As we get older and more comfortable, we are sometimes willing to pay people to do things. We don’t have a maid and I still cut the lawn. However, when we ordered a new exercise machine recently and were given the option of free shipping “to the door” and paying extra to have it brought inside, carried upstairs and assembled, it was a no-brainer. These things aren’t light, for one thing. For another, I have better things to do than spend “half an hour” assembling things like this.
Turns out it was a wise decision. It arrived last night near the end of the promised delivery window (isn’t that always the case?). Two fellows brought it in a transport (two transports, for some reason). One guy looked like Chris Rock and the other like Gregory Itzin (Henry Wilcox from Covert Affairs and Minelli from The Mentalist). “Itzin” warned me that it normally took them a couple of hours. It took three. No wonder—I looked at the assembly instructions and the picture you see here is Step 4. That’s right, one single step that involves putting together several dozen pieces. The accompanying description is two sentences long. Leave it to the experts, I say.
When they left (at nearly 9 pm), I gave them each a tip. “Chris Rock” said that was very nice of me. The usual response they got was “now get the hell out” followed by the slamming and locking of the door. I hope he was exaggerating.
We’ve been without an exercise machine for most of 2013. I probably should have waited until I was over the cold that I’ve been battling for the past day or two before breaking it in. It kicked my ass this morning, and that was on the easiest settings. I’m very pleased with our purchase, though. It seems solid—much moreso than its predecessor—and has some great features.
I revised the first half of my work in progress this morning. As expected, I cut the 400 word backstory section, boiling it down to a single paragraph. Even that might not survive the first real editing pass. I still have a little more to write to get to a finished first draft, but given the topsy turvy way this story is being written, I decided it was time to start sanding it into shape.
American Horror Story: Asylum concluded last night. I tried out the show in its first season with some trepidation. I don’t watch much horror in general, and most TV horror is hokey and derivative. AHS turned out to be derivative to the max (they threw in just about every horror trope in existence), but it all held together wonderfully. They shifted gears completely for season two, doing a Desperation/Regulators thing where most of the same cast played completely different and unrelated characters. Again, the show was a whirlwind tour-de-force effort that kept viewers completely off balance. You never knew what was going to happen next. Aliens! Exorcisms! Angels of Mercy! Mad Santa! And yet, for the most part, it was delightfully madcap. I don’t think the alien subplot contributed much, though it led to some nice grace notes in the finale, but otherwise season 2 was fun.
Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson were the glue that pulled the whole thing together. Lange ran the gamut, from incensed to insane to content, and if she doesn’t win awards then life isn’t fair. In the first season she mostly channeled A Streetcar Named Desire, and she did have her over-the-top moments in Asylum, but all in all she was brilliant. Lana Winters was the through-line, connecting the past to the present. I like how they tied the opening scene of episode 1 into it all. It makes perfect sense in retrospect that Johnny was in the asylum in the present. That was where he was conceived, metaphorically,after all. I did not anticipate the outcome of the scene when he finally met his mother, but it had the kind of symmetry that makes sense. I wonder what insanity they’ll come up with next season?
