Excerpt: “Please let this be over, not stuck in a world without end, my friend.”

More poignant: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”

Then again it takes my mind off the fact that (a) the world has more or less ground to a halt and (b) “there ain’t no life nowhere” (to borrow from Jimi Hendrix). On top of which I’m really sick of painting. Felt like saying it twice.

I’m not saying I’ll be driving to Las Vegas any time soon. Unlike the mayor of Las Vegas, I’m not crazy or reckless or suicidal. Then again I’m presuming that normally expensive Vegas Strip hotel rooms are currently renting at basement rates. Naah, forget it.

VistaVision (large format) black-and-white films were a relative rarity in the ’50s, and they disappeared when VistaVision went away in ’61 or thereabouts. If you have a special affinity for black and white (as I do), you’re pretty much obliged to give the Amazon HD versions of William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours (’55), Robert Mulligan‘s Fear Strikes Out (’57) and Michael Curtiz and Hal Wallis‘s King Creole (’58) a looksee. All shot in VistaVision. Four or five others went this way.

Not only have I never seen Cornel Wilde‘s No Blade of Grass (’70), but I’d never heard of it until this morning. Odd. I respect Wilde’s The Naked Prey (’65), another film about survival against bad odds, so maybe. The Amazon Prime rental fee is only $2.00.

I’m committed to painting the kitchen today…Jesus. Straight white walls with chiffon lemon cupboard doors. After painting the living room (coral), bedroom (lily lavender walls with soft mint green cupboards) and the bedroom-bathroom foyer (white accented by SMG), I’m getting really sick of this. But at least it’ll be over after today. Or tomorrow as I might quit before day’s end. Maybe not.