Since I woke up with a kicker of a headache that carried over from yesterday afternoon and in that time has since spread from above my left orbit to all across my forehead like a neon sign flashing PAIN, I’m going to do my best not only to accomplish the list of creative, physical and prcedural things I need to do today (and this week), but accentuate the continuing positive of my to-date 36-pound reduction in the form of a line graph captured over on fitday.com that charts my ongoing downward progress. Instead of “line graph” I prefer to refer to it as staircase on happy acid:
I also want to share with you this passage by John Fante in his Ask The Dust, which I’m currently marveling my awestruck way through:
But down on Main Street, down on Towne and San Pedro, and for a mile lower on Fifth Street were the tens of thousands of others; they couldn’t afford sunglasses or a four-bit polo shirt and they hid in the alleys by day and slunk off to flop houses by night. A cop won’t pick you up for vagrancy in Los Angeles if you wear a fancy polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses. But if there is dust on your shoes and that sweater is thick like the sweaters they wear in the snow countries, he’ll grab you. So get yourselves a polo shirt boys, and a pair of sunglasses, and white shoes, if you can. Be collegiate. It’ll get you anyway. After a while, after big doses of the Times and the Examiner, you too will whoop it up for the sunny south. You’ll eat hamburgers year after year and live in dusty, vermin-infested apartments and hotels, but every morning you’ll see the mighty sun, the eternal blue of the sky, and the streets will be full of sleek women you never will possess, and the hot semi-tropical nights will reek of romance you’ll never have, but you’ll still be in paradise, boys, in the land of sunshine.
I feel like a student showing up 25 years late to meet his mentor. Fante wrote that in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty Nine. Sixty-seven years ago. It’s truer today than it was than.
And lookee-there! My headache’s gone. Time to get some crap done.
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