Acoustic Mayhem

My thirty-year-old sound system has not after all survived having its speakers ripped out of its subwoofer and its subwoofer pulled plug-wrenchingly from its power bar prior to being dropped on the dining room floor with its cord trailing mystifyingly into the kitchen. It was a treasured and redoubtable part of my office. It came from Cambridge SoundWorks of blessed memory in 1996 and lived with me through four different dorm rooms and eight or nine apartments and the most maintenance it ever required was an occasional stripping and recutting of wires and I have no idea what in the hell I can replace it with. It was stored in a box for a year once and was just fine on the other side. I have to estimate something for the insurance and beyond rubies is obviously not going to cut it.

On the other insurance front, after an unreasonable number of hours on the phone I have managed to file an appeal for the denial of coverage for my antibiotics last month. I spoke to some very sympathetic representatives along the way. Unfortunately it seems the clinician who could just have signed off on the prescription as written by my actual doctor was not of their mind. I should have a decision within the month. I feel like punching Kafka.

In other complaints, the Orionids are clouded out.

To the very small number whom it may concern—although statistically likelier to occur on my friendlist than many places on the internet—I am flabbergasted to report that Leo Marks' The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950) has been uploaded to the Internet Archive. The acting edition by which I could compare the screenplay to the playscript continues to elude me, but I am thrilled by a decent transfer from a dead-out-of-print DVD—when I watched it off the crackly free Roku, it looked like it had gone through a boot. Cloudburst (1951) is sketchier in quality, but still available for an early Marks double feature should anyone other than me want one. Both come courtesy of the alphabetically idiosyncratic collection of Paul's British Films, which so far only goes up to J, but still encompasses nice copies of The Ghost Camera (1933) and The Gaunt Stranger (1938) and Cage of Gold (1950), to name some films I watched originally under fuzzier circumstances. Nice copies of some films I have been wanting to watch, too. I hope Paul makes it to the end of the alphabet. In the meantime, good grief.

I have not felt especially plugged in to my emotions for a while now, but I seem to be more than abstractly angry about the break-in. It could have been very much worse, but every good thing this year has felt acutely like fragments shored against ruin and the invasive loss of one we had worked for feels superfluously mean. I won't see my brother or my niece again until Thanksgiving. I am under no illusions that I can insulate myself from the state of the world, but I should be able to trust that I can leave the house without someone wrecking it. Partway through the pan-frying of steak tips tonight we remembered that we couldn't open the back door for ventilation on account of still not having one.

I meant to put some of the Craneberry left in our liquor cabinet into the cider we mulled after dinner, but it came out so well on its own—the normal fall spices plus star anise, simmered an inch down—that I just drank two mugs instead. I have not eaten enough apples this fall. I have been belatedly rabbit-holed by the article sections of Kaldor City. I managed to watch my third film all month this weekend and in the meantime of waiting for my mind to come back online, the time-shock and meta-layering made the first episode of Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–67) a hit. I am hoping the forecast nor'easter won't interfere with the Orionids.

I am still sleeping worse than usual. Sometime after I had listened to the upstairs neighbors all morning I dreamed of an image like an record sleeve, a plover-freckled profile blindfolded with windflowers like blinkless eyes. Their straight dark hood of hair looked as 1970's as the grain of the vague sunlit field behind them. It might have been a frame of film. I can think of several writer-directors working who would have done it. spatch took a different picture of me this evening when I was delighted by some weathered ornamental cherries.