ALL KINDS of mail coming in. Are you still there? You are? And not a word to say about MAGA dead-enders assaulting democracy at the incitement of the Oval Office?
D2 also inquired, on behalf of her friends who… monitor me, for some reason.
My return text to her: I try to stick mostly to the motorcycling. Not that I’ve had anything interesting to say about it since 2019. Haven’t been anywhere and probably won’t be until 2022. But yeah I’m hearing from readers wondering why the blog has been so dead lately. Good thing I got cancer, that gave me a few months worth of material.
I’m mostly busy taking care of little D1D2. We get out for two long walks a day, in all weathers. We go for miles and miles. She likes to visit the neighborhood ducks and geese and tell me how ducks go quack, geese go honk. She also does an adorable horse whinny.
I got a little pick axe work done on frozen ground. I’m locating the foundation holes for the new porches we’re going to build in the spring. When I’m sure these are exactly where I want them, I’ll start digging down. Code says the footings need to go 42 inches deep. I’ll aim for 60 since the piers will be buried in a slope. Frost penetrates from the side as well as the top.
The footing forms I’m going to use are on order. These I had under the shed. They’re not exactly the right size but close enough for the preliminary setup.
I’m equipping the iron piggy with new sneakers. Used the weight of the ’49 truck to break the beads on the old ones.
I didn’t think to get a picture, but thanks to static cling in the clothes dryer, I nearly left the house the other day with a pair of pink panties stuck to the back of my hoodie. How would that have gone over in public? Hard to say. Bragging, maybe?
She evicted me from the basement, by the way, despite the moratorium on evictions. Now she sits down here by the woodstove reading, and… I guess keeping me company.
I bang away at the keyboard and burn through books. I’m still trying to figure out how to write long-form fiction. I write and write and write and throw it all away and write again and throw that away, and read novels by the masters, and books and essays on the form itself, by writers, linguists, thinkers, critics… Too many to mention.
One recent morning—that early morning hour when it’s still dark, you hope it’s at least 5 and you can get up for the day—we’re just stirring and her first words are, I love you, even if you do look like George Clooney on the way out.
To be clear, she didn’t mean George Clooney. George Clooney cleans up nicely. She meant George Clooney’s character in The Midnight Sky. We had watched it the evening before on Netflix and had cracked up at how the more the actor goes to hell for a role, the more he looks like me.
Oh no, she says, poor George Clooney. I say yeah, how would you like to wake up next to that every day? Oh wait… you do.
A dark concept, this movie. It’s 2049, the world is ending, and George’s character is dying of cancer, alone, at an observatory on the Arctic Circle.
We watch and watch and I say look at this, he’s got to administer his own chemo. That sucks.
At least I keep my eyebrows mowed, look at his. She says, God, please don’t be that old man who can braid his eyebrows.
The ears, check out his ears. Do they need a shave?
She says the ears look okay but OMG, your foreheads! Your eyes and your foreheads!
Look, he’s got chemo-puke spittle on his lip, I say. Now that’s an attractive man right there. Who let a wino in the observatory?
Then we get onto his dark circles. I say those are makeup, at least mine are real. She says, no, I think they’re his.
And then the action switches from the observatory to a spaceship and she’s done with the movie, says I’m not interested anymore if it doesn’t have you in it.
Okay, that’s all I got, given that what the hell kind of a blogger am I.
I’ll give the Trump thing some thought. Second impeachment today, that’s quite a feather in his cap.
I did get a kick out of the sheer, comic shamelessness of Chao and DeVos, resigning “on principle” with two weeks to go. OMG, this is the guy?! We had no idea.
Tony DePaul, January 13, 2021, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
The fiction thing. I don’t do that. But a Bangor cop/detective has written a FB column for a couple of years about cop stuff. First under the Bangor PD banner, then his own musings under the Blauer banner. I don’t know how that works. But he just published a first book, with a follow up under contract. The first book is called The Detective in the Dooryard. His name is Tim Cotton. For a long while he wrote under TC, while wandering Bangor PD headquarters. He found a stuffed duck in a trash bin, tossed by a female civil servant. He rescued the duck, had it restored and put under a plastic cube. It is called THE DUCK of JUSTICE, and it has turned into a cult. “No Duck, No Justice.” People visit it from all over. And there are T-shirts and hoodies, decals and such. Tim found an angle…by luck. The duck. All the best.
Pam read it and dropped off her copy on my desk. I’m looking forward to it.
Is Sandy Phippen still around? I remember his The Police Know Everything from way back when. Published… oboy, maybe 40 years ago now? I think I interviewed him about it. Or maybe it was his People Trying To Be Good.
Funny, The Police Know Everything… I just remembered… Years ago I mentioned an anecdote from the book while making small talk with a cop in Oregon, he was probably running me out of some place where I wasn’t supposed to camp for the night (what else is new?) and it turned out he had relatives in Dover-Foxcroft and had spent time there, so he started quizzing me about Maine, verifying. And I said oh yeah yeah Piscataquis County nice town Dover-Foxcroft, been there many times. And you can tell when the cop standing there in the dark doesn’t think you’re a dangerous drifter on a motorcycle anymore, it’s like, there it is, finally took his hand off the backup piece inside his vest, haha…
Always enjoy your musings. I am not a writer but I am a lifelong reader and you are correct about short pieces and long pieces. If you are trying to write entertainment fiction, I suggest you read Thomas Perry, Pat Conroy, and Anne Rivers Siddons. They are great storytellers and Siddons is a master at language.
Hope to see you in Dawson City this June.
Thanks, Robert. I don’t know Siddons, I’ll follow up on the lead, much appreciated.
Dawson City! Alas… I expect to be here working on the house project, or maybe just getting in the way on it, but… you never know. Quite a few times now I’ve woken up in the morning planning to be here and the next thing I know I’m somewhere else.
Despite the meh reviews and similarities to other films,I found “The Midnight Sky” strangely effective in capturing the pandemic isolation.
We’re isolated while my wife finishes radiation therapy, surrounded by technology, helping each other as much as we can. We are making decisions now about follow up treatment and keeping busy, zooming with friends. I read your old blogs and enjoy the homey details of your current ones. We have made small changes to our tiny front porch so other couples can visit.
Keep writing the stories about family and books and films until we ALL can travel again.
I haven’t read any of the reviews, will take a look. It took me two watches to get through “The Midnight Sky.” Neil Diamond stopped me dead in my tracks on the first one. And the big reveal at the end was out of M. Night Shyamalan’s bag of tricks, which never really work, but… that said, it’s not the worst apocalypse/space/far-from-home movie I’ve ever seen. Might give it another chance one of these evenings.
Hang in there, Robert.
Okay, I watched it again. Same impression, basically. It’s flawed, but most movies are. It would be better if it lost about 19 minutes midway through: the two space-debris emergencies, the space walk, and the melodramatic death of Specialist Maya Peters. Lots of good things about it, otherwise.
The little girl is a delight! What a perfect casting decision. She carries off the role with just four words of dialogue, maybe the four most striking words spoken in the movie. She’s a natural talent.
Yes, Neil Diamond was the low point of the film.
There is an old SF film, “Silent Running” featuring Bruce Dern on a spaceship containing the last green life on Earth. The film featured a Joan Baez soundtrack of her songs which worked much better. Downer of a film but close to the truth, looking back on it.
Hey Tony, can’t wait until you can stop in and say hello on one of your walks to see the ducks. Hopefully you will still be walking by, not having D1D2 driving. Miss you and Pam.
… or D1D2 pushing my stroller.
Tony, how many porches do you have? If I remember correctly from pix, you have a beautiful, large one now. But this is an exciting project and just imagine all the cookouts you’ll have in the spring and all the days you’ll spend just sitting out there, enjoying it. And your daily walks with your little one- what a wonderful addition to your day. Ellie
Thanks, Ellie. I built the front porch many years ago. We basically live out there in nice weather. Have our meals there, coffee, reading… Now to add two on the back of the house. It’s the logical build-out with the house set into a hill as it is. They’ll both measure 12′ x 28′, one off the walk-out basement, the other above it off the first floor of the house.
Keep on truckin’ there George.
Gonna! Unless that jack pops out from under the truck and smacks poor George in the kisser.
Always good to read one of your postings. I find it amazing that you have the energy to do so many things – child care, digging footings, working on the bike, etc. Seems like nothing slows you down for long.
Digging: soil in your part of the state may be sandy but up in the northern section it’s all roots, rocks and clay. Digging a 42-60 inch hole would be quite difficult.
Treated lumber: yeah, it was real hard to find last fall – I’ve got unfinished back steps as a result of the shortage and unwillingness to go out more than absolutely needed.
Politics: motorcycles and daily life are so much more interesting.
Good luck on the writing.
Thanks, Dennis. Wish I had the beef to build these porches myself, that was always my intention. D2’s husband is a contractor, his crew will make it look easy.
Tony. Too much wear on the center and not enough on the sides! Need to get out there and lean her over to the chicken strips. Clooney would do it. Always enjoy hearing from you old friend I’ve never met.
Jeff
So true, the highway miles really flatten out the sneakers. These were done in by weathering, mostly. Before long I was going to be rubbing shoe polish into the cracks, like the guy on The World’s Fastest Indian.
I so much enjoyed reading this. Say hi to Pam, the light of your life.
Thanks, professor! I hope to hoist a Tusker or two with you in Nairobi one of these years.
Hey Tony,
That bit about George Clooney reads like humorous introspection, I love it! I am curious to know why you’re picking away at soil in the middle of winter, would it be easier in the spring? I, like others, anxiously await your reflections on the events of January 6, another day that should “go down in infamy”.
Good morning, Will. The subsoil’s sandy in the Ocean State, easy digging once you hack down through the loam. Just getting a head start. I wanted to build last spring but there were pandemic-related supply line issues. It was hard to find treated lumber around here.
Your blogs are relaxing and have a real feel-good feeling to them even in the darkest of times, for yourself and the things we are facing right now. A tip of the hat to you, sir. I gotta ask you, Tony, where did you find that old wonderful ’49 truck, and what kind of condition was she in when you found her? She was bright and beautiful at Christmas time. From the looks of the help with the wheels, the lady is a truck of many talents.
Bronson forever.
Thanks for reading, Terry. Here’s the story on the ’49 truck.
https://www.tonydepaul.net/the-1995-97-restoration/
Tony, do you get Chip Scanlan’s weekly piece on writing? (You must remember Chip from ProJo.) He almost always has some good tips on the writing process. Email him at chipscan@gmail.com to get on his mailing list.
Len
Thanks, Len, will do. Long-form fiction is a whole other cat, so different than every other form I’ve done, journalism, film scripts, comic scripts, blogging… My first manuscript, 140,000 words, head of the writing program at Brown said it’s a great story but it’s not art, you never took your reporter’s hat off. So I’ve spent the last two years getting an education from E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, Umberto Eco, Andrea Moro, John Gardner, James Wood, Steven Pinker, Francine Prose, etc., etc… Working on The Singularity of Literature now, by Derek Attridge.
Mike Manley, your colleague on “The Phantom” tells the story of his time at Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts” earning his painting certificate and MFA. His instructor and mentor, critiquing a canvas barks at him: “Dammit, Mike, don’t draw, PAINT!
Mike DID learn to paint–his two painting websites have his paintings; all are good and a few are amazingly so. You might want to talk to him about his experience and what it takes to make the change.
Manley’s experiences as an elder artist going back to school made for great reading. I wish the two of you would treat your blogs as low hanging fruit and rewrite them from a fresh perspective—great non-fiction reading.
I wasn’t aware of that tale by Mike, will look it up. The quote reminds me of a line in Renoir, which I think I saw on Kanopy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renoir_(film) The artist says it’s not the line that holds the painting together, it’s the color. And yes, there’s a parallel there to writing.
Mike’s talent in fine art is what makes him so good at comics. Just the other day I sent the link to his portfolio to a reporter friend of mine at the Boston Globe who paints. http://www.michaelcolemanley.com/
Always enjoy reading these, Tony. I’ve never really been a person who comments on blogs, but here we are. Stay strong, sir.
Thanks, Chris. Hi to Joe & Mary!
Funny blog, dad. Keep it up!
Depends on what George would do.