APRIL 2024: CELEBRATE
Emoji dad with his emoji birthday boy (WBN 2024).
The theme of my life is that it’s going by too quickly.
I messed up, big time, when I published this last night. I wasn’t feeling well twelve hours ago, and I’m still not feeling well at 6:18am on a workday. I woke two hours ago and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I read a little and surfed the net, which brought me to my blog and the absolute horror that I blew through my month of April post without mentioning one of the things that is most dear to my heart, my son. His birthday was April 5, and he turned seven. A lot of parents will tell you how unique their children are, or how different one of their children is from the others (if they have more than one kiddo). My son is on the Autism spectrum, so there are some things about him that are like other children on the spectrum, but I can say that his personality is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. He is the essence of purity and sweetness, and his love is a gift to our family. It’s a coincidence that his birthday is during Autism Awareness month, but it means that we get to celebrate the little dude multiple times throughout April because of his birthday and the Autism walks and community gatherings we attend. He is an incredible kid, we love him so much, and I can’t believe that I forgot to write about him in my original post for this month. Happy birthday, kiddo!
Facts
I enjoy hearing facts. Sports facts. Movie facts. Facts about history. Facts about the area I live in. Family facts. All kinds of facts. I should have been opening these blogs with some fact about the month or whatever it was that inspired me in the moment. In this moment, it’s just some basic historical facts about April, presented to you by me, courtesy of Generative AI.
For example:
- The Civil Rights act was signed on April 11, 1968, Also on April 11, but in 1970, Apollo 13 launched from Cape Kennedy.
- Abe Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.
- The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912.
A lot of shit has gone down in April over the course of history. On April 23, 2024, the Lakers blew a 20-point lead to the Nuggets in Game 2 of their first-round matchup to go down 2-0 to the reigning NBA champs. They would also lose Game 3 on April 25, 2024, but (by some miracle) they would manage to win Game 4. I’m currently watching them blow it again in Game 5. Damn. I’m not going to turn this into a sports blog, but the Lakers led for most of this series—I mean they held a lead for most of the game in all of the games—except for at the end of the games, when it mattered most.
I didn’t do much writing about the Lakers after the pre-season article I published for FarFromProfessional.com, and it was mostly because they sucked. Yes, they won the inaugural In-Season Tournament. They looked good for maybe the first third of the season, and then the wheels fell off. I suppose Darvin Ham deserves much of the blame for their poor performance through the winter. I believe he is responsible for part of that, and I also think that the franchise invested in guys who failed to show up in big moments, or at all (Gabe Vincent). I don’t think there’s a quick fix for this, but I also said that two seasons ago when Russell Westbrook was on our squad, and Rob Pelinka managed to make miracles happen at the trade deadline. It wasn’t enough to get past Denver in the Wester Conference Finals last season, and it wasn’t enough to run it back with most of those guys plus some “improvements” to the roster this season. On to Dodgers baseball.
Reading
I knocked out two books this month and began a third. The first two I started and finished within my two-week library limit. Those were Chuck Palahniuk’s The Invention of Sound and Robert Knott’s Revelation (based on character’s created by Robert Parker). I’ll get to them in a second. Palahniuk’s book was a fun read. That’s par for the course with his stuff if you enjoy going down a rabbit hole. Not the YouTube kind that sucks you in and holds your attention hostage for hours. Palahniuk’s rabbit holes are the “flip your world upside down” kind. His worlds are twisted at best, and terrifying in the case of The Invention of Sound. Mitzi Ives, the novel’s antagonist, is a terrifying spin on a serial killer. She’s a legacy foley artist dedicated to her craft and carrying out her work in the same manner as her father. She kidnaps people and kills them, recording their scream of agony and last gasps to then sell to Hollywood producers for their movies. Horrible stuff. Gates Foster is our protagonist, a man plagued by a decades-long search for his missing daughter. I found it harder to root for Gates the longer the story went on, but the exploration of his pain and how that drove him to whatever length it would take to find Lucy was fascinating.
The story lost some steam in the third act, and it wanders into absurdity near the end, but I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t know this book was going to be as violent as it was, so you may want to avoid it if you don’t like extremely violent content. Then again, if you’ve read a Chuck Palahniuk book, you know that it is an extreme event. The Invention of Sound is another psycho story from one of our great contemporary writers.
Revelation was a much different type of read. It’s about U.S. Marshall Virgil Cole and his deputy, Everett Hitch, two characters created by prolific author Robert Parker (and written in this novel by Robert Knott). They are based out of Appaloosa, a fictional frontier town in Arizona, in the late 1800s, as the rail roads helped push European expansion and colonization straight to the West Coast. Cole and Hitch are called to help round up some escaped convicts, and their search for the baddies leads them right back to the baddest of them all, right in Appaloosa. I enjoy westerns, but Revelation isn’t particularly well-written. Reading it after The Invention of Sound only emphasized the distinction between the levels of talent. That said, Revelation was entertaining. I got what I wanted out of it, which was a cat and mouse chase: good guys versus bad guys in the Wild West. It was shockingly violent. That caught me by surprise.
I’m working on Haruki Murakami’s beast of a novel 1Q84. I’m 200 pages in, with 700 to go. It’s a captivating story, revealed in layers, but I still have no idea where it’s going. I hope Murakami can keep it this way all the way through.
Throated
My throat is sore at the moment, and I’m not feeling up to any more existential stretching. I’ll catch up with you folks next month. Be good.
Sure hope it’s not these microscopic motherfuckers (WBN 2024).
