My Last Day as 64

When I was waiting for the bus yesterday morning, I remembered that I had not made it to the Sheriff's for my SORNA check in. I had hurt too much on Tuesday to remember it. 

I made it there after work. That had me getting the #2 downtown, to Merchants Bank for the government's $45, then to Ivy Tech's Chesterfield's restaurant when I bought an excellent grilled Reuben. Then it was 1 PM bus out to the jail. Oh, was my back acting up! I caught the 2:30 bus back downtown, and walked over to Open Door for my chiropractor appointment. Then I walked home.

For two hours I tried to stay awake, fixing a dinner of mushroom macaroni and cheese, but the fight was over before 7 PM. I slept until 2 AM this morning.

I am no longer 64, but 65. No longer do I need to worry about being loved.

 

I cleared out some article that I had left from yesterday. Only Djuna Barnes’s Playthings by Missouri Williams (The Nation)

At their best, the stories make a serious demand of their reader, which is something rare and special. When met with drives that seem to have no origin and actions that appear incomprehensible, you have to read between the lines, surmise, guess at meaning. There’s a line I returned to in “Aller et Retour” where the narrative voice describes “the lane of flowering trees with their perfumed cups, the moss that leaded the broken paving stones, the hot musky air, the incessant rustling wings of unseen birds––all ran together in a tangle of singing textures, light and dark.” It’s a line that makes me think of reading. It’s your job to untangle light from dark, to figure it all out. And that aside, it’s worth making the effort with this collection, even if just for the strength of certain images. There are arresting moments, as when Madame von Bartmann wanders through Marseille at night and observes the city’s prostitutes, “full-busted sirens with sly cogged eyes.” It’s hard to decipher what “cogged” means in this context, but it compounds the force of “sly” while evoking the same mindless, mechanical intensity ascribed to other women in the collection, with the cogs whirring in their brains and bodies as they make their calculations and act upon them. In “Dusie,” the movements of the story’s namesake are “like vines growing over a ruin,” and the source of her mysterious charm is that “something in her grew and died for her alone.”

 I read about Barnes while in prison, then I read her since I got to Muncie (and wrote about her here), and I think she is worth reading, if nothing else for keeping a writer's work alive.

That is all I thought worth reading and posting about. Mostly, I started on drafting my prison journal onto this blog. I decided that I might as well get them typed up and wait on publishing them. I still need to get the last of the pretrial detention notes on here. Which means I need to find them!

In the background, I have been playing YouTube videos. These are the ones I want to share:

 Dropkick Murphys Documentary "This Machine Rising":

 The Great American Novel Series: Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

 

 Slavoj Žižek meets Yanis Varoufakis (Part 1) -  a good analysis, barring the sound effects

 An injustice corrected:

 

 sch