That’s the color the Wife has me putting on the walls at Twin Brooks. When I’m done, I get to do the ceilings and the cedar siding. At least I don’t have to hit the exercise equipment. Speaking of which, I remain amazed that I’m just as shredded from a day of painting as I am from raking leaves. Weird.
We had some Yuengling and wings at the Buffalo’s on HP Road afterward and watched the last half of the Vikings game. This is the headquarters for the Minnesota fans and they were not happy. Several Atlanta fans enjoyed the loss. Arriving home, the Wife repaired to the bedroom to finish a book she was reading. I moved a chair and ottoman in front of the big screen and watched the Panthers lose. With all the commercials, I switched to other things.
Waiting for my food to digest so I could go to bed Saturday night, I caught the last hour of Ride With the Devil on TCM. How I missed this movie before is beyond me. We recently canceled our Blockbuster account because they sent us shit instead of the stuff we asked for. Still, I don’t remember seeing this when we traded in the drek for watchable films.
One of the things I’ve been enjoying are the Hitler documentaries on the Discovery Channel. The Third Reich has been an interest since I was an adolescent. In the intervening decades since, not much has changed. I, apparently like some others, find the notion of Tom Cruise as Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg laughable, at the very least. Despite some very good Mission Impossible films, Cruise does not possess the necessary gravitas. Matt Damon would have been a better choice and this guy would’ve been perfect.
I realize I promised an account of Chickamauga and the book awaits. However, I have for a long time wanted to read Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. I’ve seen the film adaptation of his other book, Tobacco Road, and it offers no great mystery, paralleling the lives of my sawmill grandfathers’ lives closely.
Not content as a student of the apocalypse to look only to the past, I also wanted to read Cormick McCarthy’s The Road. I ran the gauntlet of Christmas shoppers at Barnes and Noble and found both in paperback. Stay tuned.
23:00: I’ve read about 70 pages of God’s Little Acre. A part of me, not of flesh and blood, but genetic memory, spectates and I can almost feel my chromosomes resonate with the tale of the cotton mill shutting down and people getting by in the mill shacks on nothing more than a sack of flour. My parents never told us these stories, but I heard the whispers as a child, of living on beans and cornbread for years at a time. I also know about Caldwell’s references to the men driven mad by desperation and their knowledge that the women were better creatures, more fit and desirable for employment. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that my condition is nothing new at all. The challenge for me is to behave better than my uncles and grandfathers did in their time.
There was a mean trick played on us somewhere. God put us in the bodies of animals and tried to make us act like people. – Ty Ty Walden
I know now that I shall also have to read Tobacco Road.
if you liked No Country for Old Men and used your deductible up for therapy after the CoenBros screen version, then you must read Blood Meridian and receive your token to the real dark side after being introduced to the Judge. McCarthy has created the two most unredeemable characters in literature. They fly past Iago, cut off his head and shit in his neck.
Have not read it, yet. Saw the movie and loved it. Read a Rolling Stone article on McCarthy about that time. Read one Noam Chomsky, but am more hopeful for Cormick.