Reminder: I’m taking May off, see you again the first weekend in June.
Watching: TV
Only Shogun, really, and we’re not even done yet. Next up: Fall Out, I think. MY taste in TV isn’t particularly prestigious.
My husband is enthralled by YouTube. We watch travel videos from the BBC. We also like “Have I Got News For You,” the long-running British comedy show. Another one is the “Graham Norton Show,” because the celebs seem so happy and relaxed sipping wine on the couch and I can recognize most of them. Last night I watched a documentary on the sand crisis.
Watching: Movies
The Friday Night Family Movies, which are as follows
Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin (1955): Something of a random choice, I didn’t have a list prepared and we ended up paging through the Max selections until we saw this. It wasn’t actually terrible, but remind me to lay off midcentury Orson Welles in the future.
Destry Rides Again (1939): Jimmy Stewart plays his usual character, there’s a memorable catfight, justice prevails in the end.
The Wrong Man (1956): Certainty not Hitchcock’s finest. I always find Henry Fonda and his hopeless sad-puppy eyes a disturbing presence and there was little suspense.
LA Confidential (1997): Everybody loved it. I liked it but found the Kim Basinger character too fantastical. I can't fault her performance though. Guy Pearce didn’t appeal because he reminded me too much of my dad.1
Reading: Books
Erasure by Perceval Everett (ebook). It was great! I loved it! I don’t know why writing by bookish nerdy black writers always resonates with me so intensely, although I could probably figure it out if I thought hard enough. It is not at all like American Fiction, the movie (in part because the book is set in DC, which makes way more sense) but you can understand why Certain Decisions were made. The book, as always, is better.
James by Perceval Everett (ebook). Currently in progress. I love it! It’s Huckleberry Finn from the viewpoint of his black traveling companion, Jim. I haven’t read HF in quite some time but I think it’s following the book fairly closely. Jim (James) knows a lot of things Huck doesn’t so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.
A re-read of The Book of the New Sun (book) by Gene Wolfe. For an online reading group. This is either the 3rd or the 4th time I’ve read it and at the moment I’m bogged down towards the end of Book 2, The Claw of the Conciliator. I think I read too many nerdy recaps before starting this time. I’d rather consider Severian from my own erudite literary perch.
Filterworld by Kyle Chaka (book). The first chapter gave me BTDT feelings so I should probably skip ahead before I give up entirely.
I never even cracked open The Famished Road by Ben Okri before the library wanted it back.
Reading: The Internet
I read and free-subscribe to a bunch of Substacks. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend them, but Substack is getting more and more like LiveJournal For Grownups, which is fine in its own way, but doesn’t add up to Serious Journalism. The fashion girlie bloggers are very enthusiastic about all this, it’s cute. Someday, when I know what I think about it, I’ll make a list.
Delia Cai of
commissioned a very funny “Hate Reads” pop-up series. I especially liked the final one, which made me think I should write something about How Annoying the Youth Can Be, in addition to not knowing they don’t know anything. Put it on the list, too.The New York Times is on the Substack phenomenon, which may have peaked by now. There was a piece on Rusty Foster’s Today in Tabs. Full disclosure: I am an enthusiastic Rusty fan and would like to point out that he doesn’t just write about media gossip. The comments devolved into whether Peaks Island (iykyk) is truly a small, remote Maine community or actually a suburb of Portland. Por qué no los dos?
Another NYT “Substack is happening!’ piece covered Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk the book and
the substack and podcast. She is called out for being overweight and eating Oreos and not caring. She is further castigated for letting one of her daughters bite into a stick of butter. The writer insinuates that she has split from her “very fit” ex-husband because he couldn’t stand how fat she is. The comments section of course went ham on the unhealthy selfishness of it all. Here is a representative screenshot:I am completely flabbergasted! Is this commenter actually putting food in the same category as drugs, alcohol and self harm? Newsflash: you need food in order to live. And yet 256 other commenters agreed with her.
My Virginia connection: She lives a few towns away and I found my hair stylist through reading a profile of her in a local blog.
Listening: Music
I listened to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, to which I say YES! YES! And again, YES!
I listened to The Tortured Poet’s Department and kind of liked it. I didn’t have time (two hours!) for the whole thing, but I’m sure I’ll catch up someday.
Maggie Rogers released a new album that I tried to listen to only to realize I had heard much of it on the radio and it hadn’t made much impression. She does sound a bit like Taylor Swift as produced by Jack Antonoff, only without the intrusive lyrics.
In which history and memory whack me in the face
A couple of weeks ago we went to dinner at my mother’s with my sisters and their husbands for my mother’s 93rd birthday (and for one sister’s birthday that is right around the same time).
I saw the news of the Iranian attack on Israel flash up on my phone, but my attention was on other things.
Middle Sister had attended the memorial for my least favorite uncle and brought back the scrapbook my aunts created for my grandparents’ 60th anniversary. That was sometime in the late 80s but the scrapbook has photos up until the early 00s and includes the programs for both grandparents’ memorials, as well as a bunch of other people, not all of whom I know.
I looked through it and realize there's a lot of information I don’t otherwise have access to and my sister told me I could keep it, nobody else wants it. My late uncle and his wife both had incipient Alzheimer’s and the house was in a hoarding state, filled with papers and model railroad equipment and layouts (he was an avid model railroader). The model stuff will be sold or donated and I suppose the papers will be thrown out. I brought the scrapbook back home. My son enjoyed looking at pictures of his grandfather’s side of the family, which, for various reasons, he hasn’t spent much time with. I paged through and pondered my family history, how much love there was and how much of it I’ve let go.
The hubs had a great time talking to Middle Sister’s spouse–they’ve always got on well, coming into the family at about the same time (he was the first son-in-law, but brother in law had been around longer). I wonder why they don't stay in touch more. I think they know their relationship is always going to be bedeviled by
The Hanna and her sisters factor (as in we are a group of smart, beautiful, fairly accomplished women who are also pretty neurotic)
My sister’s resentment that her then-boyfriend wasn’t permitted to be in the famous family portrait taken at a friend’s wedding in the 90s, which extends to all the people who were in it
We can be a bewildering trio. Two of the husbands act somewhat bemused, the third would very much like to be included in the discourse. But it may not be such a good idea to get too involved in the murky waters of intra-sororal back-and-forth
I constantly beat myself up for not taking advantage of my many prospects. But the truth is we are very, very lucky people.
The next morning my husband and son were discussing the Iranian attack on Israel and I flashed back to being in my parents’ attic and reading an old National Geographic about the Strategic Air Command. I remember it as bombers soaring across the hemisphere in a grid, 24-7, refueling in flight, never touching down, endlessly in the air to protect us from a Russian attack. I asked the guys, both well-versed in military history, if this is at all true and they fill in the details. The bombers endlessly overhead landed in the 1970s or so. I think they were superseded by ICBMs, which are, themselves, no more.
It’s so weird how things I took for granted as a kid now seem more in the realm of mythology or science fiction. The U.S. had a bomber umbrella and now they have what?--aircraft carriers I guess. Eleven of them, with another scheduled to come online in 2025. I don’t understand why people worry about the decline of American military might. We can still kill more people more quickly and easily than any other country in the world, including China. But victory doesn’t always go to those with the biggest guns.
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And to a certain extent, myself
We do still have strategic bombers (SAC became USSTRATCOM) and we have ICBMs. And nuclear submarines too.