Saturday coffee.

Coffee at home. Anne cooked up a couple of bowls of Bob’s 10 Grain hot cereal.

It’s what my mom used to call binding. The truth is that I like it. Better than oatmeal.

Along with fighting for our promised pension, this is what happens when you retire at 64. No more bagels for breakfast. Bob’s 10 Grain hot cereal.

Stop. I’m having a hard time keyboarding this morning. Lavert’s Casanova is on Pandora’s R and B and Oldies station and I keep bopping up and down.

I ain’t much on Casanova

me and Romeo ain’t never been friends.
Can’t you see how much I really love you?
Gonna sing it to you time and time again.
Oh
Casanova
Casanova.

Every man deserves a good woman
and I want you to be my wife.
Time is so much better spent with you
baby

Okay. They’re done.

I have some other retirement observations to share this morning.

First.

I have now been going to the gym four days a week for five weeks. Two days are with a trainer.

I am finally getting over the point where I hurt all the time. This is what happens when you have not worked muscles for 50 years. Wake them up and they get mad.

On the other hand I feel like I felt when I quit smoking twenty-five years ago.

Reformed smokers are obnoxious about other people smoking. I was.

Now I go to the gym at two o’clock in the afternoon and the place is filled with twenty-somethings. That’s fine. I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me.

But where are the other retirees?

Hey, my brothers and sisters. Twenty-somethings are already in good shape.

I should be seeing more of my contemporaries on the treadmill and stretching those quads.

My friend, Dr. John, told me it will add two years to my life.

Two extra years of TRS would be the greatest revenge against Nekritz, Biss, Quinn, Madigan, et al.

I posted on Facebook my surprise that Samuel L. Jackson didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for his role in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

A great movie, by the way.

A Facebook friend wrote back saying something snide about me being retired had given me time to be passionate about Oscar nominations.

Actually it is quite the opposite.

I was far more passionate about movies when I was 18.

My high school pal Jeff Ort would pick me up in his Volkswagon bus (he was a surfer dude) on Wednesday evenings and we would go over to Royce Hall at UCLA to see what they called art movies. We were heavily into auteur theory. Back then I could name every starting player on the LA Dodgers and twelve French New Wave directors.

Now I don’t know the names of anybody on the Cubs until August and maybe I see a dozen movies a year.

No feature-length cartoons. Nothing in 3-D. No movies about guys getting drunk and finding a baby.

But amazingly, this year I have seen four of the Best Picture nominees.

I thought it was interesting that Argo started with a pretty accurate history of US – Iran relations, including the CIA coup against the democratically elected Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.

(Spoiler Alert) In Tarantino’s Django, Jamie Foxx doesn’t die at the end. That’s pretty radical film making.

Les Miserables is about revolution. It is ironic that so many of the elitist film critics hate it  and sneer that it is a popular hit. I watched one local snobby critic on TV last week talk about it with his lips pursed as if he just sucked a bitter lemon. He gave me cause to like it even more.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is touching and profound and features the wonderful Quvenzhané Wallis. Actually, it is my favorite film of the year.

So, yes. I guess I am retired and passionate about movies again.

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