Dear ghosts of empty bleachers and reluctant sports channel subscribers:
Some ridiculous distractions from this week:
Why is a vision coverage explanation in 4 point font?
During the Olympic gymnastics competition, why are gigantic TV’s overhead? The stadia are empty. Why not turn off the TV? It has to be distracting for the athletes.
Likewise, who are these solo people that walk around in the empty balconies during the floor exercises? they don’t seem to be photographers, they’re not watching. Why are they walking around up there?
There was an automated phone tree recording that said ‘just a second’ and then played typing sounds as though that could trick me into thinking this recorded voice was actually typing (why? why?????)
Who designed the medical insurance claims form that says to “see the back of your insurance card” for mailing address? Why do this? The complaint address is on the form, but not the place to submit the claim.
Tennis playing women have long been castigated for wearing long pants and recently Norway’s women’s beach volleyball team was fined for wearing pants at all, all while men are caught with their pants down at work and not fired. (He’s back to work!) Meanwhile, rhythmic gymnastics seems to require feathered loincloths.
I took a photo of a seriously creepy bug and asked Twitter to ID it, and it turned out to be an invasive species: The Spotted Lanternfly. I will spare you the photograph of the textured carapace and shiny black bug legs, but suffice it to say that this upscale cockroach is not one that I want taking over Manhattan. I have seen two more (one was dead) since the initial ID, and now I don’t know what to do because I keep finding them!
Two guys from my building, each armed with plungers, each simultaneously plunged one drain in the double sink in my kitchen. This did not clear the pipe, instead it broke the pipe which had been weakened by Liquid Plumber sitting in it. (For the record, tell your teens not to dump food scraps and grease down your normal sinks, and if they do, never use Liquid Plumber, especially if you live in an old building. The new acid formulas eat through old pipes faster than through grease. Instead: put baking soda and vinegar down the sink and let it sit overnight, then run boiling water over it.)
Olympic rock climbing is something crazy to watch: there’s speed climbing which looks like CGI from a martial arts film and then there’s something called bouldering and it is basically Spider Man without the webs…if you have a subscription to some channel that shows these sports, you’ve got to see them.
1)Rhythmic gymnasts are better at overall gymnastics than the apparatus gymnasts.
2) Artistic swimming looks about a gazillion times harder than speed swimming.
Ergo, I put before you: it is time for artistic, rhythmic basketball (bring back those Harlem Globetrotters) and synchronized discus throwing. (also RIP “Curly” Neal who died in 2020 at the age of 77 after bringing joy to gazillions of kids everywhere and not a few adults.)
DESPITE ALL THIS, I WAS RATHER PRODUCTIVE THIS WEEK
I got a villanelle accepted by Limp Wrist Magazine which should be in their all-villanelle issue this September.
I worked long and hard on a new draft of my satiric dystopian novel. (My family is all out of town so I am getting in some amazingly long writing sessions!)
I went to see Shakespeare in the Park and wrote an essay about the lottery process. (The play was terrific, even if “Merry Wives” was a 90 minute abridged and rewritten version. SO enjoyable to see live theater. Great acting, I particularly enjoyed the outright glee which Jacob Ming-Trent brought to the updated character Falstaff.)
The Medium publication, “Life and the Performing Arts.” almost immediately requested the essay as a reprint. I said sure!
Published an article about the various vocabulary words that I learned while researching the places-formerly-known-as-nursing-homes for my uncle. It’s called “The Shocking Way Kind Words Can Hurt Old People.” (Some crazy information here, and you can all thank Dorothy Papadakos that it isn’t all in this newsletter. We went out for Thai and I realized that my musings on the messy vocabulary of retirement facilities was better suited to an article than a newsletter. Read it here. Share it with anyone you know who might benefit )
The new story collection, A Fire to Light Our Tongues, is FINALLY being published in Spring 2022 by TCU Press! I was first invited to contribute in early 2019. The contract is now signed and editing is at last in progress. My story “Baptism” is a doozy!
Speaking of invitations, I should have a new strange story in a Halloweenish anthology forthcoming in 2022 (I just sent it off per request; hopefully the editor liked it!)
That’s it. I leave you with a thought brought about by writing that Medium article about nursing homes. There are so many things that make all humans the same, from our phlegms, blood and bile, to the fact that we’re all going to die. And so what is it that makes us so utterly squeamish about talking about these things?? Why is it that the more common the biological event, the less comfortable we feel discussing it?