It starts at 4:30 am with today’s morning names: George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Gershwin was in my head because when I woke my Apple Music had just finished playing an album of Gershwin songs. Gershwin immediately triggered Berlin, that’s an obvious leap — and also led to Porgy and Bess and the complexity of the relationships between American Jews and Blacks. And Berlin’s name triggered his “God Bless America” (from World War I), an uncomfortably sentimental patriotic anthem that I’ve always disliked, but on the other hand it’s a displaced person’s outpouring of love for the country that found a place for him, and then I was filled with dread, and the fear that my country had no place for me, that the troopers would come and drag me away to a concentration camp.
This is by no means an irrational fear, especially today.
But I pulled myself together and started the day, almost immediately returning to my regimen of video therapy (even before breakfast, and then during breakfast).
The background. Catching up on 10/3:
On a posting on 11/1 I reported that I was using my writing here
for escaping current events and my bodily miseries. I am not cut off from the world … but I have entirely stopped following the news and commentary on the news on tv. The background for my days is re-runs (on dvd) of all six years of the tv series Major Crimes (details in my 10/29 posting with that title)
Video therapy continues.
… with the unwinding of the intricate life story of the serial killer Phillip Stroh, during which the crusty, irritable, and sometimes foolish LAPD Lieut. Provenza continues his growth into a wise senior officer, taking over the Major Crimes unit on the death of Sharon Raydor, eventually becoming the avenging angel, determined to remove Stroh from the earth by whatever means necessary.
The new turn. That particular treatment came to an end at 9 this morning, about a day earlier that I’d planned (I maintain that I hadn’t taken the absence of commercials into account in my calculations), so I had to find something for about two more days of other-worldly seclusion. As it happens, I have an enormous collection of dvds, of all sorts, but rather than search systematically through the categories, I went to the big pile of uncategorized items and riffled through them until one caught my eye: Looking, the gay tv series (2 seasons, 2014-16), with its film sequel.
So today I’ve been living, once again, in a young man’s gay San Francisco from 10 years ago. More or less non-stop talk about sex and relationships. Plus plenty of both. Not truly light entertainment, but certainly engrossing and diverting. And Jonathan Groff as the central character (the show could have been titled Patrick and his Friends) is especially fine.
In any case, there should be enough to last one more day.
November 5, 2024 at 8:25 pm |
Damn. I must have stopped watching Major Crimes before it was done; I don’t think I was aware that Sharon had been done in.
November 6, 2024 at 4:54 am |
Not done in. Died of cardiac myopathy. Nobody’s doing, nobody’s fault.