It’s hot this morning, but not as hot as it has been. The sun’s beginning to wear on me and the back of my neck when I’m riding in, however, and somewhere in the city something metal-sounding is being cut with a large saw, pinging back and forth off the buildings surrounding the old meeting house up to my own perch in one of them. I’ve got the tour playing, muted on an iPad I brought from home for the purpose: it’ll be a sprint stage, and anyway the GC battle is over. I haven’t looked in on the climber’s jersey, but — checking — it looks like Ciccone’s still in polka dots, if barely. Assuming Vingegaard doesn’t decide he wants to win the stage on Friday I expect the mountains classification might still be interesting to watch; the points jersey and best young rider jerseys are also, at this point, pretty well tied-up. It’s been a very good race, but after Pogi cracking spectacularly yesterday, the air’s been let out a little bit, I think. But this is fine: in theory I have other things to attend to, also.

My drinking club (by which I mean my friends from writer grad school, though in fairness we are less and less a drinking club as time goes on) went to see Macbeth on the Common last night in a more wholesome turn of events. It was nice: a well-played play. In theory going to see plays is supposed to be helpful to me in writing the play parts of the novel I’ve been working on for too many years, though really this kind of thing isn’t really the right kind of play. Nevertheless. We sat in camp chairs and enjoyed the show, commenting a-fresh in each small sub-group how we haven’t seen nor read the play since high school, most of us, and how long ago that has all of a sudden become. You remember the general outlines, though. A few lines, the common names of some of the speeches. The play was interrupted just before the intermission, at the height of the Banquo’s Ghost scene, by a guy shouting about Karens and Chattel Slavery and I don’t really remember what else. Apparently he’d been told he wasn’t allowed to film the performance on his phone, and that had set him off. The Commonwealth Shakespeare Co. security folks escorted him out, the play paused and the actors left the stage (for safety, presumably). We all, in each small sub-group during intermission, noted that one of the things that went through our minds was if he came back shooting. It’s a bad time we live in, in that respect (and, of course, in others). We joked about instinctively thinking to herd around our friend who’s 8- or 9-months pregnant. We bought over-priced but delicious ice cream. The play resumed. The guy did come back but he was arrested before he could cause too much trouble. The fight scenes at the end were elaborate. They had a mannequin head stuck to the tip of a sword. In this retelling, Malcolm was now Queen of Scotland. My friends headed to their various T stations and I biked home through an empty, eleven o’clock and sleepy Boston.

I was lucky today in that they had brewed fresh coffee just before I arrived, though I am already on my second cup and it hasn’t even been an hour. There was a decision made, I guess, at WeWork corporate a few months go, to change mugs from the taller black mugs with white interiors to shorter black mugs with black interiors. Apparently some of the guests were complaining about spoon scratches, thinking the mugs not sufficiently fresh, thus the change. All it really means for me is that I get up more often for more, that it’s a little worse for my heartburn, that I switch to tea earlier in the day than I used to so as to try and mitigate the aforementioned heartburn, which really hasn’t been so bad lately. I think it’s as much about stress as coffee, and it not being bad is itself something of a comfort.

David, the writer I’ve interviewed a couple of times now, once mentioned he was reading a book called Stoner that was set in Missouri, and, knowing that I am from Missouri, mentioned I might like it. This was maybe a year or two ago. On the scale of something more like a month or two ago, I perused the dollar-racks at two of the bookshops downtown and found a copy and bought it, then proceeded to read it as my "lunch book." I try always to have a "lunch book" that I keep and read (more or less) only at the office. Stoner was an excellent lunch book, because it was lovely, extraordinary well plotted and written, and easily consumable in 30-to-45 minute lunches. I’d gone to a MeetUp meet up a week or two ago and learned that, upon its relatively recent reissue, Stoner was one of the "it" books a while back (probably how it ended up on David’s, and subsequently my, radar). One of the folks I met was even teaching it. Anyway, it was a very good book, and I’ve started Colette’s The Vagabond as its successor. So far, I like it:

(It is not actually a novel (memoir?) about writing, so far as I can tell, but the above is wonderful, anyway.)

The peloton is not giving the breakaway much of a leash today: there’s still 80k left and they’ve only given them 37 seconds. The only other coworker in the office so far is giggling, listening to some podcast or other, I think.

What else? I thought I’d taken down more quotes from How to Cook a Wolf, which I’ve also just finished (I always seem to finish books all at once), but here’s the only one I can find:

It’s a bit bleak, but either way I love "always the game of Being Casual." The title caps is what does it for me, I think.

We’ve been talking about getting another cat, a kitten. Listening to the new version of "Speak Now." We watched a documentary called "Meet Me in the Bathroom" about the New York music scene in the early naughties and so I’ve been listening to a lot of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. It was chilling to watch the 911 attack footage again. I hadn’t remembered the dust-covered streets (I was pretty young, then). My brother’s band came to stay with us when they played Boston and reminded me that I like playing music too and so have been trying to do that. The folks on the community piano down in the square next to the Walgreens have been excellent lately. Someone told me I should think about doing a GrubStreet class about prosody for prose writers and I’ve been thinking about it. But only a little.

My stomach is making its presence known and so soon it’ll be time for breakfast. As soon as I finish this. I can never decide if I want to keep this blog up to date or not. One part of me says if I take time I should take time for other writing, another part says that this, too, is writing, and so counts. I’m trying to stay off social media and am succeeding (mostly), though in some light I’ve only replaced all of that with Backgammon on my phone. Distractions persist (or at least the tendency to seek them). But like all games I’ll sooner or later lose compulsive interest and return to something else or other. The sawing sounds have resumed (here: a nice circular ending). It is very bright today, and clear. No wildfire smoke from Canada, I guess. I’ve got an irritation on the back of my neck. The morning is late enough that work tickets are starting to appear and pile gently in my inbox. I don’t think they’re anything yet that will take too long. I’ve slept okay this week. I’m amazed at how far into the summer we are.

I make a point to take a "lunch walk" every day I’m downtown in the office. The other day I stumbled upon a "Berklee Summer in the City" performance, and sat and listened until the band decided it was time to take a break. On the walk back I saw a sign for one of those free "We have artists in our building, see! Not just finance offices!" galleries and walked in and looked at that, too. It’s these kinds of things that I mean to make more time for.