Not exactly killing my retirement chores
As I write this on Monday, it’s been a year now since I doddered into retirement, and yet here I am working on the day before Election Day, which means I don’t even know who won yet, so I’m not sure if I’m going to wind up dancing naked in the street or filling my pockets with rocks and walking into the sea.
I plan on sitting with my wife and a carboy of Bombay out in the Barn flipping madly between MSNBC and FOX (I’m nothing if not open-minded) and enjoying Trump’s victory speech regardless of such trivialities as the vote count.
That’s really the only thing on my near-future to-do list. When I retired, I made a longer-range list of things to do as a muddle-headed retiree on a fixed yet somehow fluctuating income, and so far I’ve only accomplished a couple of the projects, including spending a day at the El Dorado Park Nature Center and changing the strings on all my guitars — and I shouldn’t really call that one a success because I own several guitars and only managed to change the strings on one of them, which should count as two chores because I stupidly strung it wrong the first time and had to throw that set away and do it correctly and by then I had grown tired of the project so my work is not yet finished.
Trump biopic
Happily, I can spend the time between delayed projects by reading and watching movies. And even those minor tasks were interrupted last week with the World Series, an event abbreviated by the Yankees’ ineptitude when it comes to playing baseball.
When I played outfield for the Little League Dodgers (sponsored by Dick’s Palm Tree Liquor) back during the 1960s, I think our squad could’ve taken the Yanks into a Game 7, and I don’t think we ever had as many errors as the New York team had in the fifth inning of Game 5. I’m pretty sure I did a better job of handling fly balls than Aaron Judge, and I think my batting average was in the same lower to mid .100s neighborhood.
When I got back to movies I watched “The Apprentice,” a film about the early days of the making of Donald J. Trump, even before his TV show of the same name.
It was a good, solid movie, one that should delight anti-Trumpers to a certain extent, while likely having no particular effect on the MAGA audience which would likely stay away from it in droves.
I wasn’t too impressed with actor Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of a 1970s-era Trump, but “Succession” star Jeremy Stong’s performance of the hyper-vile GOP fixer and Trump mentor Roy Cohn was spectacular and worthy of an Oscar.
Off the bookshelf
First I struggled through “The Waiting,” by Michael Connelly, the latest in a series of books featuring retired detective Harry Bosch and current detective Renee Ballard, and if it’s not the final book in the series, it’s the last one I’ll bother with.
Bosch, who’s aging in real time, is struggling with cancer and, like most of us, not getting any younger. He has a very limited role in this book, which features the unlikely solving of the 1947 Black Dahlia murder, a crime that’s yet to be solved in real life, despite plenty of books claiming to be the real story.
Bosch has always been one of Connelly’s most compelling characters, along with Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer.
I tossed that aside with zero satisfaction and picked up the can’t-miss novel by Irish author Roddy Doyle, “The Women Behind the Door,” the latest in his series of books following the fraught life of Paula Spencer, who has been featured in three of Doyle’s novels over the last couple of decades, starting with “Paula Spencer” and continuing with “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.”
Spencer, now in her sixties, is living with haunted and unwelcome memories of her late abusive husband, along with a couple of kids who grew up at a distance because of their mother’s submergence into alcohol and drugs.
She’s relatively fine now, if somewhat addled by years of misfortune, but she bravely soldiers on in this brilliantly told story marked by Doyle’s always-enjoyable dialog.
It’s not advisable to dive right into this novel without reading the preceding ones, although you’ll manage to catch up through Spencer’s memories.