Weeknotes: September 8–12, 2025
Monday, September 8
Out my window a moving van crawls up the street delivering city-issued trash bins. Another large, unnecessary plastic object in my life. A crewman yanks a pair of them off the truck and rolls them my way. I run outside in my slippers to refuse (pun intended) one of them. Just because this address has two units doesn't mean we have space for two giant receptacles. And what do we do with our old, perfectly functional bin? It's a minor event that somehow sets a weird tone for the rest of the day.
I learn that an old friend from high school has died. She had been battling metastatic breast cancer for what seemed like an eternity, trying every experimental treatment available and enduring horrific pain while putting up a courageous public front. I've never seen anyone fight so hard just to live. Truly incredible. She entered hospice last week and I thought she'd have weeks instead of just days. You never know. Her husband is one of my oldest childhood friends, now a widower with six kids. It's going to be a rough road.
Weeknotes: October 21–25, 2024
Monday, October 21
Battleground state fatigue. Two weeks unil the election and it's just a relentless slog of unwanted emails, texts, and TV ads. I listen to Death's classic debut Scream Bloody Gore over coffee and oatmeal. I hope it's not a harbinger of the violence we're all afraid will occur after November 5.
I remember when my brother first bought this album on cassette in the late-'80s. We were power metal guys (Iron Maiden, Helloween, Fate's Warning) and had never heard death metal. Jamie was already into punk and some thrash. He bought it because it seemed audacious and kind of funny. A band called Death with a bunch of skeletons in robes drinking wine on the cover. I was about ten or eleven and they were pretty heavy for me, but I was still rapt whenever he put them on. It was kind of scary and exciting, like when he gave me his Walkman and told me to go into the closet, turn off the lights, and listen to "In the Beginning" by Mötley Crüe. Shout at the Devil sounds lightweight now, but there was some great glam-Satanist theater to that intro that really tapped into the zeitgeist of the era.
I went to the John Williams pops concert over the weekend. I took my mom; we had a pub dinner then went to the symphony. Very classy. Honestly, it was one of the most transformative concerts I've seen in years. Even more than power metal, John Williams' film scores are the true music of my youth. They go straight into that special part of my soul where hope and green things live. My face hurt from smiling so hard and when I wasn't smiling I was crying, especially during the Superman march, Star Wars end credits, and E.T. theme. Damon Gupton was the guest conductor and proved to be an effective showman and emcee. Some of the players had costumes on; a few witch hats, a toy shark affixed to the top of the harp. We thought they were going to hold out and deny us the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme (we'd have gone all Scream Bloody Gore on them), but of course it was the encore. The joy of life was in that room.