July 8, 2025

Hot days punctuated by thunderstorms. My patchwork weeding continues. Found the Ur-version of Jason of the Apes, turned it into a short story.

Maeve

 

July 7, 2025

MT facebooks me a photo of himself atop Knocknarea, with the message: Thinking of you, David. Thank you for lighting a fire within me. Thank you for teaching me about Yeats. Queen Maeve says Hello.

Fireworks

 July 5, 2025

More fireworks tonight than last night, including a huge fusillade from Grove Park, partially visible through my trees. Last night girls (by the sound of it) from the other corner of Lakeshore set off fireworks across from my drive. When they were done I shouted “Thank you!” and they shouted back “You’re welcome!” I was happy listening to the explosions and reverberations from my front porch, the waxing moon making his way across the west. 

Another huge day of weeding, maybe more strenuous than yesterday, though the results less visible, because the job far more massive. Two weeks of neglect returns the plot to wilderness. 

Tired eyes. I want to paint, but not to prepare the canvas. 

Dinosaurs

 July 4, 2025

The most tragic and hypocritical Independence Day of my life time. I would take up arms, if I could, if I had any, if I knew where to aim first. 

Ingegneri on Pandora. 

DJ and R and I to Asheville Pizza last night to see the latest Jurassic Park film. In terms of storytelling (and of acting) the best of the lot, perhaps because, as DJ pointed out, Spielberg’s hand was off it. A large family sat next to us. The youngest boy (I’d guess about 4) was clearly too young to watch monsters devouring people twenty feet tall fifty feet away. He climbed from his seat into his father’s lap and said “I don’t like this movie.” I lost track of that drama until R stiffened beside me and said, “He just slapped that child across the face.” I don’t know what I would have done by myself, but R’s indignation aroused mine. We left little doubt that we had seen and it would not go unremarked. The father’s response was, “I’ll do what I want with my own family.” The answer to that was, of course, “No you won’t. At least not in public.” The wife said “We’ve taken care of our own problem,” but they hadn’t counted on R’s moral sense. I’m not sure of the sequence of events, but R went to the lobby to call the police. The father confronted him there, strutting about like the redneck coward bully he revealed himself to be (you are a coward and a bully to strike a four-year-old in the face, whatever the provocation). R did call the police, who came with Child Services in tow. I got this from employees standing around discussing it when the crowd exited, and later in DJ’s phone call to R.  At one point I assumed there would be fisticuffs between me and the young and very fit father. Thank God the wife was sitting between us. But I was happy with the mood in my mind, which was absolute fearlessness and readiness for whatever came. Part of my character was wasted, I think, in a basically tranquil life. 

Heroic weeding in the first half of the day, a visible dent in the work that needs to be done. 

Prom King

 July 3, 2025

The painting that moved me so in the Frick was The Purification of the Temple. KS is the beautiful delicate boy in the Glass House.  Wikipedia reveals he is 32 and has had a far bigger career than I imagined (having gotten his age so wrong as well). I’m glad I didn’t use the phrase “very promising” to one whose life is already in full bloom. Though he still lists High School Prom King among his credits. 

 July 2, 2025

Part of my feeling terrible yesterday was the onslaught of phlebitis, which after the strain and stress was quite expectable, which I caught in time to head off with the magic pills. The lesson I keep learning is that the bad feelings are never age (which of course is what I think it is) but the disease gathering in my vessels. 

Sat on my porch last night to revel in the difference between my garden and Times Square. On the capital of one of the columns was a fuzzy shape I took to be a bird nestling for the night. It was gone this morning, so whatever it was it was mobile. 

Lilly's

 

July 1, 2025

Home, planted upstairs in the blast of my fan. My last night in New York proved sweet. A little stroll (one block off 8th Avenue and it’s a neighborhood, sedate and picturesque) supper at Lilly’s on 9th with a waiter, Michael.  from Dublin. Incredibly, a firefly flickered and fluttered in the Paramount Hotel bar. My bartender was an immigrant from Bangladesh, who said the problems in his life were caused by the people poorer than he, who sucked away resources which might otherwise go to him and his struggling family.  The Republican strategy of making the poor blame the poorer rather than turning the right direction and blaming the rich has worked utterly, unaccountably. I couldn’t even form a sentence to counter him, so passionate and ingrained was his conviction. Quite dark dreams before waking and taking the plane, with minimal event, home. My body aches with a not quite definable ache– maybe just exhaustion. Lawn has not been cut. Hope Tony was not seized by ICE.