The Friday Article Roundup
We continue the year of magical thinking about the best pop culture writing of the week.
This Week We’ve Got:
Thanks to Dave for contributing this week! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Vulture‘s Christopher Bonanos takes a glance at the newly released Joan Didion Archives:
Possibly the funniest document in the archive: a school essay about pet peeves Didion wrote shortly before her 16th birthday, one in which her arch tone is already on full display. “It is extremely difficult for me to pick a specific thing I dislike in people. I dislike everything about them, especially at eight-thirty in the morning. However, after giving it considerable thought, I have come to the conclusion that I dislike people who can play the ukulele.”
At The Baffler, Malcolm Harris critically reviews Ezra Klein’s book in praise of Abundance:
It’s one thing to advocate for class compromise, but another to exclude discussion of class conflict altogether. …Abundance is the prefab, catch-all alternative to these forms of scarcity-thinking on “both the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right.” Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace.
At her substack Jackass World, Caro Alt considers Jason Isbell and Johnny Knoxville as avatars of the Southern thing:
While it might seem like just a TV show compiling the Biggest Assholes You Know lighting their heads on fire or barfing on each other, it’s literally Knoxville’s way of connecting to his father. Which brings me to the “Decoration Day” of it all. Much like the narrator of the song, Isbell’s interpretation of a grieving and vengeful Calvin Lawson, Knoxville is living up to the big personality of his father — embroiled in this bizarre pranking ritual because it’s the environment he grew up in.
Adam Nayman uses Megalopolis as a jumping-off point for considering what you want to hear and see before you die at Big Toe Magazine:
I do not know what song I want to die to: maybe “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” which is about the ironic joy of beating the system, such as it is, and not dying alone (to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die), or “Our Life it Not a Movie or Maybe” (self explanatory). …The movie I’d probably want to watch on my deathbed, à la Edward G. Robinson in the “thanatorium” sequence from Richard Fleischer’s dystopian Soylent Green (1973)—a painless expiration surrounded by video screens projecting nature footage beneath classical music—is, predictably for anyone who knows me, Don’t Look Now (also 1973). Beneath its occultish trappings and modish and decadent sense of dread—Nicolas Roeg’s peerless specialty, and my personal aesthetic sweet spot—is an instruction manual about coming to terms with the inevitable.
And in the Reliably Delightful People department, The Bitter Southerner‘s Nic Brown follows Michael Shannon behind the scenes of his R.E.M. cover band:
Shannon is a fan of rock ’n’ roll bands, though, and it’s one of the reasons he’s managed to avoid the usual actor-as-musician pitfalls, because by celebrating the work of others instead of just shining the spotlight back on himself, Shannon has found a way to serve as an avatar for us all. He’s a movie star, yes, but also a music lover, and he’s inviting everyone to the party. “I mean, basically what we’re doing is glorified karaoke,” Shannon says, “and karaoke is, you know, on the one hand kind of an embarrassing ridiculous thing. But on the other hand, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful, moving thing that allows anybody, literally anybody, to go up on stage and sing a song that they love and sing it with as much passion or however the hell they want to sing it.”
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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The Friday Article Roundup
An assembly line of this week's pop culture writing from around the Internet.
Lunch Links
State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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The Friday Article Roundup
A catty roundup of great pop culture writing from the past week.
Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Empire of the Sun – the last of the “early” Spielberg films I had left to see, although I haven’t seen Schindler’s List since the 90s so I’m not sure that even counts any more. This one was interesting – I found myself wowed by the scale of it, there are some incredible sets, huge crowd scenes, stuff with planes and tanks. But I feel like maybe I was appreciating the technical stuff and craft more than I ever really got sucked into the story – like The Color Purple it feels like there is some stuff that is a little off here, tonally. The performances are good (tiny Christian Bale is a very compelling presence, and I love that the movie is not afraid of letting people get fed up with his personality) but there are lighthearted scenes that fit a little awkwardly into the horrors-of-war stuff, a difficult trick to pull off and I’m not sure Spielberg was quite there yet in terms of mixing the light and dark. I still felt moved by the ending though and it really moves for a fairly long film.
Babylon 5, Season One, Episode Three, “The Geometry of Shadows”
A weak episode for different reasons than normal – things should be moving at this point, but the only real plot developments are Ivanova getting promoted and Garibaldi returning to his position, and the former happens at the start with little payoff and the latter happens at the end after a lot of moping (and is a return to the status quo to boot). The real purpose of this episode is commentary; Londo has a story about trying to get an endorsement from a technomage that climaxes in him getting a condemnation from him (that is admittedly cool “Millions of people crying out your name.” / “My followers?” / “Your victims.”). Ivanova’s first responsibility as Commander is her being given responsibility for a society right out of the worst Star Trek episodes.
Still, there’s things to enjoy. Vyr ends up with a scene in which he reveals his meek surface doesn’t cover but in fact is an expression of bravery. More generally, I was thinking about Dave Shutton’s disdain for the show’s dorky style compared to my own affection for it; there’s a cutesy moment where Sheridan gives a playful little speech downplaying Ivanova’s promotion that is the kind of thing I enjoy, and I could listen to Londo talk all damn day.
Hey! I don’t think it’s disdain and there is a lot of charm in the aesthetic for me — it’s more of a general disappointment with missed opportunities. The most recent one (see below) was a lot better in this regard.
Understood! Some of your initial criticisms sparked my thought process on the show’s aesthetic in general; I realise now stuff you were pointing out is really your consistent distaste for bullshit, which I think the show indulges in a little bit. I love bullshitting when it’s funny and knowing.
I think some of this is the show still developing; as it gets a stronger sense of itself I am more open to its bullshitting within its form, as opposed to relying on that as the form because it’s the cliche to fall back on. The all-time example of this is whenever Lance Reddick would get mad at the Fringe team (or the Wire crew, for that matter): “My office!” A total cliche but the delivery delights in it and its deployment.
Severance, “Defiant Jazz” and “What’s for Dinner?”
This rewatch is currently suffering from me watching it too close to The Shield. I loved all this the first time through! I remember that! And it’s not the pacing that bothers me now–honestly, things are moving along at a reasonable clip (we’ve gone from “initially disrupted status quo” to “burn this place to the ground” defiance and a jailbreak in under ten episodes, after all). It’s the way the plotting is occasionally fudged in ways that don’t make sense (Graner’s key card is untraceable just for the innies’ convenience, and Lumon knows he’s been murdered but, despite all their secrecy, it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that his incredibly valuable access to their facility could be on the open market now and should probably be shut down; also the surveillance here is calibrated precisely to “this will occasionally inconvenient our characters but somehow not stop them from plotting the revolution, despite the fact that they don’t even know where all the cameras are”).
Even more than that, though, it’s that making (some of) the characters’ motivations as mysterious as their world doesn’t work for me. I don’t need all the answers about Lumon and severance: I like being in the characters’ shoes as I’m trying to figure that out. Helly’s outie’s identity is a fantastically handled surprise, and doing it this way makes sense: we’re following innie Helly, who doesn’t know who she is in the “real” world either. But Cobel is a main character, and we spend plenty of time with her outside of how she appears to the innies. I don’t know what value comes from not knowing what she wants to achieve with Mark and Ms. Casey or why she’s tracking Mark outside of Lumon. That mystery doesn’t feel intriguing, it feels pointless–and unlike the mysteries the characters are also involved in and trying to unravel, it feels like it’s purely for me, the viewer, which makes me freshly conscious of the artifice of it all. It’s more distancing than involving. So even as the story moves forward, these sections feel like stalling, because they lessen the emotional connection to the material.
Anyway. I don’t want to be entirely negative–again, I loved this the first time through, and I’m still enjoying it now. It still achieves one of my most important TV aims: I care about these people and want to see what’s going to happen to them. Highlights of these two episodes include the defiant jazz dance party (A+ Milchick, no notes) and Dylan’s absolutely feral freakout, the gift Dylan requests for the waffle party, Burt’s outie’s retirement video where he’s both genuinely sweet and also hilarious in constantly coming back to the fact that he has no idea who any of these people are, Mark’s conversation with Ms. Casey and the brittle sadness of her talking about only being “part-time” and therefore having so much less experience even being alive than he does, the weirdness of the waffle party, the run-up to the overtime contingency plan, and Irving joining the revolution.
Pray for Death
If you haven’t seen this, and you are at all interested in ninja movies or ’80s action schlock, WATCH THIS NOW. It’s going to leave Tubi before I can write it up for Streaming Shuffle, but I’m hoping it surfaces somewhere else. If it does, you’ll read about it next week. If not, I’ll stick more on it in a comment somewhere. For now, I’ll just say that until this point, I always assumed I had to choose between ninjas and chainsaws. No longer!
*scrunch-faced sobbing* you had me at “Pray For Death.”
The Shooting – A mysterious woman – The Woman with No Name, in essence – hires a bounty hunter turned miner and his somewhat dull witted partner to accompany her across the desert, only it turns into a manhunt. Filmed on a tiny budget and funded silently by Roger Corman, this “acid Western” directed by Monte Hellman manages to hold together on the strength of Hellman’s use and subversion of Old West tropes, including some wonderful desert scenery, and Warren Oates’s performance as the former bounty hunter. Jack Nicholson (also a co-producer) plays a slightly foppish and totally cold gunslinger and is okay. Millie Perkins is the mysterious woman and is passable.
Kojak, “On the Edge” – An aging detective, recently suspended for using excessive pressure and in a troubled marriage, obsesses over a case in the desperate hope this rescues his reputation. A somewhat messy plot, but Forrest Tucker, not someone I tend to think of as a dramatic actor, is really good as the disintegrating detective. I see hints this one is channeling Art Carney in The Late Show, though the 70s was the age of aging detectives with Barnaby Jones and Cannon on TV as well. Also featuring Malachi Throne and Danny Wells, who played Luigi opposite Lou Albano’s Mario on the Super Mario Brothers kiddie show.
The 1st season of Kojak features intense younger actors, Harvey Keitel and Richard Jordan (who played the manipulative federal agent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle). Also these two episodes mark a didactic shift from copaganda to “crime doesn’t pay” (someone in your crew is gonna fuck up).
While there are elements of copaganda of course, overall the show offers at least some shades of gray, as befits pretty much any cop show or movie from the 70s. “Hooray for our side” is fairly muted next to the sort of things we see in the present on network TV.
Great weird western. There is a second Nicholson and Hellman western, Ride the Whirlwind.
Babylon 5 — hey, good stuff! A genocidal war criminal comes aboard with something incredibly valuable and the station’s various factions are at cross purposes trying to weigh justice and advantage, this is the first time the agendas of larger groups really feel at play in unresovable ways. They are resolved in a “this is TV” way and that is foreseeable, the specifics are handled very well as a player who has mostly been on the bench gets a big moment. It appears the Space Jehovah’s Witness episode is up next…
Extreme Measures (Said in George’s Prognosis Negative voice) – Gene Hackman has a God complex and Hugh Grant is on the moral side in this medical thriller. It’s the oft asked moral conundrum of, would you kill in the name of medicine? Grant is very good in a serious role, which all these years later still feels kind of novel for him to be doing. He acts feverishly trying to find missing bodies, deleted records and unravel the mystery of secret human testing. Hackman is great as the misunderstood idealist who’s noble intentions are corrupt. He’s a mad scientist ultimately spouting monologues about ethics and morality. Lots of leaps in logic. But a movie with David Morse and J.K. Simmons being shady can’t be all that bad.
Abbott Elementary, “Music Class”
Barbara’s frustrated with music class when the kids don’t seem interested in learning what she has to teach and only wanting to go viral. Gregory is finding himself a bit in over his head in his own new role. Janine decides to rally for Ava and… maybe Ava doesn’t need to? I pretty much enjoyed this one. I am keeping the plot details sketchy due to some major recent Happenings on the show.
Mythic Quest, “Heaven and Hell”
Well… that was the season, all right. I think it’s safely MQ’s weakest yet, although it did have at least one really good episode and some really good moments. But as an overall story it felt way more disjointed than usual and way more disconnected from the actual action at MQ. And the characters haven’t always been serviced well– Dana’s change in personality feels just plain weird. Still, though, we had some laughs along the way. I’ll leave it to other people to debate thoughts on the closing moments.
A bit of Sweet Sixteen action
Goddamn it, Arkansas.
**The Return** – I loved this adaptation of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. It felt very much in keeping with the tradition of Greek dramas as therapeutic tools to help the audience process traumatic events. In this instance, Odysseus coming home broken by the violence of the past two decades and his part in it, only to find that the situation at home requires more of the same. There are so many interesting tensions explored (with a lot of really excellent face acting).
Some of those left behind resent that it was violence and war that led Odysseus to go away, but now expect him to deploy that violence on the suitors as a matter of course and are clearly offended by his reluctance. In another scene there is an encounter between him (while still disguised) and Penelope in which you can feel the agony in Penelope’s voice as she reflects on the fact that she has sacrificed years and the health of the kingdom to her love for the husband who left, and is now confronting the idea that not only may he be dead and never coming back, but that the husband she has done this for perhaps never existed. Telemachus is wrestling with his own identity having grown up without a father, feeling his lack of actual power in line with his status, and emasculated by his mother’s protection.
When it comes to the inevitable massacre, I like the detail that Odysseus asks Penelope if this is what she wants before he begins, and that Penelope is then horrified by the carnage. Then add the detail that Telemachus gets his graduation to manhood by executing the final suitor (the one who was in this for love of Penelope rather than the power) in open defiance of his mother’s plea for mercy.
The final scene with Penelope and Odysseus hit me particularly hard in its view of dealing with trauma within a relationship, contrasting the idea of simply burying the past trauma within yourself (what Odysseus wants to do) with what Penelope insists on – that he will share his story with her, and she will share hers with him, and then they will “forget” together.
Keen to hear what other people think of this when/if they see it.
What Did We Read?
I finished the second “story” in Monday Begins on Saturday (it’s divided into three parts for some reason despite being one ongoing narrative) which unfortunately I found to be a bit of a slog, just an endless parade of zany goings-on. I was far more into the first part so I’m curious to see if it can win me back over.
”The Statement Of Randolph Carter”, HP Lovecraft
This is solid early Lovecraft, and arguably another one that lays the groundwork for his later work – it comes off barebones when you’ve read something like “The Rats In The Walls”, which takes the basic concept of a subterranean dive and riffs on it much more imaginatively and with greater thematic depth, but it’s a functional short horror story; like a college student getting the hang of actually exploring a place before doing it on their own in a foreign country. I deeply enjoy how Lovecraft initially immerses us in the story with – by his standards – downright casually delivered exposition.
There are two elements that I think make this hold up on its own, independent of its later influences. The first is the canny detail that Warren tells Carter to abandon him and close the slab; on one level, it’s charmingly heroic to have a guy sacrifice himself for his friend. More importantly, though, it enhances the horror in that Warren has realised he’s already dead no matter what he does. The concept of knowing your own violent, gruesome death is coming is a horrifying one.
The second is the ending. Now, I’ve never hallucinated in my life and I find the idea of suddenly hearing voices a disturbing one, so it plays off my fears in particular. Lovecraft’s elaborate description works with it particularly well; I can vividly hear in my head how it sounds, and the very particular intelligence implied by the final sentence is enough to spook me.
Working on One Summer by Bill Bryson, a popular history of the major and minor events of Summer 1927. Things we remember like Lindbergh and Babe Ruth, things we forgot like massive flooding in the midwest and someone blowing up a school in rural Michigan (yes, this is not just a 21st century thing). Bryson is a very good writer, and is not afraid to call out foolishness and fraud – he is especially unimpressed by Herbert Hoover even before the Depression, and is carefully foreshadowing what a turd Lindbergh will be by WWII. I am sure there are more serious works about many of these subjects (though I think a scholarly work on Babe Ruth would be strange), but as a popular history this is okay so far.
Bad Night, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips — the fourth Criminal book and indebted to Jim Thompson and in a very weird way Dick Tracy, I don’t think it fully lands story-wise but Phillips’ art is fantastic, using shading and angle to capture all aspects of the shall we say multilayered protagonist.
God’s Pocket, by Pete Dexter — Dexter was a Philly journalist who at one point got the shit kicked out of him because of a column he wrote about a guy killed in the neighborhood of *checks notes* Devil’s Pocket; something similar happens to a journalist here after a real fucking turd of a dude gets killed and his death becomes a fetish for townie tribalism. The main character is the dude’s stepfather, an outsider to the neighborhood and a passive guy, he gets put through the wringer (not without turning a few cranks of stupidity himself) before fucking on out of there; he’s probably the only person here Dexter doesn’t dislike. That very much includes his journalist, not quite an analogue to himself but a washed-up hack whose dreams are pathetic, mirroring the desperation of the Pocket schlubs he condescends to. There is some black humor here and the Mob (the blowing up of the Chicken Man is a crucial bit of backstory) is ruthlessly mocked and beaten up, but is still a threat and part of the town’s overall oppressive air. Dexter’s writing is Hemingway-influenced but not slavishly so, simple and direct, but the miserabilism here doesn’t have the edge of George V. Higgins’ work, Higgins was a lawyer but had a sense of his blue-collar characters’ desires that Dexter can’t see for their parochialism — when that hits it hits hard but often there isn’t more than that. A decent read but I’m not about to look for more Dexter; I will rewatch the movie based on this because I remember it being pretty good and more pared-down.
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The novel, if you can truly call it a novel, follows the history of the Buendia family and the village of Macondo over the course of a bit more than a century and a little bit more than 6 generations. There’s simply too much plot to recap succinctly, but roughly: the Buendia family, and a few other families, first establish Macondo as an isolated semi-utopic community in the 19th century. The village and the family broadly the course of Colombian history through ~1920ish, experiencing cycles of creative energy and decay until the cycle itself breaks down.
The “solitude” of the title is at times “autonomy” or “independence” and at times a profound loneliness and isolation, both affective and spiritual.
This is famously a work of magical realism. The unusual and magical are described in a perfectly frank, unmagical way. Things happen and they keep happening.
Likewise, as the history of the family is chronicalled the protagonists change. And they keep changing, but their agency is limited. They march dutifully towards their fates. (In fact, this might just be because I’ve coincidentally been thinking about the volsungsaga after watching the ring opera, but it has more in common with a premodern form like the volsungsaga. (there is even a lost horde of gold)) The cycles of creativity and destruction, or creativity and spent creativity, are at the forefront of the narrative, as the family cyclically repeats names and cyclically fall into similar patterns (more significantly, colonel Aureliano spends decades making, destroying, and remaking little golden fishes).
There’s a long Jameson essay on the book. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n12/fredric-jameson/no-magic-no-metaphor
The stylistic charm here is in the absolute concentration on what’s before the writer and the reader. Things happen and if those things do have a metaphorical or transcendent dimension the text doesn’t care. Events in the outside world impinge on the narrative and vice-versa, but they only matter when they connect. This intense concentration necessitates intense forgetting. You have blinders for everything you’re not focused on, and then you are suddenly reminded 200 pages later so and so is still alive, just in a self-imposed and narrative-imposed oubliette.
The repetition of names is annoying for the reader. I’m sure was annoying for Garcia Marquez too. But it’s thematically important for the cycles.
Eventually the cycles break. Like playing jenga with ice cubes, you can only create and destroy so much before the whole thing is spent. You take the wheel of fortune or the eternal recurrence or ragnarok or samsara you never oil the wheel and then the axel breaks.
Anyway, great book, masterpiece of 20th c. lit, easy-ish to read in that it’s anecdotal and propulsive but then repetitive.
Also it’s open to a marxist reading.
The Opportunist: John Howard and the Politics of Reaction – an essay from 2001 by Guy Rundle, written during a major inflection point in Australia’s political and social trajectory. The quote highlighted in the FAR from the Ezra Klein review touches on a central theme of the essay: “refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace”. Rundle’s way of describing conservative reactionary politics is as an almost sociopathically compartmentalised way of thinking, in that it insists on the fiction that economic policy is not also social policy (and vice versa), and that fetishises idealised fantasies of family/community/society while enacting policy that actively makes these harder to achieve.
He also makes some really interesting points about how the origins of our two major parties inform fundamental differences in their philosophy of government. First, that while the Labor party arose naturally out of labour organising and unions, for the purpose of achieving economic changes that impacted daily life, the Liberal Party came into being post-WWII as a party for which the main pathway to association was not via practical affiliations linked to specific economic circumstances (e.g., union membership, property ownership), but rather was open to self-determination based on feelings about circumstances. Rather like the “silent majority” of the US, the founder of the Liberal Party staked their position for “the forgotten people”. This abstraction present in its very founding facilitates the compartmentalisation of economy from society, and the tendency to frame concepts around societal structures as having some kind of naturally occurring and immutable true form, rather than dynamic and adaptable and resulting from circumstances and decisions made in the past.
There is much more in the full essay touching on issues of socialisation and isolation, impacts of transformation from industrial to information economy, philosophies of leadership – it’s fascinating and depressing that these essays and events from almost 25 years ago feel incredibly relevant today.
Link to essay if anyone is interested: https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2001/10/the-opportunist
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 18th: Cameron Ward: The Mummy
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
And here’s how we’re wrapping up Silent Era Month!
Mar. 30th: Lauren James: The Well of Loneliness
Mar. 31st: John Anderson: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Busy day today, will check in later.
Made a rare trip to the office and to the island Manhattan Tuesday. I tried to avoid the subway (not because of mythical criminals but just to avoid crowds who could give me a virus) by taking the LIRR, but wouldn’t you know it, the train was cancelled and I ended up on the subway anyway. I have not missed the commute, but I do miss the city. I took a walk at lunch, and then walked across to meet my wife and ride the express bus home with her. There is still nothing in my life like the energy of the big city. Though that walk took more out of me than it used to. I was once a master long distance walker. In middle age, my limit before needed to sit is lower.
One reason I was at the office is that there was a retirement party for someone who’s been there over 50 years. I didn’t get to work with her much, but she seems like a good coworker and from what I can tell, she has been a positive force for the organization. I also saw a huge number of people I have never interacted with, and probably never will as long as WFH endures. I can’t say this upsets me – I get my job done and I am not much for office socializing – but it is interesting to see how big the staff is, and also how young and diverse.
But it’s not all fun and games. I was in quite a funk yesterday over a) the evil doge and pony show that raked the heads of NPR and PBS over MAGA coals; and b) an article in the public media industry’s magazine by a supposed supporter who actually isn’t a fan of public media getting government money even though he is anti-MAGA. The former is a wake-up call that we should stop fooling ourselves that funding will last much longer (which I feel my bosses have been loathe to admit). The latter was just a kick in the shins from some self-declared expert who is okay with relying on, among other things, advertising. I so wished there were a place to talk to colleagues from the industry anonymously but openly about everything, but there isn’t such a thing. (The industry magazine allows comments, but no one ever does.) The whole thing is dismaying in new ways now.
And lastly, my father in law visited for a couple of days, and showed us how much weight he lost. Which was not on purpose. Turns out that the stress of getting a pacemaker was greater than he told us, or that we could really see on video chat. Indeed, he only admitted to us now that it was a very near thing when they installed the pacemaker. Sort of disconcerting to realize this. He seems okay, but he has long played his health issues close to the vest. At least I can say he’s still up to travel.
Finally getting some good spring weather, trying to turn the associated boost in energy and mood in positive directions and get into more of a regular exercise regime, which is going OK so far (translation: everything hurts, but I’m sticking with it). Had so many weird health issues and so much anxiety lately, maybe getting fitter can help with both? I guess it can’t hurt, anyway.
I’ve been going through a lot, which sounds like something I could’ve written every week for the last 18 months. Some of you know what it is. But we’re trying to move onward and through it.
Anyway, I’m having wrist surgery on Tuesday so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a few days.