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It is Monday morning, and this past weekend failed to be executed as I had hoped it might. Still, it was not a disaster of a weekend and there were many fine elements and several routine errands completed so it ranks as a so-so couple of days off.

Saturday, while I took care of getting my car smogged, for those outside of California that means having its emissions checked and verified that it does not overly pollute the atmosphere, and stopped by the pharmacy to pick up more salt-infused drops for my eyes, my sweetie-wife attended the Scottish Highland Games held for the first time in River Park very near our Mission Valley home. It turns out me not attending was a fortunate decision. I have no issues with bagpipe music but multiple pipers playing at the same time, but different tunes would have ignited a migraine. (though one of those was to come soon enough).

In the evening, I ran my table-top role-playing game of Space Opera and managed to get in two and a half hours before my chest signaled that the chronic cough would soon return and my head began feeling peculiar. After a meal of take-out food, I began to suffer a migraine and by the end of the evening it had grown quite intense, forcing me to leave a note for my sweetie-wife that I would not expect to be taking part in our customary 2 mile walk in the morning.

Sure enough, that was the case when I awoke Sunday. I canceled plans for lunch with friends, and to see The Death of Robin Hood in the theaters and stayed home taking my prescription medication and nursing the headache that eventually subsided, but left me without the ability to think clearly forcing me to cancel attending the virtual writers group meeting that evening.

I was recovered enough that in the late evening I made my customary trip to the supermarket to purchase lunches and fruits to take to work and even return a wallet stuffed with cash that had been lost in the parking lot to its owner before retiring for the night.

Hopefully this coming week will be better than its preceding weekend.

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I am the youngest of ten children and for a good deal of my life I knew four brothers and four sisters, one sister died in infancy long before I was born. Now the time draws near when I shall have no living brothers at all.

There is a fairly decent number of years that separate my youngest brother from myself and as such my childhood is not one where I spent hours with them in roughhousing, or anything approximating sports. Perhaps that is why sports of any kind never really appealed to me. They were, for the most part, already teenagers when I was still very much a child. I am told that two of them used to, when I was something like 4 or 5, take me along so my then exuberant personality could be used to break the ice with girls that they wanted to meet. This I have no memory of; what I do have memory of is drive-in horror movies.

They would want to go to the drive-in and were forced to take me along while promising to see something that was suitable for a young child, a promise that they apparently broke quite often, hence one of my earliest memories is of a Hammer Frankenstein movie in all its glorious color. I don’t recall ever having nightmares about the movies and they did kindle a life-long love of the genre.

It was the summer of 1980 when my first brother died, a victim of being the wrong place at the wrong time and shot to death because someone wanted to kill another person at that poolside table.

The next, after conquering his own alcohol-fueled demons, died from cancer. Another, who never found a way to overcome his substance issues, died from a body that eventually could no longer suffer that treatment.

This week I learned my oldest brother is being released from the hospital into hospice. The end may come in days, weeks, or I am told even possibly months as his aged physique surrenders to the accumulated damage of the years.

I fancy myself a writer, but I have no words that accurately convey the turbulent emotions of this time, yet I am not the first nor the last to suffer them. This is life as much as the happy times and all of it is to be known.

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90 days ago, I embarked on the less than thrilling adventure of trying to lose weight by way of dieting. I make no judgment against people who are employing the GLP-1 agonists to help them curb their appetite and shed their weight it is simply that I would prefer to at least attempt my weight loss by way of diet first.

What had worked for me in the past, though there had been a few bumps and minor issues that I had found annoying, was using the Weight Watchers app. The program, though not very expensive, is not free and works by a fairly simple process. Each food is assigned a point value, roughly correlating to its calories, fat, and simple carbohydrate composition. Some, like fresh fruits and vegetables, are given a value of zero points. Participants log their meals and snacks, tracking the points and attempting to remain under a daily allotment. To give a person ‘wiggle room’ should they choose the less strict program, which I have, there is also a pool of points known as ‘weeklies’ that can serve as a buffer for any time a dieter exceeds their daily limit. Any surplus points at the end of a day, up to no more than four, rolls over into the weeklies pool, providing a little more flexibility. There is a vast database of processed food that can be easily searched by way of their barcodes on the packaging, making logging them quick and easy. In the newest version of the app, one can even take an image of your food and have the estimated point values located by way of an A.I. engine.

I have been on this program now for 90 days and I have managed to cut out nearly all of the ‘bad’ snacking that had been contributing to my weight gain. To date I have lost 27 lbs and not felt overly deprived except on the occasional day when the craving for something rich and sweet hits particularly hard. The only week where I consumed all my weeklies was my birthday week and all in all I think that one is one I can let slide.

I still have a way to go before I am close to my goal but this time around, I am finding the process a bit easier.

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April and May turned out to be not so great for several of my electronic devices.  The first to give me troubles was my Xbox One, when it began dropping the wireless connection between both my controller and my headset. Once it progressed far enough that I couldn’t watch a complete YouTube video or play a single session of online Call of Duty, I bit the bullet and took the device in for repairs. It took two attempts and replacing the chips and transmitters for both the Bluetooth and WiFi components, but the repairs seem to be holding.

Next went the 55″ LCD Television. I have already documented that journey with a couple of other posts. While the screen had not failed completely, the faint, but growing in intensity, lines across the left quarter of the screen had become too pronounced to ignore. It was a blessing that the replacement OLED set ended up costing less than the set it replaced.

I had thought my device troubles were in the past and then after watching the Blu-ray of The Body Snatcher, still the best performance of Karloff’s career and a criminally underseen film, my region-free player went belly up. The power light remained lit and the tray refused to open. I tried to reset the player, even leaving it unplugged from power for more than a day, but nothing could cause it to cycle. Tomorrow the replacement player, this time one capable of displaying 4K discs in addition to being region-free (I had been using my Xbox One to play4K titles), arrives.

So, that is nearly my entire entertainment system either repaired or replaced in less than six weeks. On the bright side, this OLED television looks fantastic and hopefully the new player will complement it well. I have a birthday gift from my sweetie-wife, the 4K edition of Godzilla Minus One(A film that surpasses the 1954 original) that I look forward to watching once everything is set-up and running.

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A dear friend lost a person close to them recently and that has me thinking and pondering on death and all the various ways it has, from some of my earliest memories, touched my life.

I have no clear idea of how old I was, 5 or 6 I guess, when my puppy ‘Snowball’, a quite unimaginative name for an all-white dog, was struck and killed on the road in front of our North Carolina home, but the incident has stayed with me. Death came again to my life when I was 9, when my brother awoke and told me bluntly that Dad had died. I have no memory of being told that Dad’s illness was terminal and my impression from that time was that it came as quite a shock, but memory is always plastic and unreliable, particularly when trying to recall traumatic events of childhood.

My maternal grandmother, whom we, my mother and some of my siblings, lived with after my father passed, died at home after a long illness. After that I had a respite from death intruding into my life for several years until my brother Lonnie, having sat at the wrong poolside table to escape a summer heat wave, was gunned down along with two other men he had been chatting with. I was 18 and in the United States Navy and my sister recalls, that upon delivering the shocking news to me over the telephone,  that this was the first time she had ever heard me curse.

Death’s intrusions are not always deeply personal. While serving aboard the USS Belleau Wood(LHA-3) on a cruise of the Western Pacific, two men aboard died, one a marine who ignored safety regulations and fell from a helicopter in flight and the other a naval crew chief who was on a helicopter that crashed on the flight deck and then tumbled over the side into the ocean. I knew neither of these men and their deaths touched me only tangentially.

It returned to a personal meaning years after I separated from the quite unsuitable to me and to the U.S. Navy military service.

A close friend and gaming buddy, on the day he purchased his motorcycle, drove the machine after a heated verbal argument with his wife (One should never ride angry. Motorcycles are unforgiving vehicles.) and, taking a curve too fast, jumped the divider and collided with an oncoming truck.

In 1997, following a stroke and a prolonged illness, my mother insisted on returning home, despite the doctors advising her that she would grow weaker and die, who, like her mother, died at home, on her own terms.

COVID-19 took a close friend who perished in the hospital, counted among the more than a million Americans who died due to that disease. Another close friend and writing partner suffered a neurological condition that horribly took his voice and his motor control before taking his life.

It seems that I have experienced death in all the manners in which the Grim Reaper can claim us: terminal disease, homicide, accident, and sudden illness. I can say that there is no ‘easy’ way to experience the loss of a loved one, no method that robs you of their company makes the losing of that company even slightly more bearable. Death comes for all of us. I have known that in the pit of my stomach since I was 9. The best we can do is be aware of that fact and cherish the time we have with each other and not waste it on futile and pointless hatreds and petty disputes.

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Last week, on my birthday, was the day I scheduled for the delivery of the OLED television to replace my dying LCD set. For simplicity’s sake I kept the size the same, a 55″ diagonal, so that the new television would fit perfectly on my already existing stand. The delivery notification indicated an arrival window starting at 3:00 p.m. and terminating at 6:00 p.m. Naturally, the thing did not arrive until 7:20, giving me and my sweetie-wife just barely enough time to take down the old television and mount the new one with a short period of relaxation before she headed off for her bedtime.

I connected my Xbox One and region-free Blu-ray player, installed a few apps, established that the set worked and made sure that there would be no motion-smoothing to destroy the films I watched before heading off to bed myself.

The next day I took care of recycling the packaging that the television had arrived in and taking the LCD to an electronics recycling location to deal with the heavy metal and special materials that required it. With all of that completed I could spend the weekend making sure that everything worked and settling in with my new tv.

Eight years ago, when I had purchased the LCD,  OLED technology had been frustratingly out of comfortable reach for me. Now with the tech having tumbled in price and a discount that I got through my employer, this television actually cost me less than the one it has replaced. Overall, I have to confess that I am quite happy with the OLED screen. It has the infinite contrast that comes from being able to produce true black in the image and the colors look great. When I put it into gaming mode and get the full frame rate the image looks fantastic and the response is quick, though I am still far from the most talented player in the Call of Duty matches that I enjoy.

The most frustrating thing about the new set is that its smart features are not Roku, and as such I lost two apps that lived in my old set that are not available with the LG operating system: Kanopy a free streaming service that builds off your library membership, and The Criterion Channel which fortunately I can replace because an app for that is available on the Xbox operating system.

The only thing I do need to be vigilant about is switching from one device or app to another. Saturday evening I had been playing a match and then decided to move to YouTube and watch some reaction videos. I killed the game and launched YouTube on the Xbox and not the native app on the set. The reactor was watching Taxi Driver and for several minutes I wondered if she had launched her copy of the 70s classic in High Frame Rate with motion smoothing. I knew Scorsese had not filmed that movie with overly bright and flat lighting that looked like a soap opera.

No, it wasn’t the reactor, switching from a game to video on the Xbox the set had remained in gaming mode and played the video at 60 frames per second, inserting a dozen invented frames per second into the masterpiece. Lesson learned. I am now quite careful about switching apps and inputs.

That aside, I am quite happy with my new television and hope to get a decade of use out of it.

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Last night I got most of my streaming applications loaded onto my new OLED television and while some of them worked just fine a few, (Disney+ and others) wouldn’t actually load and stream content. It was late, I was tired and sweaty from taking down the old tv and putting up the new one so I figured I would just let the matter rest until today.

I got the rest of my apps loaded but I was still seeing the loading circle of doom when I tried to play content from some of them. HBOMax had to be the final app loaded because it had a very different login than the others. (When I originally signed up for my AT&T fiber internet access way back in 2016 the promotion included free HBOMax for as long as you kept the service. They no longer offer that to new customers but those of us who signed up then still get free access to HBOMax.)

When I sorted out the special login and got it working, HBOMax displayed a failure message when I tried to play anything, advising me that I should go into the settings of my device, find the one for IPv6 and switch it off. I did that and HBOMax played just fine, and so did all the other apps that had been giving me trouble. Only HBOMax bothered with a dialog box for the user. Thank you, HBOMax, for thinking about the people at the other end of the internet connection.

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Well, here it is early evening, and my birthday is coming to a close. I received plenty of well-wishes on Facebook from friends both near and far. Each and every one was treasured and lifted my spirits.

Though, to be honest, for most of the day my spirits were in no need of lifting. My sweetie-wife took half a day off from her work and spent it with me. We went out for lunch to Outback Steakhouse. I had wanted to try out Texas Roadhouse, but they did not open until 3pm and other considerations made that a non-starter. I have a nice New York Strip, a side salad, bread, and mashed potatoes, still counting the points for my Weight Watchers journey, down about 26 pounds so far, but not caring if I failed to stay under my daily quota, which I exceeded but not by very much. I had intended to order an indulgent dessert but the server failed to return promptly and so I simply paid via the tabletop device and we came home.

My sweetie-wife gifted me with a 4K UHD copy of Godzilla Minus One (in my opinion the very best Godzilla film, even better than the 1954 original.) She also got me a Call of Duty game so I could waste more hours being slaughtered by mutant cyborg teenagers and their inhuman reflexes. Now all I needed was the delivery of my new 55″ OLED television. It was scheduled for between 3pm and 6pm.

Ahh, the optimism of delivery windows.

It arrived at 7:20 pm.

We had already eaten, and my sweetie-wife helped me take down the old failing television, remove its brackets, affix them to the new set, and hang it on the stand, an evolution that took in total about 40 minutes.

So, with the television mounted on the stand, but not yet with any devices connected, the day is drawing to a close. Once she retires to bed, I will set about getting the television working and all the settings just where I want them. Tomorrow, which I also have off, I will cart the old one away for recycling.

While I had hoped to be watching my brilliant infinite-contrast set already, I still cannot complain about the day. I spent a lot of it with my sweetie-wife, had a tasty steak, and no true disaster struck. Not bad for the day I officially join those who for Medicare.

This past weekend was a celebration of cinema with two trips to the local multiplex and the last feature film to be watched on my 55″ LCD television before its replacement later this week, so, it is fitting to kick off the week with reviews.

First up, the horror film Hokum.

Neon

The third feature film from writer/director Damian McCarthy Hokum is once again set in his native Ireland. Successful American author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) has traveled to the small and isolated Irish hotel where his parents had honeymooned and, after many years delay, to spread their ashes in the thick nearby wood. Bauman reacts to stories of hauntings and witches trapped in the sealed off honeymoon suite with the skepticism appropriate to not only an American of the 21st century but of a writer known for his dark, bleak novels of human futility. After uncharacteristically warming to a member of the hotel staff, Fiona, Bauman returns to the hotel as it is closing for the season to discover that she has gone missing, and Bauman begins investigating, a process that draws him into the supernatural dangers of the hotel and his own terrible history.

A common comment I heard about Hokum before seeing it was that in tone and intensity the film compares to Ari Aster’s Hereditary, a film that I very much enjoyed and found unsettling in the best possible manner. Now, having seen Hokum I disagree with that comparison. Hereditary was relentless in its narrative and focused with tremendous precision. I found this movie to be a little less focused, some of the plot turns struck me as fairly obvious, when Bauman spoke obliquely about his childhood trauma, I knew instantly what the third act would reveal, and Hokum’s plot meandered a bit, but not to any great detriment, just enough to make a comparison with Aster’s film misplaced.

The film I would compare this one to is 2020’s critically underseen and undervalued The Night House, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski and directed by David Bruckner. Both films spend considerable time in exquisitely shot darkened scenes with fantastic use of negative space and briefly seen and unsettling imagery. Where Hereditary finishes with imagery and a resolution that might be fitting to one of Bauman’s own novels, Hokum crafts a more traditional if not entirely settled ending for its tale that again fits as a comparison with The Night House.

A second element that Hokum shares with The Night House beyond its cinematography is that by the ending of the film events can be reasonably interpreted as either supernatural or a product of the protagonist’s own mental state with just enough ‘evidence’ to push most viewers into the supernatural conclusion.

Colm Hogan’s cinematography for Hokum is, pardon the pun, picture perfect. The deep shadows and blacks of both the night and the isolated area of the hotel are dark enough to conceal the threats from both Bauman and the audience and yet never so dark as to become frustrating to a moviegoer. McCarthy’s script, while suffering from a touch of predictability, is populated with enough realized characters as to make the plotting work even when that obvious reveal is telegraphed well in advance.

Hokum is enough of a slow burn, quite the opposite of a ‘slasher’ horror film, that it works best in the theatrical environment where someone watching the film will not be continually distracted by their electronic devices, the well-lit room, the kitchen beckoning them with snacks, and the ever-present noise of the outside world. This should be, and needs to be, seen in a darkened auditorium with others reacting to every moment of suspense and shock of a sudden appearance. If you are a fan of horror films, particularly of one that rewards patience, then waste no time in getting to your local theater and seeing Hokum.