Author: Jinx

June 18th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
What countries do you want to visit?
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Everyone I know who has been says it’s wonderful.

My impressions of the country are based partly on what I read in Hemingway, partly on an old boyfriend’s story about a weird, midnight orange-fight he got into while hitch=hiking across the country in the ’70s, partly on the fantasy TV series El ministerio del tiempo, and partly on my favorite Spanish tapas place.

And there’s also Saturday Night Live‘s 70-era weekly reassurance, “Francisco Franco is still dead.”

The Generalissimo is still dead and he’s not coming back. The people seem nice. They have a good sense of humor and history. They do great things with potatoes and spicy red sauce. I want to go.

I’ll ignore the bullfights.
June 17th, 2025

The Magnavox monster is now off the floor and installed in the entertainment center where it belongs. Today is another baseball day, and Michael invited a friend, Ken, over to help him set up the TV and watch the game. I walked to the store and got fixings for a chicken chili. By the time I got back the TV was in place — a very nice picture, though Michael thinks it’s a bit fuzzy.

The two of them have been on the sofa since noon (it’s now 6:00 PM) and none of the games have gone well. Michael says his stomach is upset. Ken says he’s giving up sports and pouring all the excess energy into relationships. The chili is gone. The Toll House cookies I baked last night are gone. The Blue Angels have come and gone, Grace Cathedral is striking the hour, and the sun is low in the sky, the light ashy. “It’s just stupidity,” Michael is saying. “Piazza made adjustments, Burns made adjustments, but not Bonds.”

“The As are not strong defensively,” says Ken a few minutes later.

“Just a long drive, right up the middle for two” says Michael. “A slammer would be okay, wouldn’t it?”

“No, that would be terrible. Just hit a single.”

They’re both in mental agony.

These men say they love watching baseball.

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June 17th, 2025

One of Tim’s co-workers is leaving the company to take a new job in Switzerland and there was a send-off at Brennan’s, so after work I drove straight there. We spent a lot of time at the table talking about the alarming exodus of old employees. I heard a lot of complaints about a new manager there who apparently went to a couple of software engineers and told them to make a purposely arcane and confusing presentation for a female engineer who lacks a computer science degree and needed to be “put in her place.” I think I heard that story about six times.

Classic Silicon Valley sexism. So many of those white, male, newly-rich nerds were eager to replicate the mindset of the high school jocks who bullied them when they were teenagers. They saw themselves as part of an exclusive club. I remember how much some software engineers hated Macs because they made computers accessible to people who couldn’t write code.

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June 17th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite thing about yourself?
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Who understands me better? Who’s more sympathetic when I’m sad? Who do I like seeing in a mirror? Who is always glad to hear my stories? Who is quick to meet my needs? Me. Me, me, me, me.

I just love me.
June 16th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
How do you want to retire?
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…most of the time it’s as I would want it to be.

Until the wireless mouse to my Imac stopped working yesterday just after posting my last writing prompt answer, and no, it doesn’t need to be recharged, it’s dead, kaput, and I think no big deal I’ll just walk down the hill to the Apple store and get a new one and I do and walk back home up hill but the new mouse won’t connect to my Imac, and after a lot of back and forth on the phone over two hours with technical support it’s determined I need to upgrade my operating system except I can’t because you need a mouse to do that and the guy on technical support says I’m in a “tough spot” so I walk back down to the Apple store and we talk and they are very nice and embarrassed about this Catch-22 of not being able to use my mouse unless I update my OS but I can’t update my OS because I don’t have a mouse so I borrow my husband’s mouse and update my OS, and think now everything is solved, but I STILL can’t get my new wired mouse to connect and end up sending off for a wired third party mouse which doesn’t arrive until this afternoon which is why I have not posted until now.

Otherwise my retirement is going fine.
June 15th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
What’s the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?
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t’s not some cherished item with memories attached. I’m not even sure exactly how long I had it or where I bought it. It’s just a rather large mug with a black and white design. A Riviera Van Beers according to the writing on the bottom. Which seems to be A Thing. I’ve been drinking coffee from it in the morning for decades.

There are older mugs in the house, including one from boarding school, but that one’s cracked and can’t be filled with anything hot and is kept on a shelf and occasionally noticed and mused over. But it’s not used.
June 14th, 2025

Pumpkins have appeared in store windows and the days have gotten so short that on Friday, when I lieft waork an hour late, it was almost dark. The fleet is in town and on the walk home that night I passed on Clay near Polk a gaggle of boys in uniform, dark green, with square caps. They looked very young to me, all downy cheeks and round chins.

The next day, while I was walking down California, I heard a sound over my head as though the sky were being slowly ripped in two, and looked up to see the blue bellyt of a jet, frighteningly close. For the next few hours the Blue Angels dove, pitched and barreled overhead, the sound of their passing more overwhelming than the sight of those tiny, sharp-looking jets flying in formation. It’s like reality is being torn open. I expected to see the sky, the clouds, and the tall buildings all around me collapse like a painted backdrop around a black gash. When I got back to the apartment I could see people standing on their roofs, some of them with binoculars. I was content to stay inside and occasionally peek out throught the blinds.

Michael spent the day watching baseball. “You bastard! You incompetent! You useless F*ck!” he’d yell at the TV before running into the kitchen to call a friend and vent.

Yes, children, in the old days of the last century, the phone was tethered to an outlet and YOU had to go to IT. Phone conversations could only take place in our kitchen.

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June 14th, 2025

A resignation at Locus today. The new hire, she of the curly brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, did not come in. Nor did she call. When Shelly went to Charlie’s mailbox she found his keys and a letter from the new hire saying she was sorry, she was resigning, she had thought she could take the pressure but she couldn’t and she wouldn’t be coming back.

This after Trevin has left us, so we are now down by two. I was annoyed, but Tim pointed out tonight she probably did it that wsy only because she felt she had no alternative.

The sequel to this is that a couple of years later, I was driving in some wooded, quiet area in Oakland and had paused at an intersection when I heard my name being called, looked to my left and saw her at the wheel of a UPS truck, waving at me. She looked round-faced and quite happy. We exchanged a few words, and she said she liked her new job much better. “It gets me outside,” she said.

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June 14th, 2025

Daily writing prompt
Describe one of your favorite moments.
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…nine years old. I sat in a seaside cafe with my family, the remains of breakfast spread across the table, looked out the broad window behind my parents at the beach and knew that was where we would spend the day. White sand, blue sky, curling green waves…
June 13th, 2025

I won a pair of tickets to the Giants game on Thursday night in a drawing at work. No sports fan, I handed them over to Michael. In return, I got to go see a screening of Shadow of the Vampire at the Variety Club on Wednesday afternoon. The Variety Club is a small screening room on Market Street, in a dinky theater with a half-hearted lobby that includes a pocorn maker I have never seen used. It’s tucked away to one side on the first floor of one of the older high-rise buildings. There are rarely more than fifteen in the theater, mostly critics and people who work in film. While it has its advantages in that it’s intimate and quiet, I prefer a normal theater with an audience that can be counted on to react normally. Shadow of the Vampire has generated a lot of talk about Willem Dafoe’s performance as Max Schreck and I’d been looking forward to seeing it. Enjoyed most of it, but found it choppy and hard to follow most likely because — as I discovered when I read the synopsis in the press kit — an entire scene had been left out.

When Michael returned from the game on Thursday night he talked about it for half an hour, and I heard about it at work the next day. Both Michael and everyone at work described the same moment. When J.T. Snow hit his home run, the crowd watched in absolute silence as that white pill sailed through the air, only exploding into cheers when it disappeared into the stands. It’s a measure of how good the game was that Michael enjoyed it in spite of the Giants losing.

The Variety Club is in the Hobart Building, just around the corner from the place that would become such a huge part of my life — The Mechanics’ Institute. I may have walked past Mechanics’ that afternoon without so much as a second glance.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is one of my favorite movies. Would like to know why a scene was omitted in a critics’ screening.

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