Train In Vain

holiday time. I don't feel it. I don't know. I wanted to tell you I forgot. I watched that Michael Manson documentary and I forgot to tell you that one of the it was such a phony moment of my life, but a necessary one, because you know, that's what you do when you're a person in Ay. You got a movie script, Well, what I did was when I got the script for a movie I was supposed to read for called Chump Change. Yes, I read it home in my apartment actual it was Vinnie's apartment, and I loved it.

It was really funny. It's very seldom that you get a script you laugh out loud, and Chump Change had some really great jokes and I loved my lines, and the director allowed me to live and we had a ball with Tracy Lord's and Fred Willard. I mean, so many people and Mirra. That movie had a lot of fun people. Tim Mathieson, Oh yeah, we had a great time. I remember taking the script. This is so bad, but I did it. I took it to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

I just went to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And back in the day, you could kind of slip in and get out the back door and take off your sweatpant answer and have a bathing sit on and lay on a lounge and order a drink. And they didn't bust your balls about what room are you in, Sarah? Now I'm paying cash. I still need your room, sir. They didn't do that back then, so you could go out there, and I did. I laid out there on a nice hot date and had my script next to me and

read my script at the pool at the BHH. Because that's what you do when you're a big shot and you get a script. You got to read it in front of people. Let the town know, Oh he's getting work. I know it's so bad, but it's it is what it is. You know. Before I launch into the show, I gotta tell you this morning God, how I love

this song ninety seven point five. I don't even know what the name of the station is that I listened to, but it's got all old rock, which I love, and it's none of that bullshit rap in the morning and I can't you know, Oh, this is the zoo, the fucking zoo. Cow bells, I can't hear air horns. Get out of here. They played this morning Knights in White Satin, moody blues. Most of you, if not all of you, know that beautiful song. The guy that wrote this song,

I want you to understand. You know, sometimes we push away youth because we don't think they know enough and they're not ready to hear this. What does he know? Well, the guy that wrote this song, Justin Hayward, was nineteen years old when he wrote Knights in White Satin. And yes, it's a progressive rock song or whatever you want to call it, but you have to admit it's timeless. The kid was nineteen and we all feel most kids don't

know shit at that juncture of their lives. But here he is spitting out a beautiful melody and lyrics to a wonderful song. I mean, remember what happened to your heart. When you first heard that song, it wasn't just a melody. You know there was something else behind it, right, It just hits you a certain way. It's still creepy in a good way. And it's moody. Well that makes sense, it was saying by the moody blues. But it is phenomenal.

It's a very haunting melody. There's those beautiful string instruments, lush string. I love using the word lush, lush strings. With the powerful crescendos. It's a symphony of sorrow and it cuts very deep when you hear it. And not a lot of us can understand the poem at the end. You know, poems could be kind of weird to delve into. What is this exactly saying? Is it meeting the sadness I have in my heart? Like? Where is this poem? And what does it mean to me? Oh? My god,

it's beautiful. He was writing this justin Hayward as one relationship he had was ending and another one was about to go and bloom nineteen years old. Happens a lot. You break up with a chick as you saw another chick. It's you know, back in those days where every tree had so much fruit, and he come home one night and he couldn't sleep. His mind was wandering. I listen, I still sit on the edge of my bed at night and try to come up with better words to

a story. I do. I do. And that night Justin Hayward was wrapped up in satin sheets that a girlfriend bought him that he felt were a bit pretentious, but that's what he was wrapped up in. He liked them because they look romantic and man, those lyrics at the beginning knights in whit satin, never reaching the end. Let us I've written meaning to send fuck. That's the kind of shit you hear from therapy. Like he. I know for a fact that he went to therapy because those

lyrics right there. You know, a lot of therapists ask you to write letters to the people that you may have hurt, and even write letters to yourself to forgive yourself. I didn't. I've not done that, but it's been asked of me, and I can tell that's where this Justin Hayward got that line. Yes, letters that are written to send the girl, sure, but sometimes it's about letters you write to yourself or people you want to apologize to

that you're not going to send. But again, this happened during a time when one relationship was ending and the other one was beginning, or at least he hoped. And that sort of shit will give a writer a lot of fuel. But anybody who knows a thing or two about men and women can tell you this is a song about a guy who lost a girl. Of course, it's one of the best things you could do. Oh, I lost my girl. Go write a song, Go write a story. Your heart is full of words, it's full

of passion, and you gotta get out there. You have to, you know, blood, let it, let it out. Find something in that pain that you can make positive for yourself. Too many people don't know how to do that. But those lyrics, beauty I've always missed with these eyes before. Just what truth is? I can't say anymore? Obviously he's lamenting the fact that he should have told this girl how he feels about her. Brilliant, But then, you know,

just what truth is? I can't say anymore because I love you, And he says that over and over again, and it's hearty, Yes, I love you, you know, it's just my god, it's beautiful. The strings someone tried to tell me thought, they cannot define just what you want me to be. I will be in the end again, Oh my god. He won't be where he wants to be because he fell in love with a girl who got away. You get it. He fell in love with well, I've told you about Mary, but Labucci, that was his girl.

Just what you want to be, you will be in the end. Yeah, that happens. The guy wants that which he can no longer. Have a love song to the one who got away. It's very tragic. But if you're a man and you don't know a love song, you haven't lived. I've heard this song I don't know ten thousand times. I love it, I adore it, and I've come to realize as I've gotten older, you do become what you want to be in the end. You do. And it's kind of beautiful how much emotion it starts

up in you. And when the song breaks down into the narration part where they do the poem, next time you hear it, try and remember that this came from a nineteen year old kid's broken heart, and he minded that beautiful song from his broken heart his chest. Obviously, there's people out there who could be just as creative by tapping into their inner pain, or their inner peace, or their inner agony, whatever the fuck, But just tap

in and beautiful things will come out of it. I always say, if you feel like you might want to cry, then lean in and cry. But that poem is called late lament and God breathe deep. The gathering gloom watched, lights fade from every room, bensidered, people look back and lament another day's useless energy spent impassion, lovers wrestlers, One lonely man cries for love and has none. New mother picks up and suckles her son. Senior citizens wish they

were young, cold hearted. Orb that rules the night removes the colors from our sight. Reds, gray and yellow white. But we decide which is right and which is an illusion. Oh myfe hit me with an axe in the back of the head. I don't care if I die right now. That song, that poem, red is gray and yellow white. Fuck you six words that kill me. So beautiful and even better than it's the end of a rock song.

What an extra surprise that was. As a kid, we didn't know that was coming, right, We just heard the song and then what's this. There's a poem after they hit the xylophone. If you done what kid like me who loves words that work together, well you can imagine what it did to me. So great, Moving on, I told you a few days ago that Cannis Owns just lost her mind with what she's doing with this whole new story about the country of France. Has put out a hit on her. Coincidentally, they also put out a

hit on Charlie Kirk. Now Candas sow is in there crosshairs. That's what she's saying. I told you she's lost her mind and it's getting embarrassing. And now there's articles about exactly what I said. They're saying that cannas Ollan has claimed they're very high ranking employee of the French government had warned her that President Emmanuel Macron and his wife quote unquote Brigitte have executed upon and paid for her assassination.

And the kill squad includes at least one Israeli. Of course it's gott included Jew because that's what Candice Owen's loved to talk about. Jews are killing every Jews at the end of the world. Ju Ju ju ju jew unbelievable. But the New York Post and The Guardian and other outlets have written about this delusion. She suddenly is going on this paranoia delusions of grandeur, as she declines, she's been claiming this since last year, that Macron was born a man and they both are part of a pedophile

cult called the Frankests that founded Israel. It gets I mean, uh, a cult, a pedophile cult founded Israel. She even says Brigitte may actually be Emmanuel's biological father. I know she's not on drugs, but she might as well be. Matter of fact, get on them. Can this? You'll feel better during your delusions. She also fanned the flames of this big old crazy conspiracy theory that Israel had something to

do with Charlly being assassinated. I mean, people talk about Alex Jones and the kind of nutty shit he's done. Is Candae owns that far away from him, and I enjoy listening to Alex Jones, even though I know there's something off of them. These people are all Howard Beel's from the movie Network. If you haven't seen it or heard all my shows I've mentioned Network, and you need to. It's one of the best shows of the nineteen seventies or maybe the Best Not Shows, one of the best

movies of all time. But Howard was a newsman who lost his mind and began to just report what he felt he had to report on. And that's the movie where you get the line A man as hell and I can't take it anymore. He made viewers say that out there windows in New York City while he was doing his news show. This is what Cande Zellens has become, except she's spouting conspiracy theories and not truths, at least

not truths to me. But the thing is, the more she talks shit, he would think that people would turn off, but no, she's getting so much more hits and likes this. The first episode of the Macrone series, Becoming Brigitte got five million views, and the whole thing about the Franco Israeli hit squad that got are you ready thirty nine million views over the weekend. I write something on substack and if twenty people read it, I feel good. Jesus Christ.

Maybe some of them are tuning in because they know they're reading the words of somebody or listening to somebody who's become a dumpster fire. I don't know, but it's a really weird sight. And this whole digital media landscape we're now all kind of involved in, it's become what this writer called a cesspool where personality and scandal outweigh anything resembling sanity and substance. Great point, and every time Canda Sellens has something to say, she gets more clicks,

more likes. That puts more money in her pocket, and it puts you into the feeds of other equally unhipged viewers who do believe everything she's saying and selling. I don't know. I've always looked at her as sane, and I'd like her face. I think she's pretty to look at, and she's very smart, and she's quick on her feet, and man, she hit the town running. People like that you gotta take stand up and take notice of. But her sanity is off right now. It's almost like disintegrating.

And the more people that tune in and hit like and subscribe, you're just adding to her delusion and her paranoia. I don't know what's gonna happen to her, but I think there needs to be a welfare check on Canvas. Can someone go check on her and her husband and the kids, it's really weird. Okay, water break, because I'm gonna talk to you about a movie I just saw that I liked a lot, and do me favorite. Anybody out there that wants to be smart ass and write

me on the podcast page. Could you not sniff so much to clear through or make noises with your mouth? Go fuck yourself. Anybody who says that, fuck off. Go listen to Heathery McDonald. Go listen to anybody that's got to show with an editor that edits everything out. This show is called unfiltered, So if I fart in the fucking microphone, it's part of the show. If I do this, deal with it. It's fucking life. If you don't like it, fuck off. I'm sick of it. Don't complain to me.

Get out of here. A fucking asshole told me that this morning on the page. You have no idea. I don't care what people think of me when they say something as stupid as that to me. I don't know his name. I call him out right now. He's not someone that usually UH posts, but the fuck out of here? Can you stop doing this and that? Anyhow? I saw an article today that said that pretty soon forty percent of jobs performed by human beings are going to be

replaced by AI. And most of the jobs you kind of see would be replaced by robots, but there are some you wouldn't think that would happen to. But listen, it's going to be a scrum, and that scrum many people who never dream they lose their occupations. They're going to have to try and convince their bosses that they're better, healthier, quicker, and more reliable than programmed robots. And none of them

are going to be able to do that. Not even one percent of them will provide a convincing argument that makes sense to the pencil pushes of the world. They've made their decisions. Robots don't get sick. You know, you're not going to pay them, you're not going to worry about them not coming to work on time. They get it done, and they're there every day, whether it's a machine or an actual robot, and they're reliable. I know it's impersonal, but if you're a pencil pusher with a

big business, it makes sense. I know a lot of occupations that include, you know, empathy, sympathy, entertainment to a degree, medical advice, and there are many other important areas that should not ever be replaced, or maybe in ten years will find that they can be. I don't know. We used to always talk about a doctor's bedside manner. That meant a lot. I hope doctors are always going to be around our bed and not have some robot deliver some print out to a nurse who reads it to you.

It's just crazy if that happens in ten years, five years, What does that do to the workforce in America? A workforce that's very uncertain of their future, Like our children, What do you want to do when you get out of college? I don't know what's going to be available. I don't know either. Along the same lines, today I watched a movie on Netflix called Train Dreams with Joel Edgerton,

who I always like. And this movie centers around one man at the turn of the century trying to spend a life, or to spin a life actually for him and this nice pretty girl he meets, who's Felicity Jones, And then they have a baby. And this man gets work making bridges up in the Pacific Northwest Idaho Oregon area, bridges that traverse rivers and streams, and because of his hard work and all the other people working on that, on those developments. It made life a lot easier for

people traveling in those areas in the Great West. But then ten years later, bigger men from a big company with more money came and replaced those wooden bridges with ones made of steel and concrete that could stand the test of time. And you see this man coming home, dead tired from months of work away from his home, and you can tell his face in the same kind of threats to his career and his family's well being as many of us right now are because of this

scary reality. Even though it's a beautiful movie. It's a very sweet trauma about young love and big promise of you know, the big promise of parenthood and what hard work can bring you. Many moments where he's with his wife and their little daughter is born, and they're in bed speaking about what kind of girl she's going to be, what kind of women, what they want to do, and they put rocks around this patch of land and the rock symbol how they want their house to be built.

And they build this house by fucking hand like pioneers did back then, and it's beautiful. From log cabin they built for themselves to house that baby, and it makes me remember what it was like when I had my children with my wife, and those nights where you just sit up in wonder and stare at that baby's face and the giggles and the crying and everything. It got to a point where I was a very hands on father. The minute I heard my babies cry, I was up.

I never believed and let them cry till they fall asleep. I can't do that. I picked them up, immediately, made them a bottle, made sure it was warm on the inside of my wrist, took them to the couch, you know, sang to them, and fed them all swaddled up. Those are just such amazing times that you share with somebody now that marriages go bad and that's where you got left. There's those memories, but they're tremendous memories. But when you think about this plot, it's almost like a horror movie

because how quickly the world is moving. There's no jump scares, there's no petrifying clowns or little kids with knives or you know, there were no walls where blood runs down them. There's no cycle that stabs the little kids. After he pulls them down a storm drain. You know, no red balloons. It ain't that kind of scary. But it's just a man who came to America to make this country great and to keep his family's head above water. And fifteen minutes in you can already see him drowning in doubt

and worry and heavy concern. And I ask you, is this any different than the way many men and women are feeling today? And this movie is seeing men. You know, they're taking down big trees in Idaho, and they got handsaws and axes and hatchets, and you know, some men die. In fact, there were Asian men on the job who were you know, there was bad time back then in America and you know they have to be taken away or killed. And some of these guys were thrown off

a cliff. And I'm not sure how truthful that is, but there's one guy in this movie, this one Asian man who gets thrown off a cliff, and that memory never leaves our lead character's brain. But yeah, Asians back then were very good with explosives. They were the men that went into caves and put dynamite in there so they can blow things up and keep it moving, keep the train tracks able to be built, et cetera. So the why Asians got that job. They were good with

gunpowder from China. Same thing with Native Americans are very good at heights. They would paint bridges and a lot of high structures. For some reason, Native Americans are flying with heights. I don't know, it's a thing. Italians like working with marble. I don't know. Mexicans like working outside. What can I tell you? But they're taking down these big trees, right And when they sleep at night, you know, it's they're sitting there with these lanterns that are powered

by oil, you know, and they're intents. They sleep in tents that were once used for the Civil War for soldiers to sleep in during the Civil War. In fact, those tents were used before that, during the span during the Indian conflicts. Something we never think about, right, And it's an old man in this movie played by William H. Macy And I'm telling you right now he will be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and I think he'll win. It's not a long roller. It's

probably in the movie sixteen minutes. But the words they gave him to say the dialogue, and the way he does it, it's fantastic. Old Salty Man has been out there a long time and he's in one of those tenths. He's singing, and the guys don't want him to sing. The Minnesota boys he calls, and they don't want to

hear him singing. So he takes his harmonica out and plays the harmonica late at night as these boys are going to sleep, And it just made me think of how much better off were we when there were people who would lay down a night and listen to a harmonica and fall asleep, rather than have to check tick talk or Instagram or the little bullshit we have on

our iPhones, Twitter, what have you. They just went to bed with the soft sounds of a harmonica, not crazy liberal fags and trans shouting how much to hate America and hate Trump and all the other noise and nonsense we have out there in the palm of our hands. Those phones they gave to us that we pay a lot of money for just slow us down. I know, we use them and they're very valuable in terms of work. You could do the same shit on your laptop, but

you don't carry around with you all day. Either way, it's made our culture very lazy, and there's a lot of learning. When you watch this movie Train Dreams, it's just about a lot of hard nosed men and women who came here to put this country together and make it the best place in the world. And now you see the fruits of their labor and others who came

after them, our grandparents, our parents, and then us. And you look at all the living and the nonsense in so many cities and states around the country, and you can feel your bones. It's just not going right. You feel a change. I got to bed back. I can feel it in my bones. When the wedd is about to change. My sister feels in her hands. You can feel it. America's changed. The first big change was COVID, where we learned that our lives are not protected and secured.

After all, the government really doesn't know what to do when they have to take care of us, and it split second they don't know what to do. And then four years of Biden allowing millions of vicious, violent, uneducated masses to come into this country did nothing about it. A lot of these people don't contribute anything to our livelihood or our culture, or America's beauty or our generosity.

They just take advantage of it. They take, they steal, They make life harder for many other Americans who work hard and as hard as life was back then then.

I bet those guys could never imagine that years and years later, even though it was so hard and they worked their asses off by hand cutting down trees and living by gas lamps and not seeing their family, I bet they look back as they got older and realized that those times were maybe the best times of their lives, because, as they say in the movie, the world that we live in is very infinitely stitched together, and when you pull out one thread you can you just don't know,

you might be fucking up the whole design of things. Man, it's that intricate. It's a part of the movie where a tree falls on a man, a tree branch, a big branch falls on a man and kills him, and they call those the widow makers. Because it happened a

lot back then. Reminded me of me and Jack, my brother in law, were in Manhattan back when he was getting cancer treatments and my father was getting the same, and the three of us were going to Manhattan, and one day me and Jack were together in the car and about a block up ahead it was a big scaffolding.

And the scaffolding everywhere in Manhattan, it's disgusting. There's scaffolding everywhere, but there's no scaffolding in Europe, and they're putting up the biggest buildings in the world in Dubai and no scaffolding, But in New York City scaffolds. But we saw a big piece of plywood start to fall out of the

twenty stories, falling like a leaf. Guys, but this is a deadly piece of lumber and it hit a man and we really couldn't see it because he was like a block ahead, but we heard it and the shrieks of the people. That guy died, and you just go, God, damn, how easy is it to just die? And it doesn't matter. We're all gonna go on and do what we gotta do. The light turned green. I got an appointment. This guy's dead. Well, I gotta go someplace. It's very disheartening, you know, it's

weird our brains. I'm gonna get deep here. I heard of Jay Morris podcast. He was talking to the football player Julian Edelman, who played for the Patriots, won a bunch of Super Bowls. Great guy, short but fast as the wind and tough as nails and played quarterback in college, but knew he couldn't be a quarterback in the Pro, so he developed a talent to repurent return punts and be a receiver, and him and Tom Brady lit up

the scoreboard for years. He talked about one day a teammate got a concussion and I'm just I'm just saying this story to tell you how much, how little we know about the human brain. This guy got racked up and they go take him to the sidelines and they're talking to him. He finally comes to with smelling sauce. They're talking to him, where are you? And he said, he's at a football stadium with a dome. And he said, I'm going to get the name of the town wrong.

I'm at the wood Haven Mall. And he said it very indignantly, I'm at the wood Haven Mall. Uh huh, you are, yeah, And he goes, where did they put a dome over the fucking mall? The guy was gone. His brain was on a whole different level. We just don't know enough about our brains. Man. It's like I know, we always say space is the next great frontier. Know our brains are even the ocean is you. We got to study brains more. I'm sure we do. I know we do, but I wish it were more because there's

so much untapped information there. I don't know why I got this discussion, but I know what. I saw a video on Instagram where a an African parrot, some kind of talking bird, the ones that lived to like fifty sixty years old. This bird's very intelligent, could speak in different languages, knows how to read. Just one of those terrific birds. But he did something that they've never heard a bird. Do birds know about what's going on right now? That's my food, that's your ahead, that's the TV. I'm

gonna walk here, I'm gonna do this. They don't know about yesterday and tomorrow. It's not what their brains can do. But this fucking parrot said to his owner, what are we doing tomorrow? I would have run out of the house shrieking. Birds should know about tomorrow or yesterday? Anyhow? Can we just work more on brains? I love like another video. There's a little Pomeranian who's deaf. A family owns this beautiful toy palm. She's old, she's deaf. She

lays on the loneium floor. She don't do nothing. There's another Pomeranian who's young and act. It was like a tutsi gizmo thing. And every time there's something happening in the house or it's dinner time, the young Pomeranian goes over to the deaf one and taps her head with her paw to say, get up, there's something going on. I know you can't hear, said the fucking how does the dog know the other dog is deaf? I love

this stuff miracles. Anyhow, getting back to the movie, there's a scene with this guy's in the middle of a field and it's a field where him and his wife built that house out of logs, you know, And he's sitting there on a rock and he's just contemplating how much he's lost in life. And again, it's no different than what happened in Malibu and Pasadena. His house burned down, and I'm going to spoil something for you, but he lost his family, and is that different than what just

happened by the ocean on the PCH Pacific Coast Highway. No, people lose everything and they got to rebuild. And as hot as it is now, and it's near impossible now with allways rules and laws and sanctions in LA, how much tough it was back then. People were working for four dollars a day, being away from home for months on end. What a rough life. But they still were able to see opportunity and work for a living and get things done so that their lives would be memorable.

It's so different now. And look at that guy sitting on the rock, not really showing much emotion on his face, and I know exactly what he feels like, even though I can't exactly recognize the emotion, but I know what he's feeling. And this is what women need to hear. And I just say this, women, you need to hear this. Even children need to hear this. Your men in your life carry much more than you could ever fathom in

their hearts, in their chests. We carry shit that we can't unload, and we don't want to unload or unpack in front of people we love because we don't want them to get nervous. We're not just carrying responsibility or caring for a family, but we're also loving around all the hurt and the problems and the drama and the doubts and the mystery of our past and the mystery of the future. And that's the thing about men. We don't talk to each other. What's up, bro? Good? How

you doing good? Bro good? Bro? We don't talk. You girls get together in front of the mirror while you put in makeup on. You both know what's going on in both your lives in the last twenty years. Men don't do that. How you doing bro? Good? Good? Alarm? Okay? You know that's all we say. No one ever says, can I talk to you a second? I'm having a real rough time. We just let our emotions bounce around our head like a pinball for years on it end, and we try to make peace with them on a

daily basis. It's like we try to calm down an angry dog. It's always snarling. We just try to calm it down. That's how I see it, anyhow. But if women and children knew what their husbands or fathers are carrying around in their heads, they treat them with more care. Because we don't. We we don't want to walk around with problems. But we have to because we have to negotiate how to solve everybody else's problems while we juggle

our own. That's a dad, that's a man. Anyhow, before I slip, there's another part in this movie where an Indian chief comes to visit this guy in the woods because it gets sense that he's troubled. And that's exactly what happened with my uncle Larry and that Indian chief who came out of the deep woods in New Jersey to help him. I wrote that in my first chapter of my second book, which I love that chapter so much, and no one talks about that chapter. I think people

just breeze right past it. It's a beautiful chapter about how this Indian chief gave my uncle natural things from the forest to make him feel better, burdock rude and all these different roots and plants and leaves and berries that he knew having lived off the land. It's amazing he found my uncle because as he could sense, he was ill. Ah. God, things like that make me insane. So this guy in the movie has to find a spot next to a lake where he can fish for

speckled trout. Maybe he gets some mushrooms he could eat. But that's his life now. And it's just a reminder of how many hurdles and obstacles we have to jump over, and walls we have to push down, walls we have to knock down. That's why these Marvel movies don't impress me, because we're all doing whatever we can do to survive,

and we don't have bulging muscles or hidden powers. We're just fucking regular people with determination and grit and a sense of urgency and responsibility that just makes us move our s. So this guy rebuilds his home with the help of the Indian chief, but he couldn't bring himself to build a bedroom without his wife and daughter around years go by. Can't do it. He's still waiting, he's still thinks they're going to turn up in the woods somewhere.

And it just reminded me that we all have something we're waiting for. We all got something we can't wait to find to happen, to open up, you know, just a bunch of emotions in our life, some relief in our life. Maybe we can finish this run on a high note. We're all working toward that end goal, right

This movie is really something, you know. There's a part of the film where they the world has finally gotten to a point where these men can now use gas power chain saws to cut down these big, mighty trees. And there's a scene where the main character is trying to get that motor started and the younger guy comes up behind him and says, watch out, old man, I'll

get this cracking for you. Of course it works, but when you see all these men using saws and access and hatches to cut down trees and branches, and then you go to a man who put takes a gas power chainsaw and does in three minutes what these guys did in one hour. It's just another example of how that's happening nowadays, with technology and with people and with AI.

When we made wine in our backyard a longsle and it was from a grapevine my father planted years earlier in our backyard straight to Rosalie's backyard, and there was all fishing line set up and pieces of thin lumber that we would leave the vines to to keep it moving. And it took years. You just watched that vine grow year after year. Finally it's crawled across that lumber and the fishing lines got it, and then it goes up on the telephone lines and the cable wires, and now

it's hitting Rosalie's deck. And now we're getting beautiful blue purple grapes. They're gonna make fantastic wine. And my father would have me pull down those grapes. It was kind of painstaking, and we dumped them in these big steel or metal barrels he had. And as we did this, my father would have I'm not lying, sixty seventy bees on his forearms, honey bees around his neck. They were just smelling the grapes, licking. They loved. The bees stayed in the grapevine, so that arbor was so scary to

walk under all your herbs. But they did their thing. They were doing their work. But when they came to my father's arms, they didn't sting him once. It's amazing. The bees just let him do what he needed to do. I get. Did they understand that we're making our own wine and we'd have this operation working in long garage? There was at least I don't know, fifteen big five gallon glass bottles, all of them had wine in them being fermented from our grapes, and when the grape season ended,

my father would use pumpkins that he planted. We planted pumpkin and pumpkin. He made a nice white pumpkin wine. People thought we were crazy. No, now you look at the stores they sell pumpkin wine. Back in nineteen seventy eight, No, there was no pumpkin wine on the shelves. My father knew how to do it, and that wine got you drunk real quick, oh, very strong. And I know there are machines that can compress these grapes and make wine at a much quicker rate and save these people who

owned vineyards a lot of money. But that's not what we want to see, is it. We want to see wine and wonderful food being served to us by people who use their hands and work it with love, like Lucy Bull did with her feet on that episode of I Love Lucy. We want to see hard work. And I see a lot of instances in this movie Train dreams that what's happening in real time right now. It's getting scary and depressing because it's very different out there,

and it begs the question. Sometimes you can't figure out if it's different or if it's always been this way. You start to think about how when you were younger and tougher and rougher, it was different. You could understand and figure out a lot of the bullshit that life threw in our way. And at one point in the movie, some old man that this character meets you met years ago, comes back in the forest and didn't recognize him at first, and he asked about a character. He asked about William H.

Macy's character, have you seen so and so? And the main character knows that he's gone, but this guy's having some sort of delusion, so he says, no, I haven't seen him, because he knows the guy saw him the day that he died, but he forgot it or put it out of his mind because life was too tough back then. So she says, no, I don't know, I haven't seen him. It just makes you think about the people during those times, how they would probably have to forget about a lot of scary, sad things that happen

in front of their eyes. It makes you think about those people, how much they're scrubbing in their rear view mirror. You know, in our cars there's that sign on the mirrors that say objects and mirror are closer than they appear. Well, that's true, but objects in people and memories in our rearview mirror are further away than they appear. Especially as

you get older, they get very fleeting. My buddy tough Tony sent me a picture of about fifty friends of ours, former classmates at West is Of High School, all gather in his backyard this past week, and I didn't make it. I'm so mad I didn't make it. They make that pilgrimage to Tony's house every year. It's a great picture to see because I'm trying to remember all their faces and names right, And to my amazement, there were a

ton of men I couldn't recognize. Yeah, their midsections were bigger, many of them had no hair, Some looked beaten down, weathered. They just really looked like a bunch of old men in someone's backyard. Not the kind of men you'd fuck with. But that's besides the point. But I just don't know

and cannot remember when we all got this old. Oh boy. Finally, I want to end this with saying that one of my patrons, I think it's Deborah Cruk, sent me a letter she enjoyed my latest sub stack called Hollywood Knights. It's about a night that I had many years ago in the nineties where I was at a producer's house and he was pushing his wife off on me, and I wrote very honestly about what happened that night, and Debora wrote to me, I'm joining you. I'm joining because

of you. I seriously do not have time or money for one more thing, let alone media. Deborah. I understand I'm the same as you, but I can't help myself. So I came and happily. I hear your voice in every letter, quirky and raw and sexy, with an edge that just might turn some women off, but I love it. I've heard this story before, I never tired of it, but this was definitely better, or maybe just hit speak differently and new because I've never read your written words before.

I will need to buy your books and thank you for the entertainment and literary visuals. I love it. That's the message I want to bring to you, folks when I tell you go to aj Benz at dot subset dot com. It's about reading my words and not just listening to me. There's a difference. I'm equally talented in both arenas, and I dare to say the written word was where it all began. And I don't have a problem.

But she wrote. I love what she wrote, but I don't want to hear that it might turn some women off. It's about a man talking about the possibility of sex with a married woman while her husband's upstairs in the house, who clearly knows this is going on. So if that turns women off, I don't want to know those women. I'm a very passionate man and I've had a very sexual life and I don't make any apologies for it,

and you shouldn't either. Whoever reads those words, but by all means, gang go to aj Ben's at dot substack dot com and join. Read my words. You'll like me. It turns out I'm multifaceted. That's it. I love you as I'll talk to you tomorrow, one day before Thanksgiving. I think we're gonna take two days off. No show Thursday, knows Friday. What do you say? Maybe I'll do one because you know I can't stay away, but I don't know. I think it's time for two days. Either way, we'll talk tomorrow