Friends called yesterday afternoon and dropped by for a visit, bringing with them one of the best apple pies I have ever tasted. The pie is from a shop called Gooseberry Handmade Pies (I think…I’m not looking at the pie box right now), located in the northwest Arkansas cluster of towns around Rogers, Bentonville, etc. While the pie was extraordinary, the casual visit with friends was the highlight of the afternoon. There’s something incredibly satisfying about free-ranging conversations—while enjoying a tasty baked treat—with good friends. It’s hard to top. For some reason, the experience brings me back to memories of encounters I may never have had; as if I were living in the “old days,” times that were simpler and less stressful. It is especially enjoyable when one’s circle of close friends is small by design. I think keeping those numbers small tends to amplify the value and enjoyment of relationships.
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It is a rare musical that I find both interesting and entertaining. Musicals, as a film genre, generally leave me cold and entirely unimpressed. But Emilia Pérez, which we watched last night, was among those uncommon exceptions. Described as a “Spanish-language French musical crime film,” it is, in my opinion, an exceedingly rare musical in which the transformations between more or less realistic dialogue and dreamy dancing and singing by the stars and the large supporting cast adds to the story. My immediate reaction to the first few minutes of the film bordered on contempt, but that disapproval quickly changed to appreciation and interest. I would recommend Emilia Pérez with one caveat: if you, like me, generally avoid musicals, watch it for at least ten minutes before abandoning it. Give it a little time; it might well grow on you. Another film we recently watched did not impress me in the least. iHostage struck me as a basically pointless, unnecessary, so-called drama/crime film based on an actual situation in 2022 in which “a Dutch man storms an Apple Store in Amsterdam and demands a ransom of over $200 million in crypto.” It barely kept my interest while watching, only because I was waiting to learn something. Waiting was time lost.
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Almost three days have passed since my most recent chemotherapy treatment. The drugs used during the regimen that ended in early March started to zap all my energy, beginning by the end of the third day. I hope this new combination of drugs will not have quite such an impact. The timing of the new treatments is different. Whereas the prior treatments all were timed three weeks apart, the new ones are to be administered two weeks in a row, then skipped for a week, then renewed again for two weeks, then the cycle is repeated. Of course, I will have blood draws every week. But it seems my schedule will permit me to have appointments here in the Village, as opposed to driving into Hot Springs. Small adjustments can make significant differences in recapturing bits of time devoted to this damn disease.
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Some days, otherwise uneventful and lacking any easily identifiable stresses, inexplicably fill one’s mind with vague but powerful sadness. No matter hard one tries, the source of the melancholy remains elusive—hidden from the conscious mind. There must be something in the subconscious that sparks such an emotional black hole, but what that is is kept out of reach. Its effects, though, seem to seep through every cell in the body, dulling what in other circumstances might be happy thoughts. Instead, that something infuses the mind with a foggy mist of feelings that seem like a mix of grief, despair, and a dozen other unpleasant emotions. The subconscious mind refuses to reveal the triggers. I think that refusal may be intended as punishment for thoughts or actions for which atonement has never been made. That suggests something mysterious and even supernatural; but that’s not it. The mind is more complex than that. I think the punishment may be one’s own reaction to breaking one’s own deeply embedded personal moral code. Punishment may not be the right word; the refusal to reveal triggers simply may be an automatic reaction that we do not understand. We assign motives to actions, or reactions, we cannot comprehend.
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Sleep eluded me for too much of the night last night. Though I was tired and went to bed early, I had not been able to sleep by midnight. I finally nodded off shortly thereafter, but woke again around 1:30 a.m. and to up. Half an hour later I returned to bed; when I woke from a light sleep at 3:45, I decided to try to go to sleep again. I succeeded until 5:30 or thereabouts, when I got up for the day. I felt relatively good and moderately energetic. But now, at 7:45, I am quite tired again. I have complained for months that I was sleeping far too much; maybe I’m making up for it now.
