Author: Jinx

February 27th, 2024

I had not yet really explored Sydney‘s downtown, George Street, Pitt Street, etc. so I walked to the modern part of the city, where the high rises and serious people are. It’s like many other financial districts. Lots of preoccupied men in business suits talking on cell phones, lots of women in skirts walking in pairs, trotting down the pavement and carrying cups of coffee, traffic, sun bouncing against glass and sidewalks and passing cars, clean chain restaurants with broad windows showing people sitting at pale formica tables and staring into open laptops.

But the sunlight in Sydney isn’t like any other sunlight, just as the sunlight in New Orleans, San Francisco, or New York City has its own color and its own way of touching objects. Each city has something that talks to the light and shapes your recollection of it. In Sydney, the downtown has flashes of yellow sandstone, with scrollwork and figures tucked in among all the sleek straight lines and reflective surfaces of a modern city. It gives the air a slightly golden tint even at noon — at least in memory.

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February 26th, 2024

Daily writing prompt
Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
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February 26th, 2024

New theory about the little black box my neighbor keeps putting on his roof — maybe he’s measuring air quality, which is vastly improved? Except when the fog rolls in, distances seem crisper, more colorful.

My exercise now is a daily half-hour ride on my stationary bike in the early evening, while I work my way through Netflix’s The Roman Empire, narrated by Sean Bean. I’m curious about how he’s going to die this time.

For late-night viewing, we’re slowly working our way through international mayhem via Netflix, PBS, and Amazon. Last night we discovered Detective Montalbano, which we liked. Unlike Scandinavian, French, and British detectives, he’s refreshingly free of angst. So nice to see a series about a detective preoccupied, not with the dark traumas of his past, but with whether or not he can enjoy a good plate of pasta without a phone-call from his long-distance girlfriend or news of another dead body.

It’s almost 11:00 am. Soon, very soon, My supervisor will wake up and pick up her phone, and I will be, until 5:00 pm, enmeshed like Laocoön in emails and video-conferences.

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February 25th, 2024

Daily writing prompt
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
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I dislike this word for the same reason I dislike the clumsy use of the term “ban,” so let me start out by saying that no, I would not want to see people punished and/or silenced for uttering the word “problematic.”

But I do dislike it. Intensely. I dislike how earnestly it’s used, often with a faint moue of regret. I dislike, most of all, the built-in presumption that everyone listening agrees with its application.

Few things anger those who use “problematic” more than someone saying, “Wait, what do you mean? Why is that author/book/movie/artist etc. ‘problematic?’” It frustrates them because “problematic” is most frequently invoked on the way to advocating the exclusion/silencing/shunning of any person or work dubbed “problematic.” Questioning its use means they have to stop and think, not only about why something has been deemed “problematic,” but whether or not silencing (or “banning”) that problematic person or work is the right thing to do. The joy of their righteous march forward has been interrupted.

They might — God forbid! — have to formulate an argument.

This can be dangerous. Question whether or not someone or something is “problematic” and you just might be deemed “problematic” too.

It is the current favored jargon of the censor.
February 25th, 2024

By the time I got to the Kabuki, most of the movies were either done or almost done. I wandered around looking for Michael and saying hello to people. Finally I found him in the Q&A session of a movie on the secon floor. A German woman was talking about the problems of filming a movie in Brazil. We listened for ten minutes, then Michael said he was ready to leave.

We ended up in one of those hard little knots of company and conversation that ensue just before or after an event, when ther are rides to catch and places to go. Finally, someone observed we needed to get to the party and after various negotiations, renegotiations, and false start we scattered into a couple of cars that would take us to the restaurant. Michael and I rode with a heavy-faced woman, a younger, dark-haired girl, and an African filmmaker. I sat in the back between the filmmaker and Michael. On our way over, we got onto the subject of a documentary in the festival that I had disliked intensely, and I launched into a rant about it as the kind of smug, elitist self-justification I used to encounter growing up in the deep south. It only occured to me as we’d turned onto Mission and came in sight of the restaurant that it was quite possible that documentary’s director and/or producer was, at this moment, in the car with us.

Fortunately, they were not.

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back to 21st century diary
February 24th, 2024

Daily writing prompt
What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?
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Which is a reality every writer faces.

My goal is to always have at least 70 queries out. To keep track of this, I have set up an Excel spreadsheet that I keep carefullly updated. Rejections are highlighted in yellow.

I started sending queries out in December, so I’ve reached the point where at least one rejection a day is arriving by email. Every day the yellow part of the spreadsheet grows. Every day at least one rejection must be replaced with a new query.

That’s just how it goes.
February 24th, 2024

The racket of our neighbors moving in continued late into the night. Two husky women about our age, artists. Downstairs, alongside their front door, their street-side wall is a working garage door. Every few minutes, someone would drive up with stuff to unload and it would open. We could hear it grinding up slowly and majestically like a drawbridge.

This morning I somehow set the time ahead. Tim and I started off for work at 7:30, took a look at the clock on the Chronicle Building, and drove back home. We left again at 8:30. I managed to spill moussaka all over the car.

Charlie was gone when I got to work. When Shelly returned from the airport she told me he had said I could either work on the Dbase or type Fritz’s manuscript. Naturally I chose the manuscript.

While I was typing I listened to the news on the radio. First, they announced troops were being sent to the Honduras – then they said they weren’t. Then they said they were. Then, tonight, there was a press conference, and it was official. Such bullshit! A last ditch effort to either start a war or get more funding for the contras.

They’re still getting used to the apartment downstairs. At one point this evening the lights flickered, there was a bright flash and a heavy thud from downstairs. I started to hurry down, but heard one of them laugh and say, “Oh my God! Can you believe it? I don’t believe it!” From this I gathered that neither of them were lying unconscious and electrocuted, so I went back upstairs. The lights are still on.

I got a cancellation notice for my insurance today. Have to call my insurance agent tomorrow to ask him if I’ll have to reapply.

I didn’t. It was fine.

This was back in the day when you could have a face-to-face relationship with your health insurance agent. Mine was an amiable, gray haired man with a moustache whose office was on Shattuck in Berkeley. I liked him, but in the United States, especially back then, every conversation with a health insurance agent was slightly fraught and could include biting one’s tongue. I remember him explaining that the catastrophic health insurance plan I was on had to be discontinuted (and shifted to a much more expensive premium) because of the AIDS epidemic. “A client caught it, and by the time he died, we’d had to pay for EVERYTHING!” he said, his voice hushed with shock.

Which I had assumed was what health insurance was for, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to say so.

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February 23rd, 2024

Daily writing prompt
What advice would you give to your teenage self?
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you were unkind.

You will never regret being kind, even when it didn’t work out.
February 23rd, 2024

That morning Michael had asked to to find out if there were any (relatively) cheap seats to that night’s ballet performance of Onegin.

The Sydney Opera House seemed more crowded than it had been when Michael and I visited earlier, and this time, as I approached from the park, I saw up on the highest peak of the building two tiny figures, men black with distance, moving slowly. It looked as though there was actually a staircase of sorts curving over that rooftop, one with railings. Was it possible to get permission to climb up there and enjoy the view? If so, nobody but those two apparently were willing to do it. God knows, I wouldn’t. They were moving, but moving exactly the way I would if I were up there — veeerrrryyy slowly, with both hands on the railings. I waited until they had disappeared back behind the roof before going on.

I walked up the stairs and around the back of the opera house along the bay. It was another sunny day, and there were more people about, but the crowds felt in a weird way more serious and less aimless. Everybody seemed on their way someplace else. Between the Circular Quay and the Opera House, I found a small kiosk where a thin lady in her sixties was dispensing information.

Librarians and ladies managing info desks in Sydney tended to be slender, dashing women either elderly or in late middle age, with still-abundant hair and a flair for using makeup. (And when better to use it than when you actually need it?) No doubt there are overweight people in Sydney, but they didn’t seem as prevalent as in the US.

Where there cheap seats available at tonights performance?” I asked her. Oh yes, she said. Some were as low as $85. If I went into the box office inside the Opera house, they’d show me where the seats were.

So I went back and climbed the stairs and went into the opera-house’s cathedral like lobby, with its miles of polished floor and and peaked ceiling that seemed to swallow up all sound so that every voice was hushed. Approaching the box office, manned by a single clerk, was like approaching an altar.

No, the young man behind the desk told me. There were no $85 seats left. The cheapest were $120.

We would not be going to the ballet tonight.

Outside, the sunlight was a little dazzling. The broad white patio between the water and that side of the opera house was crowded. As I left I noticed two groups of teenaged students, boys on one side in blue jackets and ties, girls on another in blue skirts jackets and hats, about to begin a tour of the Opera House.

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February 22nd, 2024

Daily writing prompt
What bores you?
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When I was a teen-ager, my idea of hell was a housing development I’ll call Shangri-La. We didn’t live there, but friends did, and every now and then my family would get in the car and take the long drive out for a barbecue or dinner party or some other celebration.

The friends were nice. Their kids were nice. Their dogs were nice. The house was nice. But if it were a daytime event, and we lingered too long, and the food was consumed and the conversation petered out, the vaccuum that was Shangri-La would start to close in.

“Go out and do something,” one of the adults would say to us.

And so we would walk, block after stultifying block, past new, identical brick ranch houses with sliding glass doors and identical front yards planted with young, skimpy trees. There was no shade, no thick-boled live oaks or bunchy, low-branched magnolias, no spanish moss, no interesting wooden two storied houses with ghostly histories, no hills (this was Louisiana, after all), no bodies of water beyond square blue pools, no ruins to peek into and explore.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing for teenagers to do in that well-manicured, upscale, cropped green desert but sit on the monkey-bars and smoke pot at the deserted local school. And I hated pot. It made me feel stupid.

All of the teenagers we hung out with there seem to have grown into nice, law-abiding adults, but for years, I was convinced those suburban pools of sensory deprivation were hatcheries for incipient school shooters and serial killers.