1. Because Gibbs was out of dog food and we needed a few other items this morning, I delayed my visit to the Fitness Center until I finished shopping and put the groceries away.
I'm back to having the energy to work out for at least an hour again, even though I fell a bit short of sixty minutes today.
It's encouraging. For about two weeks, I only worked out a very few times thanks to that stubborn bug that wouldn't go away. Yes, I'm still a tiny bit congested, but mostly I've recovered and it feels great to be able to huff and puff, pedal and pump, and burn calories again.
2. Debbie and I had what turned out to be an unexpectedly fun dinner tonight -- even if it doesn't sound like it! I'd thawed a couple of tilapia filets. I seasoned them with dry dill and Old Bay seasoning. I also made a pot of basmati rice. Debbie was going to bring home dinner from Wah Hing. But, when through a text exchange, while she was at The Lounge, she learned I had a dinner planned, she decided to order Szechwan vegetables from Wah Hing to provide our meal with a side dish.
I made a simple sauce for our tilapia, combining sour cream, yogurt, and fresh lemon juice.
But, lo and behold, when I bought the Nancy's yogurt at Pilgrim's last week, I hadn't noticed that it was vanilla yogurt.
Surprise! Surprise! The sauce for the fish was subtly sweet, along with being tangy, and it worked! My accident was a fortunate one.
And, the Szechwan vegetables had plenty of heat, so our simple dinner was a banquet for our taste buds and, to be honest, this unexpected pleasure made me a little giddy!
3. As I read further this evening into Bruce Chatwin's book, The Songlines, I thought back to my teaching days at Lane Community College and the work some of my fellow teachers were doing with creative non-fiction. I'm not entirely sure I ever fully understood the genre of creative non-fiction, but I THINK the idea was that not only could writers write non-fiction, say memoir, by telling things that happened, they could also employ the techniques of writing poetry and fiction, including in their non-fiction pieces imagined characters and events.
For a writer like Hunter S. Thompson, this approach was called New Journalism or Gonzo Journalism.
Bob Dylan does it frequently. If you saw the movie Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, you know that the movie simultaneously documented conversations, behind the scene moments, and concert footage from Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue Tour. You know that it also included fabricated characters and fabricated events, creatively mixing the actual with the fanciful.
If you've read Bob Dylan's recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, you know that Bob Dylan fabricates stories and makes up "facts" from time to time and he makes assertions that sound like he's pulling his readers' legs. Dylan keeps those reading his work or watching him interviewed or listening to his commentary off balance with his blending of the actual with the made up.
I need to look into this more after I finish the book, but The Songlines is sure reading to me like a work of creative non-fiction. Chatwin creates a character named Bruce, ostensibly it's Chatwin himself, and Bruce goes on one foray after another into the Australian bush with a character named Arkady. I might be wrong, but I get the sense that Arkady is much like Hunter S. Thompson's sidekick, Oscar Zeta Acosta, his heavyweight Samoan lawyer. They are characters who serve both writers' storytelling purposes, but are made up.
So, do Thompson, Dylan, and Chatwin get at truths about their subject matter in ways they couldn't if they stuck strictly to the facts?
I think they do.
For now, I'll leave it at that.
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