Hagerstown!

 

Spent an afternoon in Hagerstown checking out Hub City Vinyl.  Most people know the town for the nearby Civil War battlefield of Antietam.

Highlights: french fries and Led Zeppelin pinball.

"warm and thick and poisoned with human breath"

"In the trees of the Old Steyne the fairy lights were switched on; it was too early, their pale colours didn't show in the last of the day.  The long tunnel under the parade was the noisiest, lowest, cheapest section of Brighton's amusements: children rushed past them in paper sailor caps marking 'I'm No Angel'; a ghost train rattled by carrying courting couples into a squealing and shrieking darkness.  All the way along the landward side of the tunnel were the amusements; on the other little shops: Magpie Ices, Photoweigh, Shellfish, Rock.  The shelves rose to the celling; little doors let you into the obscurity behind, and on the sea side there were no doors at all, no windows, nothing but shelf after shelf from the pebbles to the roof, a breakwater of Brighton rock facing the sea.  The lights were always on in the tunnel; the air was warm and thick and poisoned with human breath."

-- Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

The Last of Us (with minor spoilers)

I finally got around to watching The Last of Us, and I really enjoyed it.  At nine episodes it managed to fill out some back stories to greater and lesser successes.  Did we need more Bill?  Sure, why not.  Did we need more Jakarta?  No, not really.

I guess I was left feeling that a really good two hour movie could have been made as well, one that would have outshined a nine-part series and brought home the point that Joel acted selfishly, but also relatably.

That's not hating, just wondering if an already baggy video game needed an equally baggy series to boot.

"pure and impenetrable as fine jade"

"The farther out one looked, the darker the color of the water, until it finally became a deep blue-green.  It was as if the innocuous ingredients of the offshore water became more and more condensed by the increasing pressure of the water as it got deeper, its green intensified over and over again to produce an eternal blue-green substance, pure and impenetrable as fine jade, that extended to the horizon.  Though the sea might seem vast and deep, this substance was the very stuff of the ocean.  Something that was crystallized into blue beyond the shallow, frivolous overlapping of the waves -- that was the sea."

-- Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

Saturday Night Mandu

 

Throwing Myself Out There

Job searching is never very fun, but I've got an interview for something next week.

Meanwhile, at the risk of jinxing, the Orioles seem to be for real with 30 games left in the season.

I've started and am planning to finish Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility series, maybe because I'm a masochist, maybe because late Meiji Era Japan is my jam, who knows.

"with too many clothes on, sweating a little"

"The young men and women walked round and round the plaza in the hot electric night, the men one way, the girls another, never speaking to each other.  In the northern sky the lightning flapped.  It was like a religious ceremony which had lost all meaning, but at which they still wore their best clothes.  Sometimes a group of older women would join in the procession with a little more excitement and laughter, as if they retained some memory of how things used to go before all the books were lost.  A man with a gun on his hip watched from the Treasury steps, and a small withered soldier sat by the prison door with a gun between his knees and the shadows of the palms pointed at him like a zareba of sabres.  Lights were burning in a dentist's window, shining on the swivel chair and the red plush cushions and the glass for rinsing on its little stand and the child's chest-of-drawers full of fittings.  Behind the wire-netted windows of the private houses grandmothers swung back and forth in rocking-chairs, among the family photographs -- nothing to do, nothing to say, with too many clothes on, sweating a little.  This was the capital city of a state."

-- Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

An Actual Update

Me and my Dad are living together again, in lovely Frederick, Maryland.  We tried a nursing home for almost a year and it wasn't working out.  He was bored and listless.  He had a few friends, but not many.  The staff was fine -- no lashings with wet noodles or anything, but also not enough one-on-one care, more than they could possibly provide.

Also, the place was damn expensive.

So we're trying something new.  We've got a nurse coming in five days a week.

It's good.  It's tough.  I'm looking for full-time work now, and when I find something it means we'll probably have to hire another nurse to come in.  I finished up a summer part-time job last week doing job counseling for high school kids, and it was actually kind of fun.

My cats are raising hell.  They'll both turn one this October.  We don't know their actual days of birth since they were abandoned, so close enough.

My Dad turns 95 this February.

Brexit Was / Is / Remains A Self-Inflicted Disaster

Blogging has been minimal.  Political blogging even more so (We're doomed!).

That said, here's an article on how the clusterfuck that is Brexit (British politics even!) killed off something of a Renaissance in British beer making:

"Bone Machine is one of more than 100 small brewers that have been forced out of business in the past 18 months, hit by a combination of Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis and now threatened by changes to beer duty laws. In June, the accountancy firm Mazars found that 45 small brewers had gone into liquidation, but many more have either been sold or swallowed by rivals."

Let's give Conservative ideology its due -- unnecessary taxes and tariffs really can destroy a fledgling business!  Dozens of 'em, even!

"What was gourmet about it, I couldn't tell you."

"We went into a fast food joint.  It proclaimed itself a 'Gourmet Soupery.'  What was gourmet about it, I couldn't tell you.  I got a little dizzy when I tried to lift the tray with our two bowls on it.  Despite chiding HIM about HIS diet earlier, I realized I hadn't eaten anything since yesterday myself.  They were saying on the news that more and more young people were forgetting to eat, starving to death.

'This feels kind of embarrassing somehow,' I said as I picked up my spoon.

'Uh-huh.' HE nodded.

'I've never eaten with someone else before.'

'Me neither.'

We ate sitting side by side gazing at the video screen.  It's so hard to relax without something to look at.  The screen was showing a sunset over some southern island.  The camera didn't move, so it was pretty much like an ultravista.  Once the sun had sunk fully behind the horizon, the programme changed to Top Forty This Week.  That restaurant chain's catchphrase is 'Brand new videos, guaranteed.'"

-- Izumi Suzuki, "Terminal Boredom"

Chingu The Cat