what now, cityboy?

Thursday early afternoon. The long weekend---the end of summer---looms before me. Mucho choices but does one have any more meaning than another? Some interesting movies that are possible for tonight---Luce, Fidder, Stories We Tell, and a few others. And I had promised myself that this summer I would go to at least one minor league game---well tonight (or the next few days) is my chance, but will I do it? Heavy schlep on the Ferry to get to tonight's game in Staten Island. One thing is for sure---I will not stay home tonight. I stayed home yesterday night---very tired---but between now and Monday, I must be out!
  Not a lot else to report. I finished reading the most recent novel by Susan Choi, called Trust Exercise. It is written in three parts---the second and third much  more fulfilling than the first. The title refers to an exercise given by a high school theater teacher to his students---but also, as the novel progresses, to a trust between the reader and the narrator. The story in the part I is turned on its head in several ways. Sometimes very interesting, others kind of long. One quote from the book gets me:
It refers to a character who has remained in his home town while others have left. The quote is "he saw the past as a place he was exiled from". I immediately responded to that, it articulates how I felt in the first six or seven years after I left Hopkins. Trying to come to terms with the enormous amount of activity I had done as President of the Barnstormers while feeling cut off from the others who were still there, to a certain extent taking part in what I had created. Yes, that was a strange, transitional time for me---I think that last year at Hopkins prepared me well for what I did when I turned 40, but not so much for my twenties and early thirties. But could anything have prepared me for those years?
  Another trip to Brooklyn on the horizon, or even maybe one to the Bronx. A Yankee game? (Better get there early) Still have not taken the bus that begins on Eastern Parkway and Utica and goes east into Brownsville and East New York. What about the one that begins on Saratoga and Broadway, goes through Brownsville, and then merges and follows Kings Highway as it moves west into Flatbush? Took that once before, many years ago. These are all the options available to me.
Well, let's see what happens, will report tomorrow.