Covid-19 Diary, part 18: Sequels.

429.

Four of the ugliest words in the English language: They made a sequel.

430.

Beth: Do you think Bernadette doesn’t talk because of all the funny accents I do?

Me: No.

431.

The kids are watching Big. It’s a great movie, funny and smart. Two years ago, I wrote a sequel, Small. (This absolutely isn’t a joke.) Josh is rich and successful, running a toy empire that spans the globe. But he isn’t happy. His childhood was taken away from him. So he hires a detective to locate Zoltar, and then disappears. Meg, the main character, is his daughter. She tries to locate her missing father while fending off an unscrupulous employee intent on taking over the family business. She finds him. He’s turned himself into a child, but got pulled into social services. He’s a grown man trapped inside a child’s body, stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s not a comedy.

432.

Here’s the first line, in Tom Hanks’s voice-over narration: “I grew up too fast.”

433.

So, Mr. Hanks, since I know you’re reading this: you game?

434.

Four years ago, I wrote a sequel to The Karate Kid, too. My title: The Karate Man. It follows Daniel Laruso, broke and divorced, as he travels to California for his daughter’s college graduation. He runs into Johnny on the street. Johnny is rich, successful, happy, he speaks French, is still fit, and he doesn’t remember Daniel at all. This sends Daniel into a downward spiral. The only thing that saves him is the discipline of relearning karate. The key idea is that the seminal event in Daniel’s life meant nothing to anyone else (except Mr. Miyagi, who died). 

435.

I was gutted when I stumbled across the youtube Cobra Kai show. The fact that it was terrible didn’t make me happy, not at all.

436.

So here’s the first line of a movie that will never get made: “Tell me the story of Daniel Laruso.”

437.

Beth: Part of me wants to boycott the New York Times over that stupid fucking article about the small-space gyms.

438.

Simone and I watch Meet Me in St. Louis together. It’s her idea. I love it.

439.

Beth: I’m too funny for you. (pause) You should have had a less funny wife. You would have been happier.

440.

We’re living in a sequel to those terrible 90s disaster movies, like Deep Impact. Only instead of Morgan Freeman we have a petulant egomaniac. 

441.

Today, Trump told people to inhale Lysol into their lungs as a cure for the coronavirus. That ingesting household cleaners, like bleach, will kill the virus. Or, maybe, we could blast ultra-violet light inside our bodies? Like, that would probably take care of it?

442.

He is disintegrating. I take no joy in his breakdown. 

443.

I call Daryl, a friend of mine. “What’s going on?” I ask.

Daryl: Oh, just watching The Connors, that show Roseanne Barr got kicked off of.

Me: Wait. What? Why?

Daryl: I watched Wheel of Fortune before that.

Me: Dude, are you okay? Do we need to call someone?

444.

Two blurbs came in! They’re good, too. Puts part of my mind at rest. It feels weird, soliciting compliments from strangers. The book’s release date is October. Ramping up my efforts.

445.

My sister calls early in the morning. Tells me to buy 20 pounds of meat and store it in our freezer. This is funny because a. we have a tiny freezer and b. I’m a pretty serious vegetarian. She recognizes that this is a funny phone call and exaggerates a southern accent: “Go buy some meat.”

446.

I can’t think of any sequels worth watching. Aliens isn’t terrible. The Godfather, Part II is superb, but it isn’t really a sequel. The Strangers: Prey at Night is unnecessarily well-made, really a beautiful movie, but it’s still a dumb slasher flick. Magic Mike XXL is an abomination. I challenge anyone to name a sequel—besides Small and Karate Man, concepts mentioned above—that’s superior to the original. 

447.

Beth: Who wrote the original song, “Cruel Summer?”

Me: Bananarama, I think?

Beth: Do you think it’s going to be a surprise hit this summer?

Beth reads the lyrics in a dramatic fashion. “The lyrics are too close for comfort!” Pause “Is there any way we can monetize this? Get out ahead of the ‘Cruel Summer’ explosion? Could we make our own version?”

448.

Beth challenges me to guess a song. Here are her parameters. The original song hails from the late 1970s. The remake was from the mid-90s. She loves them both. Neither band was a one-hit wonder. We play this game for 20 minutes after breakfast, and Beth grows increasing derisive as I stumble. I run with seventies groups. Beth mocks me outright when I ask if Electric Light Orchestra is the original band. She can’t believe I can’t guess it. 

449.

The song: “Sweet Jane.” (Incidentally, one of my favorites.) The Cowboy Junkies made the remake. The original song came out in 1969. The remake was from the late 1980s. All of Beth’s hints are wrong. 

450.

I think the problem with sequels is the people involved often just try to recreate whatever made the original special. They never have any magic.

451.

Beth: I hate all advice right now. I just want to punch advice in the face.

452.

I wrote a play about Trump right after he was elected. By play, I mean one line. The first line of dialogue. It’s Trump. Here’s the line: “Don’t flush the toilet.”

453.

Beth and I watch the first half of Bad Education. It’s excellent, a docudrama about a public school scandal. 

Beth: Oh my god, Hugh Jackman looks so old. If he looks like that, what hope do I have? I’m shorter, fatter, a woman, not rich and not even from Australia!

454.

I had another restaurant idea today. Favorite meals of famous people. You can order Bogart’s favorite omelet, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite sandwich, the Marquis de Sade’s top appetizer. Or the last meals of famous people. I would call it something like, Dead Man’s Mouth. But more appetizing. The menu would change month to month, with some reliable meals from Elvis, Nina Simone, doomed artists who are still revered. We might have an existentialist special on Sundays. Sartre and Camus tarts. That sort of thing. 

455.

My work computer won’t turn on. So, that’s good news. I feel the bilious, sullen presence inside trying to assert itself. I love holding onto resentment; It’s fuel to my heart-fire. 

456.

But keeping this other self at bay, fighting off the soul-killer, this dour, embittered little man who wants to control my life, is a millstone, a stumbling block, a goddamn full-time occupation.

457.

I read this line today: “To live at all is to be implicated in the world’s cruelty.”

Covid-19 Diary, Part 17: The Lighthouse and my doppelganger.

406.

We spend three tense and testy days. I’m the problem. I brood. I sulk. I resent. I come from a long line of brooding people. I had a beef with one distant family member that lasted a decade. We never discussed any of the underlying issues. We just radiated anger at each other.

407.

Beth: I think the coronavirus is making me funnier. I have to entertain myself because you guys are lame.

408.

A memory: Beth and I take the kids to the Art Institute one Sunday. The security guard looks me up and down. “You already came through here,” she says. 

Me: “I just got here.”

She shakes her head, then scans my membership id. “You scanned in 15 minutes ago.”

409.

I know who she’s talking about. I have a doppelganger. A tall dude who sometimes rocks a shaved head and a beard. Lives in the same neighborhood as I do. I’ve only caught glimpses of him. 

410.

Beth: Name one southerner who is funny.

Me: . . . Jeff Foxworthy.

Beth: Exactly.

Me: Okay. Tennessee Williams is funny.

Beth: What? No one is walking around going, “Tennessee Williams is a laugh riot!” That was a dumb example.

Me: . . . .

411.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a double, a spiritual shade, until I discovered I had one of my own. It’s hard not to see this other person as a threat.

412.

Beth: No, you’re competent. You’re good at fixing things [I’m not], you’re good at building things [I’m not].

413.

A memory: I’m walking my dog on a frigid winter night. Certain nights seem sinister, others magical. This was both. I see a naked fat man shivering in his car. I pass without eye contact. I find a pair of shoes, shoulder-length apart, at the edge of the street. I walk up to them. They are my size. My first thought is the Rapture has happened, and of course I’ve been left behind. My second is more menacing; my double has left a trap for me. If I dither, he’ll spring it. I jog my dog back home.

414.

I just overhead Simone ask Siri: Do you believe in God?

Siri: I’m not a person, I don’t have religion.

Simone: Do you have brothers and sisters?

Siri: I’m not a person, I don’t have family.

415.

27 percent of the people killed by the coronavirus have been African American. Black citizens are dying at twice the rate of anyone else.

416.

Why aren’t more people bothered by this? It makes me want to kick holes in my walls. It fills me with shame.

417.

Beth: Why are they out of the fucking hazelnut spread that I love? This is the real tragedy of the coronavirus.

Pearl: Mom, the real tragedy is that people are dying.

Beth: I know, Pearl. I was joking.

418.

I watched The Lighthouse. It’s a beautiful horror/art movie. Two dudes, one young the other old, are assigned four weeks on a desolate lighthouse. The tensions between them are there from the start. Each is irritated by the other. There’s a touch of the doppelganger in the setup. In fact, a fascinating way to read the movie is an isolated old man meeting his younger self. 

419.

Frank (Beth’s dad): Jehovah’s Witnesses think this is the end of the world.

420.

The Lighthouse has a mermaid (maybe) and a Cthonic deep-water deity (perhaps). It’s a slimy film that is disgusted by the human body. One of the ongoing storylines involves flatulence. Another involves semen. The filmmaking is gorgeous.

421.

But The Lighthouse is the wrong movie for right now. It uses a cinematic language of claustrophobia and confinement. I feel cramped and boxed in enough. I don’t need a movie about two drunks with no running water to hate my own body. 

422.

We settle on a subtitle. My sister weighs in and comes to the rescue. The result: A film buff’s journey through the south on screen. It isn’t the most elegant subtitle, but it gets the job done. It feels good putting it behind me. We’re looking for blurbs now.

423.

Josef Conrad wrote a doppelganger story, “The Secret Sharer.” A castaway hides in a captain’s cabin. The captain and this shadowy figure go insane together.

424.

The key idea of the doppelganger: You cannot flourish in close proximity. Your doppelganger is your spiritual and emotional opposite. Your doppelganger is your enemy.

425.

For years, people told me I looked like Will Ferrell. Usually by drunks in bars. One time a dude stopped in the middle of the street and yelled, “You look just like Will Ferrell!” I told him I was Ferrell’s butt double.

426.

When I moved to Chicago, students told me I looked like Jim Carrey. I don’t see this at all, but I’ll take it. I sometimes have exaggerated features. I’ve been known to tell a joke.

427.

As I get older, I don’t resemble anyone famous, which is fine by me. It’s just a shame I look like a war-ravaged knight out of the middle ages. (Only less interesting than that.)

428.

Beth: Did you go for a walk last night?

Pearl: I did. And I complained the whole time.

Beth: About what?

Pearl: I complained about how they need to build a wall in space, so that kids don’t have to worry about the universe going on forever.

Covid-19 Diary, part 16: A different kind of panic. And some more restaurant ideas.

374.

I grew up in the 1980s, first in Atlanta, and then in Pensacola. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were smack dab in the middle of a very strange event: the Satanic panic. 

375.

Here too was once one of the dark places of the world. 

376.

Beth: You should share more personal stuff on the blog.

Me: I already do. Funny anecdotes and one-liners. 

Beth: No, like the real, fucked up, gritty personal stuff. The really dark stuff. That’s what people want. 

Me: I . . . don’t want to do that.

377.

Trump declared that he has total power. Not sure what he means. Total power over what? 

378.

I take my daughters in a radio flyer to a nearby creek. When I was a child, I used to rumpus around the creeks with my cousin, Keith. This was in 1980s Atlanta. In the middle of the Satanic panic that I actually believed, the weird urban myth that Satanists were kidnapping children and sacrificing them in the woods. 

379.

One time Keith and I set out late, near dark. We always wandered along a railroad track, past the burned out husk of a car, and through the woods to the ruins of an old water processing plant. Here we would climb up the walls, dig through the wreckage; it was a child’s dream. This one outing it was dark by the time we got to the burned out car and Keith said, “Look.” We saw a man in camouflage disappear behind some trees. We ran home. 

380.

I checked out a book on Satanism from the library at my church. It was awesome. One guy popped out his eyeballs with satanic willpower. Another levitated a chair. All kinds of intimations of bizarre sex rites, violent rituals, encounters with minor demons. I read it as fiction and loved every repulsive page of it.

381.

Headline of an American newspaper: 5,000 deaths in 24 hours.

382.

In college, a friend of mine played a tape for me. The tape was a recording of a pastor dueling it out with a demon-possessed caller. It was ludicrous. I hid my laughter; my friend, she was convinced it was real.

383.

My mom believes in demons. Dark powers at work in this world. When the Harry Potter books appeared, my mom—like a lot of church-goers—decried the books as Satanic. I bought the first one, read it and then leant it to my sister Ann. She read it, too.

384.

I traveled home to see my parents regularly. I must have been 23. One day, I was in my parents’ backyard, and I noticed the outline of a plastic bag sticking out of the dirt. I pulled on it. It was my copy of Harry Potter, buried. 

385.

I carried it inside. I knew what had happened, but couldn’t believe it. “Mom,” I said. “Did you . . . bury my book in the backyard?”

386.

She admitted that she did. The book, she said, was causing disharmony in our house. “Touch not the evil thing,” she said.

“It isn’t evil,” I said

“I won’t have demons in my house.”

387.

I was obnoxious about it. I admit it. I was angry and I wouldn’t let it go. Finally my mom said, “I thought it was your sister’s!”

Ann: “What? Why would that be better?”

Mom: “See! The book is causing disharmony right now!”

388.

Robert, one of my friends, always talked of finding the Satanic Bible in an abandoned house when he was a child. He read parts of it. In my memory, he says the book had a pentagram on the front and might have been made out of leather. Human skin? 

389.

I believe in evil. Actual evil. This creates philosophical problems. But so does its inverse.

390.

I used to believe in the devil. For years, I thought I was doomed to hell. (I wrote about it here.) The devil was a debonair chap, he wore designer suits, and he had a terrible temper. 

391.

Bill Cosby in The Devil and Max Devlin. Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate. Robert De Niro in Angel Heart. Max von Sydow in Needful Things. The black goat in The Witch. The weird flying French woman in The Ninth Gate. Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster. George Burns in Oh God, You Devil. Okay, I’ll stop. 

392.

Me: I’m going to write a one-act play next week.

Beth: It’s going to be about me. 

Me: It’s titled Ten Characters Named Beth.

Beth: Okay. There are ten scenes. In each scene, a character named Beth (I’ll play all the parts) eats at one of your themed restaurants.

Me: You’re describing the greatest performance art event in the history of the world.

393.

I did have other restaurant ideas. Here’s one: We’ll put it on a pizza. Every item on the menu can be put on top of a pizza. When you finish your order, the waiter will say, “We’ll put it on a pizza?” 

394.

The theme is carbs and deliciousness.

customer: The eggplant risotto sounds good.

Waiter: Can we put it on a pizza? 

395.

There are others. The most recent: Buckwheat Johnnycakes. It’s a breakfast spot. We make buckwheat pancakes and crepes, sweet or savory, and johnnycakes, in the old style, the way good old George Washington used to eat ’em. People would line up around the block. It becomes a galvanizing gastronomic destination, the spiritual and economic reawakening of America. 

396.

Beth: Buckwheat Johnnycakes is gross.

Me: It’s evocative. And tells just what it is. It’s a great name for a restaurant. 

Beth: It sounds like a gay pornstar’s movie name.

Me: How dare you.

397.

A lot of people went to jail over testimonies around Satanic abuse. They were all, as far as I know, innocent. The memories that indicted parents and uncles and siblings were false. And once the idea of Satanists ritually killing children entered the mainstream, people believed in it. 

398.

All memory is processed as fiction.

399. 

The devil lost his shape as I got older, but the world didn’t get any less evil. I began to shade him with historical inequities, racism, colonialism, sexism, oppression. The devil became abstracted. The devil became a collection of concepts and ideas. 

400.

I don’t know how to process this New York Post headline: “One New Yorker died every 12 minutes from coronavirus this weekend.”

401.

I watched the second half of The Seven Samurai with Pearl, Simone, and my father-in-law. Pearl was riveted. She wants to make a sequel.

402.

Believing in the Devil in 2020 seems dumb. Where does this creature incorporate? Does the devil have a lair?  Does the devil have a face? Does the devil go to the bathroom? You can see the absurdity of it. 

403.

But dismissing evil seems just as misguided. Is all the suffering and cruelty in the world predicated on misunderstanding and childhood hardship? Is it our snake brains and chimp brains gnawing at the better angels of our nature? Is evil nothing more than primate want and need passed down from our ancestors? I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. 

404.

I’ve landed on a hazy gnosticism, where there are two equal forces fighting for control of the universe: good and evil. It gives little solace but doesn’t add to existential weariness. 

405.

We play crazy eights again. Pearl skips me with a 3. “I don’t like being competitive.” One round later, she turns to me and says, “I’m going to take an axe to your head!” 

Covid-19 Diary, part 15: We enter week five and everyone is still alive.

340.

I took Bernadette outside today. It was sunny. She fell asleep in the stroller. She smiles as she’s falling asleep. It’s adorable. 

341.

I have ideas for restaurants. Here’s one: Land o’ the Giants. 

342.

The restaurant is designed for eight foot tall people. The forks and spoons are oversized. The chairs and tables and plates are all giant. We only hire oversized wait staff. There’s a second section. It’s the exact opposite. Everything is baby-sized. Now, wait for it, here’s the kicker; you are randomly assigned a section when you arrive. I tell Beth and Pearl at the kitchen table. 

343.

Beth: Wow. That’s . . . a great idea. Especially right now. You’ll do amazing takeout business. 

Me: I . . . would.

Beth: What kind of food would you serve?

Me: Pensacola . . . meets the West. 

344.

Me: Is it hard, having a husband who is such an idea generator? Who thinks so far outside the box?

Beth: . . . Yeah. It’s tough.

345.

I’m 42,000 words into a novel manuscript. I’ve stalled. I only have the ending and one section to write. But I can’t find my way into the character’s head. It’s frustrating. I’m too distracted. With each passing day the story recedes. 

346.

I have ridiculous writing habits. I don’t outline, and I write everything at once and everything out of order. I then try to stitch it all together.

347.

It is a ludicrous way to write anything. I’m not sure why I stick to it. It’s fun? There’s a wildness to this approach, and my fingers crackle with electricity, but I often write myself into boxes with no escape. 

348.

With every novel manuscript I’ve ever written, the characters at some point take on a life of their own. It’s a thrilling experience, but also troubling. Who has given these figments of my imagination independent thought?

349.

Here are some of my other restaurant ideas, most of them from when I was 20. Civilization’s End, where you leave your civilization at the door. You tear at the food with your teeth, grunt and scream for service. A diner for neanderthals. Kung Food, where you cut your meals out of the waiter’s body—they wear fat suits with different compartments; if you ordered pad thai, for instance, you might slice open the stomach pocket and it would slide out onto your plate—and there are random staged karate fights throughout the day. 

350.

I started re-reading 2666, Roberto Bolano’s magnum opus, a book that is difficult to describe but impossible to put down.

351.

It has five distinct sections, all of them involving the murders of Mexican women in the 90s and a writer named Archimiboldi. It’s disturbing, labyrinthine, funny, sexy, strange. 

352.

Books can cause nightmares, Robert Bolano once said. His do.

353.

Well, we’re debating subtitles. The publisher thinks we can do better. This has sent me into a tailspin, and I’m not sure why. I am freaking out. I could crack off 10 or so good subtitles for someone else’s book, but here I am flummoxed. 

354.

Me: How about, “A film fan goes to Dixieland . . . and beyond!”

Beth: No.

355.

The emotional terrain of the day is complex. Mutual misunderstandings. Something rueful in the air. Beth doesn’t smile or laugh. Neither do I. There’s a sameness to things. Anhedonia reigns. 

356.

Beth: 32,000 people have died in the U.S. from the corona-virus. You can see how we’re going to hit 100,000.

357.

Pearl: There’s a mosquito in the kitchen! Do we want to let it out?

Beth: Don’t worry, Pearl. We’re going to let it out right into your butthole.

Me: I’m putting that on the blog. 

358.

We throw the frisbee in the backyard. Simone wants to do tick tock videos. We don’t let her. Pearl sneaks inside for a popsicle. The day is glorious. I sit in the grass and pretend things are good. Bernadette slips and cuts her face on her grandma’s water bottle. The cut is just below her eye. 

359.

I’m rewriting the movie book. It’s painful. Beth keeps telling me I need more personal anecdotes in it. I agree.

360.

But memory is tricky. I can’t trust mine. (And you can’t trust yours.) We apply a structure after the fact. We see a narrative where there wasn’t one.

361.

The relationship of then to now remains a mystery. All memory is processed as fiction.

362.

I just finished the revised chapter on Tennessee Williams. Beth has done wonders.

363.

My favorite of the movie adaptations is The Fugitive Kind. No one talks about this film, and I’m not sure why. Everyone always points to Streetcar. I’m not a huge fan. It’s slow, humorless, rape-y. 

364.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterpiece, funny, sexy, unsettling. It follows a weekend in the lives of a rich, dysfunctional family. The patriarch, Big Daddy, is dying but doesn’t know. His sons, Gooper and Brick, hate each other. The wives want their husbands to inherit the estate. It’s jaw-droppingly good.

365.

We play Go Fish. Pearl bows out. “I don’t like being competitive.” We switch to Crazy Eights. “I’m going to fucking destroy you,” she says, smiling, after I catch her with a draw two.

366.

Williams’s life is the gothic stuff of his plays. His sister was insane. She threatened to kill her family, suffered from terrifying hallucinations. His father was an aloof asshole with a terrible temper. His mother abhorred human contact and never touched her children. When his parents did copulate, he could hear his mother screeching through the walls. He matriculated in a fishbowl nightmare. 

367.

Williams was gay. A criminal act in the 1940s. The story goes he had no sexual contact—he didn’t even masturbate—until he was 25. He then immersed himself in cruising for rough trade. 

368.

He loved the allure of hook-up culture, despite the actual dangers. He was beaten, robbed, and, at least once, raped. In one of his letters, he wrote that he had gone beyond shame. 

369.

Williams sometimes cruised with Gore Vidal. That’s a movie I’d like to see.

370.

Williams is a hell of a writer, and not just of plays. His short stories are excellent, and more than a few of them will ignite your very skin particles. “The Kingdom of Heaven” and “Desire and the Black Masseuse” are unforgettable. 

371.

Mystery must be kept. He wrote this about his work, and it is a guiding light to storytelling, movies, novels, stories. Mystery must be kept. I should have that tattooed on my ass.

372.

That’s vulgar. Sorry. I’m looking out the back windows of Beth’s parents’ house at the swaying trees, the sunlight catching the soft, awakening greens of the leaves,  worrying about Bernadette and the cut on her face, fearful of the life she and her sisters will have, unsure of the next step, unsure of how to grasp the enormity of the changing world.

373.

Movies aren’t going to save me.

Covid-19 Diary, part 14: The one where Time Cop gives me answers.

300.

Griel Marcus wrote this back in 2009: “ . . . the entanglement of now and then is fundamentally a mystery.”

301.

I think he means, how we interact with the past, and how the past acts on us, isn’t clear. It seems to be one thing, but really is something else.

302.

Put another way: does history have some kind of order? Do our lives have a structure? Or, is it just one damn thing after another? (I’m quoting from The History Boys.)

303.

Put yet another way: how do we know what’s important and what isn’t, when we can’t see the future? Some people thought—they really thought—that Hootie and the Blowfish were going to save rock n roll. That was the 90s for you, dumb music and endless optimism.

304.

After two days of hope in our apartment, we wake up tense and testy. Overnight, it snowed.

305.

Here’s a riddle: You open the door and see an adult goose trapped inside a wine bottle. How do you get the goose out without killing the goose or breaking the wine bottle?

306.

If you can answer this koan, or any of a dozen or so others like it, then you have achieved wisdom. That’s the idea, anyway.

307.

I’m reading a biography of Shirley Jackson. She is one of the great horror writers. I have no idea what she would have made of this.

308.

Her writing is eerie and tense. She often presents the banal details of every day life as sinister, and delves into odd areas of living. “Charles” involves parents worrying over their son’s new friend in kindergarten. That’s the story. But the way it unfolds, it’s deeply unsettling.  

309.

Trump’s approval ratings keep slipping. In fact, the more he gets in front of the camera, the worse his approval numbers get. And yet, in a way of thinking that can only be called Trumpian, he believes he is not only doing a great job, but also winning over new voters.

310.

Jackson wrote one of the best haunted house stories, The Haunting of Hill House. It’s wonderful, spooky, and well-written. 

311.

She wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one of the first YA novels (in a good way) that is discomfiting and eerie.

312.

In the run up to 2016, Trump bragged about the size of his audiences. A lot of people were watching him. He believed that this was all that mattered. In a way, he was right.

313.

I keep thinking of a line from Time Cop. An unscrupulous politician is robbing gold from the past to pay for television spots in his presidential run. “Elections are won with television,” he says. “You don’t need the press, endorsements. You don’t even need the truth. You need money.”

314.

Did Time Cop foresee Trump? (Was Time Cop a better movie than I remember? Probably not. It has a sex scene, where I think you can actually see Van Damme’s actual butthole.)

315.

Hill House follows a scientist studying trauma and hauntings. He brings a number of people who lean into the supernatural to a famous haunted house. And then he studies them.

316.

Jackson’s terror comes from the world of everyday things. She has a way of writing that makes lamps, pencils, chairs, floorboards seem menacing. It’s remarkable. She remakes the quotidian as the source of fear.

317.

(David Lynch does the same thing. He can make a lamp, or a wall socket, seem scarier than a thousand ghosts.)

318.

Although we think of her as a cult figure, Jackson was a major writer. She published in all the major magazines, including The New Yorker. Her books about her family were best-sellers. The strange thing about Jackson is that she isn’t better known now. Everyone reads “The Lottery” in high school. Everyone.

319.

I hope things have changed. Trump is so clearly incompetent that even some of his die-hard supporters are wavering. His blustering, his lack of foresight, his lack of curiosity, his arrogance and vanity, his tribalism—he is the wrong person to lead us through a crisis. He can’t stop himself from acting like a venal, vindictive fool.

320.

Here’s an answer. There is no goose and there is no bottle. These are just words. You can move words around however you like. Words aren’t real, yet they are the only things that matter. 

321.

Which is another way of saying, we control reality through language.

322.

I used to think this, but now I’m not so sure. How do you stop a global pandemic with words?

323.

In high school, I had a religion teacher give koans out to the class. (She hated me, by the by, but that’s another story.) She said only one former student had ever come back to her with a good answer.

324.

Here’s the koan she gave me: What is the sound of one hand clapping?

325.

The Zen koans are puzzles, sort of, but they don’t have logical answers. They require creativity and intuition.

326.

So, here’s my answer: A cymbal, clinked in a cave with a lamb’s hoof, echoing through the dark chambers, the sound making its delicate way to my ears. A pretty, haunting little noise that cannot last, means nothing, yet explains everything.

327.

There you go, Ms. Chadwick, wherever you are.

328.

I didn’t keep up with any of my high school teachers, which is strange. I had some good teachers over the years, a few I felt connected to, but I never looked back. I never went to any sports events or visited the school.

329.

I did go to a party, once. I was 19. I went with Chris. It was during beach week, where the seniors with lax parents rent beach houses to their partying children. It was a hot, sultry, summer night, and Chris and I thought we would see some old friends, sip some cheap whiskey, I don’t know. It didn’t turn out that way.

330.

A senior was dating someone Chris used to date. And, for reasons that make sense in high school but nowhere else, he was pissed at some comment Chris had made two years prior. So, he wanted to fight. Chris thought this was hilarious at first, but as the group of drunken seniors started to swell, and we stood in front of the beach house near the Flora-Bama, and the heat lightning in the distance illuminated floating night clouds, he got more and more angry.

331.

I kept telling him we should just leave. Who cares? I said. The seniors—their faces glowing in the high beams of the parked cars—were edgy, excited; they clearly saw this as a rite of passage. Let’s beat up our forebears. Let’s just get out of here, I said to him again. Who cares?

332.

I do, he responded. (It was, I must say, a badass line.)

333.

The pissy senior stood in front of us with his retinue, and it looked like things were going to jump off. Chris cracked his neck, ready to throw down. I stifled a laugh; I was nervous but also the self-serious seniors, all lined up and crackling with boozy energy, struck me as ridiculous.

334.

It all kind of deflated, for reasons I don’t remember. We left. I felt foolish. And old.

335.

I know, it’s a bit of a nothing-story. Something almost happened!

336.

I spent hours and hours driving along a stint of highway in Pensacola, a winding road that runs from Pensacola proper out to Perdido Key. I have driven on this road hundreds of times.

337.

Here’s the strange thing. I know this road, but I haven’t been near it in 20 years, save once, for my older sister’s wedding. I might never drive on this road again.

338.

How that is related to this—it’s a mystery to me. Time Cop, Shirley Jackson, Trump, Chris, Beach Week, Zen koans and Ms. Chadwick.

339.

New jobless rate hits 22 million. In just four weeks. If only we could go back in time. 

Covid-19 Diary, part 13: High Life and Uncut Gems.

264.

I sit writing while a pandemic threshes the American public and the economy unravels. A demented old man holds the reins of power and seems happy to pit the states against each other while he obsesses over self-congratulation. I take refuge, as I always have, in movies. 

265.

I watched three movies this week, all of them pretty damn good: High Life, The Eyes of Laura Mars, and Uncut Gems.

266.

High Life is a bizarre fantasia of fetishized space sex and existential loneliness. Claire Denis, the cerebral French director of White Material, directs.

267.

It. Is. Weird.

268.

Earth has sent convicts into space to experiment on them. Can women get pregnant? What does radiation do to a fetus? How does the mind handle the immense black spaces? Juliette Binoche is the doctor on board, conducting the experiments.

269.

The spaceship is self-sustainable—in a sci fi kind of way—and will propel onwards forever, until it hits a black hole or a distant star. The people on board have sustenance; they will not run out of food. But they will never be able to return to earth.

270.

The bulk of the movie follows Monte and his baby daughter, coping with isolation. It is heartbreaking. This movie is bleak. They will never leave the ship. They have no prospects. This will be the entirety of the little girl’s existence.

271.

The grim atmospherics are broken up by flashbacks, including a wild masturbatory sex scene with Binoche. It’s unbelievable.

272.

Monte spends his days tending a garden and teaching his daughter how to walk, what’s safe to eat. He tries to be a good father.

273.

I also watched Eyes of Laura Mars, an odd 1970s movie written by John Carpenter and directed by Irvin Kushner, who would later direct The Empire Strikes Back.

274.

Kushner and I have the same birthday. Weird.

275.

Mars is a wild fucking movie. Faye Dunaway plays a hip photographer who creates tableaus of sexual violence. She has dreams where she can see a murderer stalking his victims, who are friends of hers. The visions turn out to be real.  She goes to the police. Tommy Lee Jones plays the lead detective. He knows her work; the crime scene photos match up with other real-life crimes. She’s a suspect.

276.

Kushner does wonders with Empire. The lighting is spectacular. The fight between Vader and Luke remains the best filmed fight scene in all the series. Yes, they get more spectacular in terms of tidal waves and dying earths, but the sense of architecture and physical space, the way you always know what is happening—it’s a marvel.

277.

During the screening of Empire, George Lucas reportedly uttered, “He’s ruined my movie.”

278.

Mars is a late-seventies urban nightmare, where the ultra-rich live in constant terror of the scheming masses. It feels like the proto-typical De Palma movie. Or the John Carpenter horror movie he didn’t make before Halloween.

279.

Kushner has talent, but he didn’t get to do much with it. Mars is well put together, with intriguing side characters and great location shots. His last movie was Robocop 2. Ugh. There’s something sad about that.

280.

Simone and I are trying to make a movie together. In Simone fashion, she won’t stop managing me. The project lasts about ten minutes. Pearl flames out, and Simone and I have . . . creative differences.

281.

I throw on some Dad rock: Cat Stevens. It doesn’t mellow anyone out. Simone shift back to Hamilton.

282.

I used to loathe Air Supply’s “All Out of Love.” Now I find it indescribably beautiful.

283.

A refrain late in the song: “What are you thinking of?” That cuts right to it, doesn’t it?

284.

My tastes turned away from punk 15 years ago. I migrated to soul, and branched out into pre-1980 funk. I circled back to classic rock eventually, but only in small doses, and welcomed into the clubhouse folk, a little country, pre-1975 reggae, and plenty of hip hop, of course.

285.

When Simone was born, I only wanted to listen to orchestral music. Pearl: alt. country and folk. Bernadette: jazz. Don’t know if this says more about my daughters or me.

286.

A quick glance at the headlines sends me on a downward spiral. The most vulnerable are being filleted by this pandemic. Severely disabled people living in group homes. Immigrants trapped in the border fiasco. Black citizens dying in much larger numbers. Nationwide, people of color are dying in larger numbers. This isn’t a fluke or an unexplainable anomaly. This is the inheritance of our country, begun back in 1621.

287.

What’s that line? The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past.

288.

U.S. jobless claims up to 16 million. How you like them apples? You don’t like them? Oh. Me, neither.

289.

Beth wanders in as I finish up High Life. “Why would his daughter have an English accent? She’s grown up with only her father. She would sound just like him.”

290.

Uncut Gems is a tense, claustrophobic nightmare of a gambling addict’s own making. Adam Sandler plays Howard, a Jewish jewel dealer who owes gambling debts all over town, has purchased a rare uncut gem from Ethiopia. 

291.

His Howard is a hustling, irritated, scheming shit-head, possessing just enough of a sense of humor that you don’t hate him. 

292.

People are raving over Sandler’s acting. But, Sandler being good isn’t a surprise; Sandler being good in a good movie is a bit rarer. 

293.

Here are his best performances in (mostly) good movies: Punch Drunk Love, Funny People, The Meyerowitz Stories, The Wedding Singer, Murder Mystery, The Cobbler, and Men, Women and Children. 

294.

The Safdie brothers direct. They love close-up shots and ratcheting tension. This movie weighs you down. The movie is ugly, distasteful lighting and clunky interiors. I felt like I was drowning while watching it; it steals the very air you are breathing. 

295.

It’s too long. There’s too much basketball. It revels in a particular New York City ugliness. Those are my criticisms. And mostly minor. 

296.

I can’t quite stop thinking about it. High Life, too. Both films have a deep, wounded loneliness at their core.

297.

I get into a nasty phone argument with one of my cousins, who I love, over politics. I don’t handle it well. Something about family, the people you care for the most in the world, that brings out the claws. We make it to the other side, and express our concern and caring for each other, but it is an unpleasant experience.

298.

We are both wounded. And lonely.

299.

Beth: Who knew the end of the world would be so boring?

Covid-19 Diary, part 12: The Lost Men.

241.

I take my three daughters for a walk. Simone weaves stories to herself. Bernadette babbles in a screamy voice. Pearl glowers at me. As we cross one street, Pearl whispers, “I hate you.” I tell her we don’t speak to each other this way, and shrug it off, but the words sting.

242.

Beth: Seventy percent of the Chicago deaths from Covid-19 are black people.

Me: Shit.

243.

We have a prism in the front windows. Sunlight filters through the device and turns patches of my face green in the mirror. For a brief moment, I look monstrous.

244.

At least 40,000 people traveled the U.S. after Trump “closed” travel between the two countries. He never does what he says, and what he claims he did wouldn’t do what he claims it would have anyway. He’s an absolute nightmare, and bearing witness to his petulant neediness while 12,000 Americans have died is astonishing.

245.

He is still purging the government of people he sees as “disloyal.” His main problem, and it is of his own devising, is simple and monstrous: he sees the government as his.

246.

His defenders always talk of Trump derangement syndrome. They never explain why 55 percent of the American people despise him and want him removed from office.

247.

He’s the most tribal of presidents we’ve ever had. He’s the most petulant, needy, mean-spirited, avaricious, and childish. He makes no overtures to the majority of Americans. He doesn’t even pretend to care. He fixates on tiny insults and must be the smallest man we’ve ever had in the oval office. He is intentionally slowing relief aid to states with Democratic governors. It’s appalling.

248.

Here’s Marlow’s first line in Heart of Darkness: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

249.

America.

250.

Marlow tells the story of his journey to replace Kurtz for a trading company. Sort of. Marlow is sent to the Congo to work in the ivory trade. Part of his job is to meet up with Kurtz, who is living far in the interior. 

251.

But the story is really of European colonialism in Africa. More specifically, the Belgian invasion and destruction of what is now called The Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s controversial, with loads of defenders and plenty who consider it marbled through with racism. I’ll stay on the sidelines of that battle.

252.

King Leopold’s Ghost tells the non-fiction account of this travesty. It’s an easy book to admire, a tough book to read.

253.

If you want a very strange taste of it, try the stop-motion animated short movie, This Magnificent Cake!

254.

Bernadette is crying. She won’t go to sleep. Pearl and Simone now share their room with her. So, all three children are up. It’s late. I am at a loss. Is there a sadder sound in the world than your own child’s wail?

255.

I had an idea for a TV series, The Lost Men. It’s a sequel to The Lost Boys, but instead of teenage vampires, you have cannibal adults. Jason Patric disappears, and his mom and son try to find him. They discover he was part of a cabal of ultra-rich weirdos who had occult parties on desolate islands, directing and controlling financial markets and natural resources, and that a lot of young people have gone missing. The lost men are staying young by eating young people. That’s about as far as I got. Are you there, Hollywood? Ready to pony up some cash?

256.

Heart of Darkness is famous in part because Francis Ford Coppola adapted it for his Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now. It’s the best adaptation of a great book I can think of. Salo—Pasolini’s adaptation of 120 Days of Sodom to World War II Italy—is a close second, but goddamn you have to have an iron stomach to sit through it. It’s one of the movies I would unwatch if I could.

257.

Other movies I would unwatch: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The Martyrs. I Spit on Your Grave. All of Oliver Stone’s movies after JFK. 

258.

Beth’s brother, Ted: I’m gained almost ten pounds since corona. Someone told me it’s called “the corona 19.”

259.

I took the girls on a quick walk and saw the chalk outline of a child on the sidewalk. It looked like a crime scene. (I kept this thought to myself.) 

260.

Remember, all those eons ago, when we could all be outraged by the pardon of Rod Blagojevich? I saw him running a few days ago. He waved at me.
Me: Look at this asshole.

Beth: Shh. He’ll here you.

Me: Good. And, he’s like 200 yards away.

261.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a short story titled “Pestilence.” It follows a man who is a carrier of a deadly disease that doesn’t hurt him but kills other people. He is so contagious the government has imprisoned him in a cell beneath Washington, DC. He spends his days writing novels no one will ever read. Everything he touches is incinerated. Here’s the first line: “The cell, deep underground and monitored by dozens of large, unseen machines, consisted of a thirty by thirty space, a toilet hidden by a metal stall, two bookcases, a television, a computer, a small desk, and a small single bed. There were no insects, no foul smells.” Don’t ask to read it; it isn’t very good.

262.

The Lost Boys is one of the great movies from the 1980s. The teenagers as vampires metaphor is brilliant. They sleep all day, stay up all night, and parasitically live off their parents. Teenagers are vampires.

263.

The Lost Men is a metaphor, too. For the entire world we live in right now.

Covid-19 Diary, part 11: The shadows can’t save us (and they won’t even try)

228.

The death toll tops 10,000. There’s another sentence I never thought I’d write. 

229.

For the fuck of it, here are my favorite film noir movies: In a Lonely Place; The Maltese Falcon; Kiss Me Deadly; D.O.A.; Double Indemnity; Night and the City; Kansas City Confidential; Touchez pas au Grisbi; Touch of Evil; Murder by Contract; Chinatown;The Long Goodbye; and one of my all-time favorite movies, The Sweet Smell of Success. I try to watch it once a year. 

230.

I could just as easily say He Walks By Night; Dark City; Thieves’ Highway; The Dark Corner; This Gun for Hire; and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

231.

Noir ages well. I showed a group of eighth graders the first 20 minutes of The Maltese Falcon. They were riveted. 

232.

Film noir = fatalism, existential philosophy, German Expressionism, fast-talking dames, hard double slaps to underlings’ faces, post-war urban blues, loads of murder, an overabundance of avarice, and flashes of casual sadism. 

233.

Here’s my favorite line from Success: “From now on, the best of everything is good enough for me.” 

234.

In Tony Curtis’s mouth—he’s a hungry, ankle biter in the big city, trying to hustle up some scratch—the line is angry and arrogant, but shaded with desperation. He knows how hard the world really is.

235.

As the super-rich sunbathe and eat bon bons in their mansions, and the rest of us attempt to weather this national disaster, the line sounds ominous indeed.

236.

I’ve avoided the NYTimes today. I don’t know the new death toll numbers. I’m making a strawberry sauce on the stove, while Bernadette and Beth nap and Simone and Pearl are reading. I re-read Heart of Darkness this morning. 

237.

We are in better shape than most of the world. Syrian, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen are all in the middle of decades-long wars. North Korea is run by a deranged child, who as often as not starves his own people. We sit in our big homes, have our food delivered. There are no regular bombing raids, no bands of thieves or brigands. We don’t worry about our electricity or drinking water. We have access to Netflix and Amazon and Disney Plus. 

238.

Not Disney Plus. Not in this household. (Beth hates Disney. I’ll write about this later.)

239.

And, yet, we’re spiraling out of control and only fools would say otherwise. One headline read: “The U.S. is committing economic suicide.” Another: “200,000 dead a best-case scenario.” 

240.

There’s a line, in a great Billy Bragg song, “The third world is just around the corner.” 

 

Covid-19 Diary, part 10: Writing about Gilda to avoid the news.

199.

Beth: You always misquote me. Your blog would be a lot funnier if you quoted me correctly. Do you want me to record myself so you can get it right?

Me: Um, no?

200.

Things that make this pandemic bearable:

The Weeknd’s trashy 1980s dance music. I love it. Duke Ellington and John Coltrane’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Thinking of Lester Bangs in his cluttered apartment, writing about Van Morrison’s Moondance. Aretha Franklin. Beth’s indomitable sense of humor. The fact that my describing her as indomitable is certain to irritate her. My daughters and their energy and vitality, even when I want them to be neither seen nor heard. Emails from my friends. Playing guitar.  

201.

We watched The Perks of a Being a Wallflower with Simone and Pearl. The subject matter is . . . a tad adult for the kids. 

202.

A memory: We took them to see I, Tonya in the theater. Beth wanted to see it, both girls were taking ice skating at the park district, and it got good reviews. The movie is superb. It’s also outrageously inappropriate. The people at the theater were glowering at us when the movie was over. We were those parents. Pearl was six years old.

203.

One of the first movies I can remember was Class of 1984. I watched it on TV with my dad. It’s a great b-movie, about a gang of psychopathic teenagers who bedevil a music teacher. I was convinced it showed high school how it actually was. For years I thought getting stabbed in high school was a possibility. 

204.

Beth: I know the world is going to shit, but I’m turning 40 this year and I deserve a goddamn midlife crisis.

205.

Beth: You’re misquoting me. I sound like an idiot. I’m going to have to fact-check all your blog posts now.

206.

Beth: Coronavirus isn’t capitalized! 

207.

I’m supposed to be promoting a book I wrote. It’s titled The South Never Plays Itself. The release date is October. I spent five years researching and writing. 

208.

Here’s the first line: I was born in the South, but I was raised on movies.

209.

Beth encouraged me to write an essay on movies about pandemics. I wrote a paragraph then gave up. Here’s the first line: Perhaps I can recommend not watching movies about pandemics? There’s another essay I’ll never finish.

210.

Pearl turned 8 today. Beth made her a cheesecake last night. We were up until 3, letting it cool off. Not the best strategy to having a successful day.

211.

Bernadette woke up before 6. I took her into the living room. We watched the second half of Gilda. Bernadette normally doesn’t look at the TV, but she was entranced by Rita Hayworth singing and dancing, “Put the blame on Mame.” That made two of us.

212.

Hayworth was pregnant during filming. She plays Gilda, a reckless hustler who marries Ballin Mundson, a psychopathic gangster in Argentina. George Macready plays Ballin; he’s that great character actor with the huge scar across his face. 

213.

The movie begins with Ballin hiring a young street-smart gambler, Johnny Farrell, to run his casino. A young Glenn Ford plays Farrell, and he is drop-dead gorgeous.

214. 

Of course, Gilda and Johnny were a thing, and they each try to hide their past from Ballin. It’s a tense, intriguing movie, beautifully filmed by Charles Vidor. (Weirdly, Charles is not related to King Vidor.) There’s intrigue, a Tungsten monopoly, Nazis, a cane with a knife in it, and dozens of double entendres. 

215.

It’s a great movie, despite a misogynistic streak that humiliates Gilda, imprisons her, and culminates with Johnny hitting her in the face. 

216.

Rita Hayworth married Orson Welles in 1943. Like every other movie fan, I like Welles, but he had to be hell on a spouse. 

217.

Years ago, I wrote a novel about the movies titled The Taunting Light. It follows a group of 13 people invited to a dinner at a mansion and find themselves trapped inside. I conceived of it as a mix of Melmoth the Wanderer and The Exterminating Angel. They have to figure out why were invited. (I think it’s great, but the world doesn’t agree.)

218.

There’s a Hayworth character. Popular, desired, scrutinized, and then dropped. Aged out of parts. Forced into the netherworld that snags actors, especially women, as they get older. She’s lived in a world of fiction and masquerade for so long, she sees the other characters as they really are. 

219.

Here’s the first line: “And one day, without warning or context or reason, Fritz Lang was summoned to the thin man’s office.”

220.

Hayworth’s life had tragic dimensions. She had early onset Alzheimers at the age of 42. Can you imagine? 

221.

Gilda is her most famous film. People still remember The Lady from Shanghai and Pal Joey, too. Time was, she was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. 

222.

I’m writing about Gilda to avoid writing about other things. 

223.

We went out for a picnic as a family. Beth baked biscuits and we macerated chopped strawberries and made a big bowl of whipped cream. We brought crackers and cheese and salami—for everyone but me—and I brought a traveler’s mug of hot coffee

224.

The sky was astonishing, filled with a canvas of clouds, yet sunny. Simone and Pearl ran and did cartwheels and played with Bernadette. Despite our exhaustion, Beth and I tried to be in the birthday spirit. We mostly succeeded. 

225.

Me: I should take advantage of this pandemic to start drinking in earnest. 

Beth: Did you ever drink in earnest? 

226.

Beth: Your blog would be more popular if you could capture my awesome accents.

227.

Beth (in a hilarious southern drawl while snacking on walnuts): “Be-en, these nuts come straight from God. They are God’s nuts. You need to appre-shiate God’s nuts.”

Covid-19 Diary, part 9: William Burroughs willed the pandemic into being.

175.

Can you imagine being an addict right now?

176.

I’ve never really liked William Burroughs. I think Junky is a lean 1950s masterpiece, but it isn’t really a novel. As his books become more “literary,” they get worse and worse. His last few novels are unreadably terrible. I despise the cut-up technique, where the original meaning of the text is destroyed. Still, he has acolytes, among them a lot of writers I admire.

177.

I had to read Naked Lunch four or fives times before I gave the audiobook a try. Only then did it make any sense to me at all.

178.

Me: What’d you get mad at Pearl for?

Beth: Oh, you know.

179.

David Cronenberg adapted it into a very odd film. There’s a typewriter with a human butthole—that it speaks out of—and a stripped down clapboard aesthetic. In some ways, the movie is weirder than the book. Cronenberg and Burroughs—there’s a marriage made in some netherworld. 

180.

If you read into Burroughs at all, he’s a very sinister figure. He called his cut-up technique a type of disruptive sorcery, a way of breaking down barriers between different realities. He was trying to maim the world. 

181.

At a party in Mexico, he also shot Joan Vollmer, his second wife, in the head, killing her. He claimed it was a failed William Tell act. He later admitted that this murder jumpstarted his writing career.

182.

Burroughs: “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and no accidents.” 

183.

Patti Smith is infatuated with Burroughs, and it shows in her lyrics. Her great memoir, Just Kids, details how to be an artist and poor. Or, rather, how the two are linked. (Don’t worry; there’s plenty of drug use, too.)

184.

Herbert Hunke was a drug-using hustler who fell in with Keroauc, Cassidy, Snyder, Diane Di Prima and the rest. By all accounts, he’s the guy who introduced heroine into their circle. (He also wrote an unforgettable short story, “In the Park,” that will break your heart.)

185.

Me: I’ve got it! Alone at Home. The third movie in the Home Alone trilogy. It has a grown-up Kevin, in a giant mansion, all alone while the pandemic rages outside. He spends his days walking around, revisiting memories. Maybe someone tries to break in. There’s no dialogue, he watches the news, he checks his email, he tries to skype with his family. That’s the whole film.

Pearl: And then he dies at the end.

Me: Right! The last fifteen minutes is just a closeup of his face as he struggles to breathe.

Beth: The whole movie is flashbacks?

Me: No, the movie just follows him around, bored and scared, for two hours. It’s basically an art movie.

Beth: Sounds . . . really good.

186.

I read Trainspotting in 1997. It was as revelatory as the movie. A druggy, often hallucinatory novel written in a Scottish patois. I was an Irvine Welsh man for a couple of years afterwards.

187.

After Claude is a great drug novel. Written by Iris Owens, it’s also, in essence, non-fiction, about partiers in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. It’s a strange and wonderful piece of writing. Drugs are used to dominate and manipulate women.

188.

The Ginger Man isn’t really about drugs at all, but squalor. J.P. Donleavy was an American expatriate living in Ireland. He out-writes most of the Irish writers we celebrate, but only—as far as I can tell—with this novel. If James Joyce toned down some of the more obscure references, and wrote about drunks in Ireland in the late 1950s, you’d have the flavor of this funny, horrifying novel. (Gary Gilmore, the killer in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, mentions The Ginger Man as one of his favorite books.)

189.

There’s something about your life being boiled down to a single need. That’s the appeal of the drug story. The junkie who lives for one thing: the next hit.

190.

With the sheltering in place and the soaring death toll, where does a junkie go?

191.

Junkies are often powerless. They require movement for their scheming. They have only their charm and diminishing cleverness to satiate their hunger.

192.

That hunger easily fills any number of metaphors, especially for being alive.

193.

Beth: I didn’t just develop mental retardation with the spread of the Corona Virus.

Me: Who said anything about “develop?”

(Beth leaves the room.)

Me: You can’t develop something you already have!

(Beth doesn’t respond.)

Me (going into our bedroom): Why aren’t you laughing at that sweet burn?

Beth: (pause) That was pretty good, actually.

194.

A thousand years ago I wrote a short story about Hunke, lost on some former hard drive. He rips off some of his writer buddies and heads out for Texas. It wasn’t very good. I’ve never been a junkie, save for my coffee addiction. I don’t really understand the sullying, overriding need.

195.

1,000 New Yorkers died overnight—one thousand people in a single day. 

196.

Burroughs often writes about pestilence and disease, viruses that spiral out of control. His misanthropy gives his books a repugnant jolt. He saw language itself as an alien virus that passes from one generation to the next. Language is alive, and a parasite feeding off its human hosts.

197.

Burroughs would interpret Covid-19 as some kind of necromantic revenge, the dead finally figuring out a way to avenge themselves on the living. Or as language itself separating from its human hosts. 

198.

I can see Burroughs, craggy-faced and lanky, standing in a hazmat suit while spraying clouds of synthetic cleaner, waltzing around the desolate Times Square, his ancient features illuminated by the flashing neon. He would have admired the malicious simplicity of the ongoing national tragedy.