The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
…one a bit too long for Twitter, so I’m stashing it here. I’d like to see a law passed whereby no presidential candidate who had not qualified for the ballot on states totalling at least 270 electoral votes was allowed to be on any ballot. The minimum threshold should be “theoretically capable of winning.”
That is all.
I got nothing. Except this donkey:
Macklemore Donkey is life. Goodnight.
I was unstoppable today, guys. I interacted with fourteen customers and sold things to eleven of them. My per-ticket could have been better, but after the disaster that was September, it’s nice to feel good at my job for once.
(Note: I have never seen Glengarry Glen Ross in its entirety. Or even any part other than that one. But I’ve seen that clip a million times.)
Now, that said, selling furniture and furniture-related products and services to strangers was basically all my day consisted of. My wife and I have discovered Black Mirror, and we’re watching the second episode of the first season right now. I’m sure I’ll have stuff to say about that in the near future, because so far the show is damn impressive.
I have a decent chance at a record week if I have a good Sunday. So, like, come out and buy things. Expensive things. I will get money and you will have expensive things. Ain’t that America?
One of the more underrated aspects of the recent Netflix Luke Cage miniseries was the attention it paid to black literature. In particular, a conversation about author Donald Goines during one episode instantly sold me four of his books– and by instantly, I mean I literally opened the Amazon app on my phone and ordered the books in between scenes. Goines’ Kenyatta series– Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta’s Escape, and Kenyatta’s Last Hit, have been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of weeks now waiting for me to finish the Hamilton biography and get to them.
I read all four of them today and yesterday. It sounds like an accomplishment, but they’re not very long– only Last Hit tops 200 pages– and I’ve been off from work.
Imagine Conan, but written in the 1970s– dear God, there is nothing more 1970s than these books– and set in the ghettos of Detroit and Los Angeles instead of Cimmeria, and you actually have a pretty good idea of what these books are like. The prose is occasionally, to put it mildly, terrible– see the excerpt above– but the books have so much energy and passion to them that I couldn’t put any of them down. Goines’ literary career lasted something like five years and he released over a dozen books during that time before being found shot to death in his home. I hate to bring in a Hamilton reference again, but it’s appropriate: the man wrote like he was running out of time, and his Wikipedia entry speculates that he wrote to stave off heroin addiction. The Kenyatta series is frantically-paced in the best way; it’s as if Goines physically needed to get the story out of him as best he could and barely glanced at it before moving on to the next one.
Think about checking them out, is what I’m saying, even if the page above makes you cringe. Do it anyway.
…preventing this from being a perfect Saturday is the fact that it’s Thursday. That said, lounging about all day in jeans and a hoodie, reading two and a half entire books, and finishing the day with salmon and mashed potatoes for dinner is basically nothing but win.
Curled up with a Percocet last night, and I’m able to stand and walk around normally now. No idea what the deal was.
I’m also a chapter away from finishing Ron Chernow’s 800+-page biography of Alexander Hamilton, which has me hugely excited; I’ve loved the book, but it’s taken me forever to read and I’ve been seriously jonesing for fiction again lately. I’ve not stopped buying books in the meantime and I have at least one novella to read so that I can interview the author about it. I mean, it would be kinda rude to write the interview questions without reading the book, y’know? I probably shouldn’t do that.
Also happening right now: there is baseball on my television. I’ve never been a Cubs fan– if I was forced at gunpoint to pick a favorite baseball team, it would be the White Sox or maybe the Pirates for irrelevant and ridiculous reasons, and while I’ve been to both Sox and Cubs games I have never been to Wrigley Field. But hey: Chicago’s still my city and always will be, so I probably ought to watch at least a few innings somewhere in there.
I kinda love the helmet that at least a couple of the Cubs are using, that curls around and covers the jaw and the mouth. I imagine you only have to have one 90 MPH pitch come near your face before wearing such a thing becomes a good idea. At any rate, the Cubs are up 4-0, so I’m choosing to believe that I’m lucky.
But yeah, back to the Hamilton biography: you should read it, if you’re partial to such things and the idea of reading a book you could easily beat a small rodent to death with appeals to you. Chernow is an engaging and talented writer, and that’s not with the curve adjusted for “historian.” Hamilton, of course, is an endlessly fascinating historical figure– while I agree that the musical is awesome, it would have had trouble being as cool as it is without someone of his caliber at the center of it.
On the TV, right now, the commentators are focusing a lot of attention on the length of someone’s pant legs, which strikes me as another reason why baseball may actually not be a sport. I don’t know why that guy needs a tailor as bad as he does or why it’s something I need to know about, but it’s happening right now. Also, it’s impressive but not particularly surprising how many Cubs fans are in attendance at this game. They’ve scored while I was writing this, and it sounds like a home game out there.
So take your pick, I guess: go Cubbies, or go read a book. You choose.
This is going to be another one of those posts where my mother and my aunt call me the next day to make sure I haven’t died since the last time I wrote anything. It happens about once a week, maybe. I don’t know what the hell the deal is, whether it’s the change in the weather or maybe I tweaked something while unloading the sofa truck this morning (I can recall one particular insanely heavy power sofa where I felt like I was hitting my knees pretty hard on way down the ramp) or what, but every attempt to stand up from a seated position today resulted in crippling fucking pain in my right hip and right leg. Like, sitting for a minute meant two minutes of standing before I was able to walk. Godfuckingawful. The weird thing is that so long as I’m still there’s no pain at all; I kind of want to take a thousand pain pills before I go to bed tonight but right now as I’m sitting on the couch typing this I’m fine. I’m going to have to bite my tongue to keep from screaming when I stand up in a bit, mind you, but right now I’m fine.
It would probably help if I wasn’t as heavy as I am. Then again, my knees have been screwed up my entire life– comparing my footprints to other people’s in the snow has always been funny, because mine are the ones at a much wider angle than anyone else’s– and sooner or later the fact is the fuckers are getting replaced. I just wish that was a surgery that could be done electively rather than in fifteen years when my patellas have ground to dust and my joints are in splinters.
But, hey. Something to look forward to.
I talked about this briefly last night, but at this point there’s no longer any doubt: I think I’m over The Walking Dead as a franchise. We’ve pretty much entirely bailed on Fear the Walking Dead, having not watched a single episode of the second season, and I watched the Season 7 of the main show premiere last night, and I think it probably should have kicked my ass. That show’s sent my heartrate through the roof on any number of occasions and not a single thing that happened in that episode did anything for me at all. The comic book hasn’t been interesting in months either. I’ll definitely finish out the current storyline just in case it gets better but I may have to be done after that.
I may write a longer post about this tomorrow or during my weekend sometime, but: I liked the Fox remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show quite a bit. I kind of feel like making that a longer post, though, so more on it later.
…but I’m not happy about it. I’m sure I will be very very angry about it really soon but I’ll probably be too tired tonight to rant properly.
‘Twas a good day at work, but I’ve only just gotten home and what with the immediate watching of horrifyingly violent television I’ve not had much of a chance to absorb the news of the day. What do we know, folks?
EDIT: Son of a bitch. Sheri Tepper died. Fuck 2016.
SECOND EDIT: Pretty sure I could be completely done with that show and be perfectly happy at this point.
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