as long as we're going down

We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.

The rain eased off after four o'clock, but until I got to Chapin Beach I still thought I would be making an affectionately overcast farewell to Cape Cod Bay, not arriving just in time for one of those conch-pink flaming sunsets for which my camera creakily consented to make an effort for about five minutes before shutting itself back down again and stubbornly refusing to be coaxed further. I walked back and forth on the wet metallic sands and collected a fragment of white-and-purple-whorled shell and watched the clouds fade to peach and charcoal. I put my hands in the water where it ran clear over the wave-rounded litter all faintly green-tinged, just to feel it on my fingers colder than before. I had all the talismans necessary to remember myself.

( Did the shamrock on your shoulder bring good fortune and pay off? )

It was such good sea. I had not had so much of it daily in years. And it is not that I can get none of it in the still working seaport of Boston, and Cape Cod remains sandier than the mountain-folded ledges of Cape Elizabeth or the glacier-scraped boulders of Cape Ann, but it is still Atlantic and still cold to the touch and still live. I am home now and approved by Hestia for the second time in a month, an unusual sign of travel in my life these days. Dinner was with my parents and spatch and came from Szechuan's Dumpling, who thanks to my being literally the last customer in and out of the restaurant threw in an order from earlier in the evening that no one had ever come to collect, i.e. free crab rangoon and what it just occurred to me to recognize as suan la chow show made by a kitchen that wasn't Mary Chung's. I did not get anywhere near as much done with my brain as I had wanted, but I am working on thinking of it as recharge rather than failure. I am not acclimated to unemployment. Tomorrow I plan nonetheless not to move very much.

Having somewhat wiped out my reserves with the glories of Corporation Beach, I only made it out to the salt marsh for about an hour between low tide and sunset, which was still great. I saw the copper-glaze glint of fiddler crabs in their burrows in the crenellated banks of mud. I saw the dark-fringed silhouette of an osprey sailing over the green-rusted brushes of cordgrass and salt hay, where they nest with the encouragement of the Callery Darling Conservation Area which includes the wetlands around the Bass Hole Boardwalk. The engine noise floating over from Chapin Beach turned out to belong to a powered paraglider who so annoyed me by effectively buzzing the boardwalk that I let all the other sunset viewers with their phones out enthusiastically take pictures of him. The long-billed, long-legged, unfamiliarly tuxedo-patterned shorebird stalking the deeper edges of a sandbar looks to have been a vagrant black-necked stilt. With the tide so far out, I am afraid there was little chance of another seal.

( Take a little comfort from the little you've done. )

After which I ate dinner, read a little, and passed out for about an hour and a half. Family and friends have been sending me pictures of No Kings, the necessity of which I hate and the turnout of which I cheer. My mother told me about her favorite sign she did not carry: a photograph of the butterfly, the only orange monarch we need. I loved everything about the spare, specific exploration of marginalized languages and historical queerness in Carys Davies' Clear (2024) until the slingshot of the ending as if the author had lost a chapter somewhere over the side in the North Sea. Since the Cape is still autumnal New England, I am drinking mulled cider.

Marooned (1994) closes with an assurance from ScotRail that under no circumstances except the exceptional are items of left luggage opened, which fortunately no one told the protagonist of this elliptical, a little noirish, just faintly magical realist and haunting short film.

Peter Cameron (Robert Carlyle) mans the left-luggage office at Glasgow Central, but in his solitude, his oddity, and the dreamlike circling of his days, he might as well be employed in the outer reaches of Kafka. Ceaselessly surrounded by human movement and direction, he shifts to the other side of his narrow counter to change up the crick in his neck. The clock cuts his hours out in claim tags and skeleton keys, the dip of a paste pot and the closing of his hand on the coins he's dropped as impersonally as a vending machine. His eyes are absorbingly dark, the thinness of his wrists in their rolled uniform sleeves gives him a furtive, vulnerable look from his covert of sports bags and suitcases, taking a mugging, an assignation, arrivals and departures all in. The caustic familiarity with which he can greet a commuter of prior scrutiny, "And where's the redhead? I thought you married her. Did she finally figure you out?" never makes it past the thousand-yard crease in his stoneface that can crumple into real petrifaction if he's caught outside his professional script. The nautical title seems a touch dramatic for the hub of a mainline station, however landlocked, but Peter as he makes himself a precisely arranged cup of tea while listening to the shipping forecast in the office's industrially riveted recesses does have a kind of marine overcast about him, a glass-greenish tint filtering his regulation pigeon-blues, the tea towel's plaid, the leatherette of the Roberts R200 serenely intoning its warnings of gales in Fair Isle and Rockall. When he unlocks and examines the contents of bags in his care, it seems less voyeuristically invasive than quizzically alien, as if trying on the idea of what it means to have a life that can be carried in cross-section anywhere its owner feels like. He always repacks them unnoticeably. It seems a very small existence, but we have no idea if we should even wonder how he feels about it until we learn that he had a clear other choice, one which perhaps ironizes that daily ritual of a brew-up with the Met Office. "Have you been to sea? Nah, I didn't think so. You're the only one that's not been. You're breaking the tradition."

What happens to jolt this recessive character out of his routine naturally involves some illicitly opened left luggage, but much of the pleasure of the small, slant plot that precipitates is how steadily it doesn't even seem to refuse the expected next move, it just stands aside at its own slight angle. It's no twist that a man who lives at such a second hand of other lives will have no defenses when one of them touches him directly, so deer-shocked by the appearance of the black-haired, sad-eyed Claire (Liza Walker) that even before he finds her suitcase filled with the evidence of the end of a bad affair, Peter misses a tongue-tied beat of the transaction, their hands holding the same receipt for such a momentous second that for once he volunteers information he doesn't have to—"I close at half past eleven." Even more than the off-duty sight of him outside the cavernously murmuring habitat of the concourse and climbing the stairs of a grottily sodium-buzzed terrace at that, it is a real shake of the kaleidoscope to have this isolated figure situated suddenly within the ties of a family, especially a brother as big and blond and laddish as the sometime merchant seaman Craig (Stevan Rimkus), boasting of his girls and their tricks while the slight, silent shadow of his sibling holds so still that his pulse can be seen hollowing the side of his throat. "I jumped ship in Port Elizabeth . . . I owe some guys rather a lot of money. Can you help me?" A tighter, more conventionally triangulated narrative could make more of these tensions, like the snapshot memento of a happier Claire wrapped playfully around a denim-jacketed Craig that queries her unfamiliarity to Peter. Marooned lets its uncertainties lie between characters who know their own histories and turns its attention instead to the consequences that skitter off more obliquely, as riskily compassionate as enclosing a first-ever note for a fragile passenger or as heedless as slamming into a fight that wasn't expecting a mad little coathanger of a man that can't normally get three words in order, never mind a crowbar. Afterward he looks just as worried as ever, flattening himself around a seedily lit kitchen on just the wrong trajectory to avoid the other person in it. If he's peeling himself off the sidelines of the life he has always screened through timetables and sea areas, stories observed in fragments or construed from odd socks and bottles of scent, he may not be much less awkward when he gets there. Where? Standing on the deck of the ferry Juno, wiping the windblown curtains of his dark hair out of his eyes as the firth and the fog churn past almost the same sea-sanded steel-blue, he's already difficult to picture fitting as neatly behind his anonymous counter as the first time we saw him folded there, consolations of the shipping forecast or no. In the end, the hardest thing he may have to do—or the easiest, when he finally sees it—is take his own advice.

Marooned was written by Dennis McKay, directed by Jonas Grimås, and BAFTA-nominated for Best Short Film in its year, which it would have deserved: it does not feel in 20 minutes like a sketch or a slice but an elusive, immersive hinge of time where we don't need the details of the past filled in to understand the weight of what has happened in the last few days. Dialogue-wise, it's nearly silent, but it's shot by Seamus McGarvey with such an Eastmancolor-soaked combination of cinéma vérité and slow-tracked tableaux that it has the intimacy of a photo album and something of the same selective quality of time, too, edited by David Gamble as if we had to be there to find out what happened between the snaps. Occasionally it reminded me of the short fiction of M. John Harrison and not only for the late sequence where nothing more than an ear-filling hum on the soundtrack, a splutter of tea, and a pair of stares that seem to meet through the fourth wall, one somber, one shocked, confirms a fact like a folktale. The score was composed and partly performed by Stephen Warbeck and it is minimal, modern—accordion, saxophone, bass—not hopelessly sad. Much of the rest of the sound design was contributed by Glasgow Central. I found it on Vimeo and was unable to get it out of my head. It looks at almost nothing straight on, which doesn't mean not deeply. So much of it happens in Carlyle's eyes, so dark and soulful that in another kind of Scottish story, they would clinch him as a seal. "I forgot about you for three whole hours yesterday, but then it started raining and you were back in the front of my mind." This relation brought to you by my only backers at Patreon.

The promised nor'easter has not yet materialized out of the escalating rain, but I have had in the main a really nice birthday observed with my parents, my brother, and my niece, including a hand-drawn card from the latter—a dragon in a party hat—and an almond cake with rosehip jam. I am in possession of an astonishing book-stack, featuring Tobias Wray's No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man (2021), Carys Davies' Clear (2024), and by some incredible sleight of used book stores, On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998). The latter looks like a windfall of material I would not have been able to locate for myself through the Internet Archive or JSTOR since much of it was published posthumously with the assistance of Doris Nolan, but at the moment I am deeply charmed that the introduction takes such pains to impress on the reader that on no account should be the quirky and sharply intelligent actor be confused with the blandly authoritative image of President Wilson, since coming from the exact opposite direction of his filmography I had already concluded that in the most complimentary sense, Alex Knox was something of a weirdo. Major points, however, for once while perusing tide pools with friends' children committing the extreme dad joke of suddenly shouting, "Kelp, kelp, I see anemone!" My niece and the twins are currently engaged in a late-over watch of The Black Stallion (1979), which they keep comparing to How to Train Your Dragon. thisbluespirit made me Elemental art of Clive Francis as Tungsten. I have a CD of the Dropkick Murphys' For the People (2025).