What if I said she's down below?

Today has been surprisingly strange and hectic. I made it to the Brattle's second and last showing of Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), which I hope to write about, because it is a genuinely weird little film and way more like some of the pulp novels I've been reading than many noir movies with similar origins, and derspatchel came over afterward and we made omelets for dinner. I wrote a poem in the afternoon. Otherwise the major events of my day involved slogging out and back to the MassHealth office in Chelsea for the second day in a row, this time for reasons it was logistically impossible for me to discover were unnecessary until I got there; finding out that a dear friend of mine has had a stroke, which is especially eerie because I was thinking of him this afternoon; and needing to call the building super shortly after midnight because the igniters in the stovetop spontaneously started striking and wouldn't stop, meaning the refrigerator had to be moved and the stove unplugged before it blew the apartment out its own windows. Also we went to Target.

I wished I'd had a camera with me on the way to Chelsea: crossing the Alford Street Bridge over the Mystic, I saw a red-and-black cargo ship drawn up alongside what looked like an enormous pile of scrap metal. The name lettered on her stern was the White Pearl and her home port looked like Nassau; I thought she was taking on a load of scrap, but then I second-guessed myself because I don't know that area of Everett at all and while I could tell that it was industrial and full of cranes and loading docks in ways that reminded me of the Portland waterfront of my childhood, I had no actual idea what I was looking at. She was indeed the White Pearl from Nassau and she is currently moored in Boston, specifically at the metals recycling yard, port, and regional office of Schnitzer Steel in Everett. I am delighted.

So my brush with commercial shipping and the movie and dinner and the fact that I have finally purchased a light-blocking curtain on a spring-tension rod so that I am no longer woken every day at dawn by an irradiating blast of sunlight from the east-facing window were all good things and I need to remember them. But everything else about today, what the hell.