Tag: Josh Brolin

I Want to Be Free

Monday morning and back to the office. I didn’t want to get up this morning–not really a surprise there, after a holiday weekend–and even now as I sit here with my coffee and can feel my mind and body coming back to life, my body really wants to go back to bed. This week will be my first regular work week in a while–four days in the office and one at home–so I imagine I will be dragging come Thursday morning. I did get some more work on the apartment done yesterday–the difference in the apartment is actually pretty amazing–but had some fatigue. I made groceries in the morning and came home to just kind of collapse and relax. I went down some research holes on Youtube (Louisiana bridges; the story of how New Orleans’ bridges were built and funded should also be a book; some of the nation’s longest bridges are in Louisiana; the top three, in fact–the Causeway, Atchafalaya swamp basin, and Manchac swamp bridge–all are in the New Orleans area) and then scribbled the rest of the evening in my journal. We started watching an odd show called Outer Range with Josh Brolin and Lili Taylor, which is different and interesting and very well filmed, and then I went to bed early.

Today is also usually my Admin day but I am in clinic this morning and afternoon, so I kind of had let some things slide to do today but I also found out late Thursday that I would be in clinic, so I am very behind and will be trying to get caught up around clients all morning. I am also trying very hard not to get stressed about it–it is what it is and it will get done at some point–and I also have some emails to answer. And it’s fine; I’ll get everything done like I always do, and not going to let anything get to me today. I slept really well last night, and now I am waking up completely. (I love when my body shifts from “want to go back to sleep” to “waking up and feeling rested”.) I’m also trying to spend less time on social media–primarily because it isn’t fun any more, and hasn’t been in a long time; it’s just another habit that needs to be broken. I need to resist the urge to waste time there “just to check in” and spend that time more productively. The precipitous decline in emails that need to be answered has been delightful, even if it still catches me off-guard, as does the amount of free time I now have.

It occurred to me last night that I dealt with my stress of the last decade or so in about the same way that I always did in the past–by taking on too much of a load so I don’t have time to focus on being sad or worried about things or concerned. The primary problem with that is I’ve slowed down some, and can’t keep up the way I used to be able to do. So, in order not to face unpleasant realities and keep myself occupied I replaced worry and sadness with stress and overwork. This time I finally burned myself out in a way I had never experienced before–the COVID in the summer of 2022 that basically wiped my short term memory and left it permanently on the blink also didn’t help matters any, either. The last two years or so have been so much stress and depression and sadness and fear (the surgery terrified me, as did the recovery process) that my memory and brain couldn’t really recover, and I went back into strictly survival mode–“just get through the day/week/month”–and I am now finally coming out of it at long last, and it’s been so long since I’ve not been buried in work and projects and things that I am having a difficult (but nice) time getting acclimated to my life again.

I also am resisting the urge to say yes to everything because I have free time, and if I have free time that means I’m wasting time….it isn’t the best way to have your brain wired, really. I would much rather waste time than spend the rest of my life worried about running out of it, to be honest. But like I said, I really went into a deep dive on the book last night in my journal, getting to the heart and core of my main character and why the experiences he is about to have are going to happen and how it changes him, who he is going to become. I think that’s important, and it’s something I always forget when I am writing a non-series book; I don’t have to really go into a lot of detail about who Scotty and the boys are; and with a non-series book I have to remember it must be written differently and the plan has to be completely different. (I do worry that this is more busy-work to do so I don’t have to write, but that’s always going to be something I wonder about, and no, this was incredibly productive because I am starting to get a grasp on who my character is and what he wants and why he is where he is in his life…)

And on that note, I’d better start getting ready for work and my not-Admin day. Have a great one, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; one never knows. It depends on how busy we are and if I can get caught up on my work or not. We shall see.

Broken Promise

And here we are on Friday yet again. The nights this weekend are a return to the frigid climes of earlier this week, but the days promise highs in the 50s, at least, and it’s supposed to get back up into the 70’s next week…or so it said the last time I checked. I generally tend not to look at weather forecasts more than a few days out, primarily because New Orleans weather is completely unpredictable and defies expectations all the time. It feels chilly this morning–I’ve not checked the temperature yet–but the space heater is on, as always, and I am shivering a bit under my layers and considering going to get a blanket. The HVAC guys were here yesterday, but there’s still no heat and there’s also no sign of them outside this morning. Which is fine; I can huddle under blankets as I do my work-from-home duties this morning. Okay, I checked, and it’s thirty-five with a high of 48 predicted. Yikes! Sometimes, methinks, it’s better not to know some things.

The forecast for next week looks much better. It’s simply a matter of getting through this last blast over this weekend.

We finished watching season two of Mr. Mercedes last night, and it was…well, it was a bit disappointing. The season wound up diverging significantly from the book it was based on (End of Watch, the concluding book of Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy), and while the middle of the season was compelling and impossible to turn away from, the last two episodes, for me and Paul at least, significantly went off the rails. The third season starts airing on March 4, based on the second book of the trilogy, and we’ll watch because we really like the characters–and I think Book 2 was my favorite of the trilogy–but now It’s a Sin has dropped and so has something else we wanted to watch as well, but right now I can’t think of what that other show might be. Oh, yes, The Luminaries with Eva Green.

I also watched, while making condom packs yesterday, the original film version of The Amityville Horror, which fits into both the Cynical 70’s Film Festival as well as the Halloween Horror Film Festival. I actually saw this movie in the theater when it was released all those years ago, and just like then, I found it unimpressive, not particularly scary, and farfetched. I had read the book, of course–I think I bought it off the wire racks at the Safeway in Emporia on 6th Street–but the book wasn’t very well written and the story–theoretically something that actually happened–wasn’t convincing and, I thought, pretty poorly written (and I wasn’t a particularly discerning reader back then, either). It was, however, a phenomenon; a huge bestseller and the movie also made a ton of money, spawning numerous cheesy sequels (none of which I watched). Horror made a big comeback as a genre in the 1970’s; it could even be seen as a “golden age”–there was a glut of films and movies in that decade, and the demand didn’t taper off until the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. Amityville was a big part of that–following The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and Carrie; it was the decade when both Stephen King and Peter Straub’s careers are writers took off, and there were a lot of books published….a LOT. (I do highly recommend Grady Hendrix definitive Paperbacks from Hell–it will trigger a lot of memories for you if this was a period when you were actually alive…it certainly did for me.) But the movie is still bad, after all these years–James Brolin was certainly handsome, coming off his years on Marcus Welby and before he spent the 80’s managing Arthur Hailey’s Hotel on ABC. (Although I couldn’t help thinking, “wow, of someone would have told me back then Brolin would marry Barbra Streisand and live happily ever after and his son Josh would become a major star, I would have laughed and laughed and laughed.”) Margot Kidder plays his wife, Kathy, and this is the best, I think, she’s ever looked on film–they are a handsome couple and have some chemistry together, even though both performances eventually descend into one note, repeated over and over again. Rod Steiger also has a supporting role to which he brings all his Method bombast in a role that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, nor does what happens to him. The movie’s end, like the book’s, explains nothing other than the family abandoned the house and never returned. (Of course, the house has changed hands with people living in it for decades and none of them have experienced anything the Lutzes claim to have. Even cynical teenager me, when reading the book, thought, oh, you bought a house you couldn’t afford and dreamed up a crazy story to try to get out of the mortgage..the movie only convinced me further that I was correct in my theory. I looked it up on line, and the lawyer for the kid who murdered his family in the house later admitted he and the Lutzes, “over many bottles of wine”, came up with the story…to not only get them out of the mortgage but to try to get his client a new trial. The Lutzes still claim it all really happened. *insert ‘sure Jan’ GIF here*)

I think I bought another copy of the book several years ago–still in print all these years later!–to reread and see if it was as bad, if not worse, than I remembered. I have yet to get around to it…but watching the movie made me think I need to reconsider that urge to reread it.

But the 1970’s were, as I have said before, a weird decade of transition and change. Conspiracy theories were running rampant everywhere about everything–the JFK assassination in particular was talked about and theorized about a lot–but this was also the decade of the Bermuda Triangle, when UFO’s really became a topic of discussion, when The Late Great Planet Earth truly began shifting certain sects of Christianity into doomsday prophecy and end-times philosophy, and of course, we cannot forget the existential threat of Communism that had some people seeing Russian agents everywhere and there was the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation.

Although there are times, too, when I think about the 1970’s as the last gasp of American naiveté and innocence. The one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate made everyone start distrusting the government…and HIV/AIDS was just around the corner.

Hmmm. Some pretty heavy thoughts on a shiveringly cold Friday morning in New Orleans.

And now back to the spice mines. Stay warm, everyone, and stay safe.