I was hungry and I ate and a man took my trumpet

1. We had a more traditional Christmas after all: eggnog as a public event did not happen, but in the late afternoon my brother fetched us from Somerville and we had an evening with family, our two-and-a-half-week-old niece included. There was lamb and scallops and leftover roast beef and an artichoke spread I tore into and several weird cheeses and a plum pudding on fire as is only proper, this year mostly comprised of cherries, figs, candied orange and lemon peel, and some stray and confused pineapple, but it flamed beautifully and I ate all the bits I like with whipped cream. derspatchel and I watched The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945) and correctly diagnosed it as a film that had suffered substantial rearrangement after shooting, although its original cut might still have sunk like a rock eight days after FDR's death. Pieces of it work brilliantly (and weirdly foreshadow Wim Wenders' work with angels pulled into the world for one reason or another, whether it's love or temptation or impulsive altruistic acts that go all wrong). There are some lovely quirks of Heaven, here the popular bureaucracy of the 1940's: "Assessor of Asteroids . . . Vice-President in Charge of Tomorrow . . . Department of Small Planet Management." The cast is full of character turns and faces, Jack Benny's peerless falsetto crack as his mild-mannered angel Athanael, sent to earth with Gabriel's trumpet and a page of instructions he lost on the way down, finds the task of blowing the Last Trump possibly out of his pay grade after all. Pieces of it are just not as funny as they need to be. Harold Lloyd hangs off a building better than anyone else in cinema, I'm sorry, and Raoul Walsh as a director did not have the slapstick chops to compete with him. I am almost willing to bet the frame story was added at the last minute, because other than getting the script out of the corner it topples itself into, I can't figure out what it's doing there (the payoff to the Paradise Coffee joke is good; the setup is unnecessary). The film was still a delight to watch, especially in the way of B-movies: the performances, the effects, what works, what doesn't. And I can't think of very many comedies that have the audience rooting for their hapless hero to prove himself a success by demolishing the planet, so there's that, too.

2. Yuletide is still fun this year, too. Have some stories! I am nowhere near done with the archive.

( He told me I lost when I failed to identify the chambermaid. )

3. The first night I spent with Rob, I slept and it amazed me. I never slept well with anyone. I barely slept well by myself: adding another person to the environment just made everything worse. It was important for me to be able to share a bed, emotionally, but it was rarely physically comfortable or in some cases possible at all. (This sentence heavily edited for Tiny Wittgenstein.) Some weeks ago I had occasion to spend a night in Lexington and realized it was suddenly strange not to expect Rob beside me at some point in the night, whether he was coming to bed after me or the other way around; nights together rather than apart had become the rule only in September, when I moved to Hall Ave. for six weeks before we came here, but already it was a familiar thing. Now we've had to set up the second mattress on the floor in the bedroom, because we both can't fit comfortably into the actual bed with his foot in a splint and needing to be carefully elevated and not jostled during the night, and even though we are in the same room and can say goodnight to each other and I can reach out in the middle of the night and find him if I am willing to lever myself out of the warmth of the spare blankets and wake a person on opiates, I am finding it surprisingly disorienting. I did not think I would become accustomed so quickly to something that always gave me trouble. I suppose it is another good reason we're together, but that ankle had better heal soon.