If I have stuff to write, then why don't I just write it for me?

The Harry Morgan train has officially pulled into the M*A*S*H station.

Me: "I can't watch seven seasons of M*A*S*H! I won't have any time! I won't have any focus! I won't have any retinas!"

spatch: "You don't have to watch seven seasons of M*A*S*H!"

Me: "But I'm going to run out of film noir!"

(Topper: it's eight seasons, counting inclusively.)

Me: "I never had this problem with Van Heflin!"

But I think that ruins have beauty

Yesterday while a family member was in the hospital for a scheduled surgery and I could do nothing except wait to hear the results (it went well), I went for a walk and photographed flowering things.

( I wish I were born a stone. )

In the evenings I have been staring at movies with hot compresses over each eye in turn. I had never seen Dennis O'Keefe pre-noir and would not recommend Burn 'Em Up O'Connor (1939) as an introduction despite its macabrely unraveling murder plot, but The Chaser (1938) is a delightful exposition of rules-lawyering in an pre-Code atmosphere of everyone working an angle and chief among them O'Keefe as the kind of fast-talk charmer whose ambulance-chasing comes with fifty-year-old statutes up its sleeves in the event of needing to fight an unjust transit authority, which is a very relatable fantasy if you have tried to catch a bus lately. Plotwise I have almost nothing to say about The Omaha Trail (1942) except that its conceit of a literal wagon train—the transportation of a locomotive by ox train—is cute and its villain's reasons for sabotaging it are especially capitalist, but it starred Pamela Blake and Howard da Silva was in the supporting cast and Harry Morgan in his first year on film was already doing one of his quiet little enforcers and I just felt attacked. I tried to watch Love Letters (1945) for Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones and tapped out because while it may have been inevitable that someone would write Cyrano de Bergerac darkfic, why did it have to be Ayn Rand?

Tonight I found out that I am part of a display of Lethe Books at the Imaginary Bookshop in Greenfield and I'm pretty happy about it.