gletschergenossen

Apparently if permitted to sleep for nine hours, my brain presents me with a cheerfully escapist dream of meeting Dirk Bogarde at a film festival and then spending the rest of the afternoon perusing his library and forgoing dinner in favor of sailing, which was probably more my idea of a good time than his, but I like to think if I hadn't woken when I did, he'd have introduced me to Anthony Forwood.

I may be toast at the end of this week, but I would not trade the gorgeous double feature of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990) with which rushthatspeaks and I wound it up. Late to the party, I saw Hoosiers (1986) for the equally first time last month and Dennis Hopper at the top of his game really could do anything. We were passing Porter Square afterward when we saw a loose collection of action along the sidewalk that turned out to be a troop of redcoats marching down Massachusetts Avenue, presumably on their way to fight Lexington. Thanks to the street we lived on in my childhood, my very favorite iteration of Paul Revere's ride was the year in which, instead of clattering under the window shouting per usual, he came in a truck and explained his horse had broken down. No kings.

Donuts are totally unpesachdik, but since I dropped my parents at the airport before six in the morning, I am eating a jam-filled from Gail Ann's. Outside the construction assembles with rumbles and beeps, but I am eating a fried object the size of a saucer and functionally indistinguishable from pączki. It covered me with granulated sugar instantaneously. The sunrise came up in gilt tissue and lavender and the fluorescent stipple of the windows of dawn-drowned trains.

[edit] No photographic evidence of the donut survived, only the smile on the face of the tiger.

I don't see why the cloudburst which held off until I had left the house to check on the state of the local flowering trees couldn't have hit this morning when a square of concrete was jackhammered out of our immediate sidewalk, but I did actually manage to sleep and dream most vividly of hanging out in a waking-stranger's garden-level apartment whose bookshelves seemed to be populated entirely by Michael Whelan-jacketed science fiction. My bookshelves in high school would have been heavily tilted the same.

Yesterday I walked to Porter Square Books, who in their new location further up Mass. Ave. are still only about thirty-five minutes from me on foot, which felt like a major achievement considering the vaporized state of my physical health for longer than I like to think about. I got two books for my father, whose actual birthday it was, after which I had to drop off my watch at the same repair shop in Harvard Square from which I had collected it right before leaving for D.C. I don't think it should stop twice in three weeks, especially if it was supposed to have been fixed in between. That said, D.C. as detrimental to the healthy flow of history makes a certain amount of sense to me right now.

Today I left messages with all of my elected officials about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, since an executive branch that no longer even pretends to play by the constitutional rule of law is beyond overstatement bad, not to mention that even without the additional monstrosity of administrative error, nothing about the present hell of any of America's for-profit deportees improves my safety or security and if by some atrocious miracle it did, still no. I was born into this house we don't ask what became of the previous inhabitants. I don't have to go looking for more rooms.

P.S. And then this rainbow and the sunset at the other end of the street. Tomorrow I can call about Mohsen Mahdawi.

The sidewalk jackhammers arrived directly in front of our house on the dot of seven and persisted on our street until the point in the afternoon when they moved off to torment an audibly adjacent block. The shallow nightmarish gasps I slept in were not enough. I can't do another spring at this pitch of sleeplessness. I can still hear industrial whines and trucks beeping up.

I opened the door to the stranger. I made charoses after all. This afternoon I went for a walk in the misting rain.

( You put your soul in a beggar's bowl. )

I am feeling especially scraped thin and valueless, but selkie sent me a bonanza of tinned fish, so that for dinner I had coconut curry sardines and olive-and-pepper mackerel, and spatch brought me home a bag of intensely tropical Hi-Chews as a surprise dessert, all of which made a nice change-up from my traditional habits of eating treyf sandwiches on matzah. I read Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (2021) on the recommendation of N. and enjoyed very much how it functions like a Heinleinian hard sf novel where a level head and a slide rule can solve all problems only without the slide rule or the level head. Georgette Heyer's A Blunt Instrument (1938) could have done without its obligatory inclusion of antisemitism, but I appreciate the romantic pairing of its long-lashed, willowy, deprecatingly vague hero and its blunt-spoken, crop-haired, monocle-wearing heroine. She writes novels and he was last seen wandering around the Balkans. They should have a great time in a different mystery. sholio has written most excellent B5 fic. I like the idea of the Odyssey having a moment.

We have just received notice in the mail that the concrete sidewalks of our street are going to spend the next week being replaced, thus explaining the sudden proliferation of no-parking flyers and the ear-juddering industrial noise around the corner to which I woke this afternoon. Adjacent streets will also be involved in this mishegos. After last year, I do not know if I can trust the official time estimate. I know the jokes about construction season, but I need to sleep ever again in my life.