one thing today

My fab nephew came into town today with his Julia and Ari and Annetta. We hung out at the Farmers Market and they almost adopted a foster mutt.   We watched a guy ride a bicycle while balancing a garbage can and a truck tire on his head.   H e was outdone by his buddy who ate an enormous container of cheese balls. He was the hit of the afternoon. We played in the park and the kids ate SpongeBob ice cream bars before they drove back to the Garden State.

  I can’t dispel you from my thoughts -  Burton says to Taylor in  The Sandpiper  - on right now on TCM … a super cheesey Minnelli pic with beautiful vistas and a made up studio built cabin right on the coast where she paints and poses and seduces anyone she chooses to    … she’s kind of stumpy but with a face that … well, you know … there’s a scene at Nepenthe -    an exotic restaurant in Big Sur where PCG and I had a drink one dark night before we kissed on an overlook while listening to laughing elephant whales down below playing in the crashing waves     … a brand new sound that promised more promise ... Orson Welles built the place for his new bride Rita Hayworth -   I embedded two boyfriends in Big Sur, one at a time … what times … ruminatin’ today about movie star life for real once upon a time a long time ago for a moment.   

When Carol Burnett was eighteen she was an usherhette at a movie house in Hollywood. During that time, it was very common for audience members to enter anytime during the movie. When  Strangers on a Train was playing she barred a couple from entering the theater five minutes before it ended. She was immediately fired. Years later, when she received her star on The Walk of Fame she requested it be placed in front of the theater and when the building was demolished her husband bought the door she wouldn’t allow the couple to pass through. She also has a poster of Strangers on a Train in her home inscribed by Hitch himself. His message - sorry about your job.  

  The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.   -Philip Larkin

  ...  comes from the word desiderare , meaning to long for. Connections between desiderium and nostalgia have also been drawn; the former can be seen as expressing the latter for things that can't be experienced any more, or things that someone may have never experienced themselves. Paul Simon's The Only Living Boy in New York City  always makes me feel that way. I was as old when I first heard it at twenty as I am today. Maybe older. 

  I haven’t been to Mantiques in a very long time.   I thought it was closed and gone.   It’s a strange concept - a store full of manly antiques for the manly man. Lots of steel and wood and sharp edges and oddity. There are lots of things there I’d like to own but don’t need. Some things I don’t know what they are or what they do. Lots of good foto ops and very tight lipped proprietors who often make a call to some cryptic somewhere antiquelord for a price quote. It’s a fun place to visit.  

  ... to start jury duty today. I postponed it until July - after June at the beach. I wonder if I would have been  the 96th person to be dismissed on the Trump Stormy Daniels dirty dancing deal.  They're finding it difficult to find impartial individuals. Duh.