Hello, friends! Happy Labor Day! I hope you have an excellent time with friends and family—or on your own, doing your own things.

As for me, I’m going to take my daughters to a parade.

I’ve been teased (mostly by my brother) a few times for spelling and grammar errors in recent posts. Well… you can’t catch ’em all.

It’s a lot harder to catch grammar and spelling errors in your own writing anyway, as you often read what you intended rather than what you actually wrote.

But I understand—I, too, get bugged, more than with any other group, when I find such silly spelling or grammatical errors in something written by an author, so I sympathize. With the guy mocking me.

Love you, bro. Here’s your shoutout.

Quick Discussion—Perfect Days

Perfect Days is a 2023 Japanese film about a man named Hirayama. He lives alone, cleans toilets for a living, and listens to music on cassette tapes, among other things. I have not had the opportunity to finish this film yet—regrettably, something I wish to repair as soon as possible—but I so enjoyed the forty-or-so minutes that I have seen that I wanted to bring it up anyway.

Perfect Days, at least at the beginning of the movie, has nearly no dialogue. You spend a lot of time simply watching Hirayama clean toilets and live his life. He does encounter other people, but he doesn’t say much—they mostly interact with him. That said, I still really felt like I knew this character early on. Koji Yakusho (Hirayama) says a thousand words with the most minute expressions or tics of body language; I find it no surprise at all that he won Best Actor at Cannes 2023. How quickly Koji left me feeling like Hirayama was an old friend is a huge draw telling me to come back and finish the movie.

Hopefully Perfect Days stays strong through the conclusion, because its opening—fresh, weird, completely off the beaten track—sets an extremely high bar.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at about 127,000 words—roughly a 4,000-word jump from last week. I’m a little disappointed I didn’t get to 5,000 words, but I average thirty minutes of writing time a day and my usual goal in thirty minutes is 500 words. (Brain fog from a two-month-old who seems religiously opposed to sleep hasn’t helped…) Regardless, I think in two weeks or so I’ll be done with Part 2 of the book, and then I’ll move into the final, ish—the finishing of the main part of the story, before I go and write some inserts.

I finished reading Blindsight recently, and I’m on to Echopraxia. Once this last book is read I will get started on the article I’ve mentioned previously.

Related to the article, I think Theft of Fire and the Firefall books are fascinating when put in conversation with each other. Both at least touch on many of the same ideas, but move in opposite directions. For example, Firefall has a pretty firm, central “argument” that sentience and self-awareness is an evolutionary disadvantage that humans will need to shed to be competitive in the greater cosmos—on the other hand, in Theft of Fire, greater intelligence of non-human life is only possible through sentience and self-awareness. And, wouldn’t you know it, the former book seems to take a pretty pessimistic view toward humanity as a whole, optimistic for the latter.

Send-Off

Let me know about some of your favorite ways to celebrate on Labor Day! Are you a part of a beach family? Do you prefer parades? Do you wish hiding at home with a book was an option every holiday? (Often I do.)