emotional compromise & the novelist’s event horizon

I stayed up too late last night to watch Cory Booker smash that old racist bastard’s filibuster record into dust, and it was fully worth it.

As soon as I woke up this morning, I picked up my phone to see how long he’d held the floor in the end, and the first thing I saw was “Pour one out for Madmartigan, lads.”

So between Cory Booker, Val Kilmer, & a lack of sleep, I’m pretty emotionally compromised this morning (which, phrased like that, sounds like it’s much more scandalous than it is, doesn’t it?).

I don’t know, man. Booker did really well. I was telling my son about it, about how he’d called out not just the Democratic party’s failure to stop this descent into fascism, but his own failures in trying, how he hadn’t done enough, and my son was really impressed that he called himself out specifically. Which is kind of how I’m feeling about it. As another friend said, “A filibuster is not nothing,” and of course it wasn’t just that it was a filibuster, it’s that a Black man held the floor until he made Strom Thurmond a footnote instead of a record-holder, and it wasn’t just that he made Thurmond a footnote, it’s that he stood up and said what Democrats should have been saying, and doing, all along, and…it was a lot. I cried. I’m nearly crying again now.

And then Val Kilmer. I was not ready. Even knowing he’d been ill (albeit not recently) …I wasn’t ready for that. Not on top of already being kind of a wreck. I’m a child of the 80s; I’ve loved him since Real Genius, I cried at his reprisal of the Iceman role in the new Top Gun movie, he was beautiful and brilliant and (apparently) difficult, my favorites of his movies were perhaps not the most obvious (I adored The Saint and Top Secret), and…yeah, I don’t know. I want to cry. I also want to spend the next week watching his movies. I want… I don’t know. The world is too much with me.

Which, of course, does not mean I can just go home and hide under a blanket. I’ve got to finish this book, which…

Friday I wrote 5300 words and figured I had about 10K left to write. Monday I wrote 5400 words and had 1500-5000 left to write. Tuesday I wrote 5300 words, and today I still have 1500-5000 left to write. This is the Novelist’s Event Horizon: the end of the book is always the same distance away, no matter how much you write, until suddenly you’re sucked in & thrust out the other side. So in a minute I’m going to stop blogging and see if I can get through to the other side of the event horizon, but I needed to get some of this out of my system so I would stop scrolling social media for commentary on both Booker and Kilmer.