Still

"You always tell happy stories.
You dont have any happy ones?
They're more like real life.
But my stories are not.
Your stories are not. No.
The man watched him. Real life is pretty bad?
What do you think?
Well, I think we're still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we're still here.
Yeah.
You dont think that's so great.
It's okay."

-- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

--

Finished The Road. Recovering now. Will watch No Country for Old Men tonight.

--

I picked up the Christmas Carol scripts at the office today. I expected to see under the character breakdown some smattered arrangement, like, "Actor 3, Chris - Tiny Tim, Villager, Ghost of Christmas Present, Caroler 2," but instead, there at the bottom, was this:

Actor 5 (male), Chris - Scrooge

Holy crow, I'm playing the bah-humbug guy.

--

As I read the final pages of The Road, I sat on a bench in Eden Park overlooking the Ohio River. Layered in sight, facing south: trees on the Ohio border, the river, the speedboats cutting white isoceles triangles through the water like arrowheads, the bridges, humdrum Newport and Covington, trees on the Kentucky border, the sky. Looking north from the other side, the skyline is a series of right angles and dark, shiny windows; looking south, the skyline is the treeline, broken only by I-75 to the right and the river to the left. This part of the Ohio warps in almost a full circle, creating a sort of bulge on the south banks, and a concave on the north. You can see this drastic curve from the park, and it is magnificent. The sun broke clouds in the west, to my right. It warmed my cheek. Ahead, propped on spindly white legs some feet above the Kentucky trees, was a white orb water tower, partly in spherical shadow, like another moon.

On a bench nearby, a father and his daughter talked about whether they could buy a boat, and whether they could buy an ice-cream cone from McDonald's. A thirtysomething with manboobs and under armor jogged by, stinking, wheezing. A classy dame in a black sundress walked her bulldog near my feet, and the dog smiled and the dame smiled, and they had the same smile--"it was fucking surreal," as King's Riley would have put it. Behind me, at a picnic table, a pair of fat black women yelled at their children to get off the hood of the car and laughed. An old lady in plush purple pumps sat on the low brick wall, clicked her camera at the sunset, and walked away smiling. A woman with a Gaelic lilt talked with her American relatives about the price of apartments, and it was wonderful to hear that accent--sweet, curved, clipped, a sprinkled cupcake of a voice.

Fall in Cinci is, so far, more attractive than summer. Woods metamorphosing from green to orange in splotches, tree by tree, and cool afternoons for watching it happen. The trees walked here from New England and the hills rolled over from San Francisco, and the river runs between the worlds like yarn. And maybe it's just me, but it seems like there have been fewer sirens in the night lately.