3/28/2025

 Friday, March 28, 22025

D+142/68

In bed by 9:15, awake at 4:15, and up at 4:35.  41°, high of 72°!?!  

Prednisone, day 342; 3 mg., day 2/21; Kevzara, day 10/14; CGM, day 10/15; Trulicity, day  7/7.   2 mg. of prednisone at 4:50 a.m. and  5 p.m.  Other meds at 6 a.m.   Trulicity injection at 8:45.

Caela came over to visit after her Pilates session this afternoon and brought me a big sandwich, which was almost too much to consume.  She related her serious problem with her car, a health concern, and the situation with Dick.  Widowhood has been hard on her, not surprisingly.  I feel bad for her and hope things start looking up.  Fingers crossed, but, like us, each day she gets a day older, and old age doesn't tend to get easier with the passage of time.

Chauffeur duty. A busy morning: pick up Lizzie at 9 to trip to Nicolet; 10:30 take Geri to PT; 11 pick up Lizzie; 11:30, pick up Geri.

Werner Herzog, His Stars, and His Stories.  I watched Herzog's 1977 film Stroczek yesterday afternoon.  It is a very depressing film, perversely comic at times, but ultimately nihilistic (wrong word?), bleak, and depressing.  The film features 3 'stars:' Bruno Schleinstein playing Bruno Stroczek, the protagonist; Eva Mattes as Eva, a prostitute he befriends and helps; and Clemens Scheitz as Scheitz, Bruon's landlord and friend.  Bruno and Eva are beaten and abused by Eva's pimps in Berlin so they decide to move to Northern Wisconsin with Mr. Scheitz whose nephew has a car repair garage and auto salvage business there.  Though they have no money, they buy a big TV and a big manufactured home, which are soon repossessed and auctioned off by the bank that financed the purchases.  Eva returns to hooking at a local truck stop and hitches a ride to Vancouver from one of her 'johns'.  Bruno and Mr. Scheitz rob a barber of $32 and use the money to buy a frozen turkey and other groceries at a store across the street from the barber shop.  Mr. Scheitz is promptly arrested, but Bruno escapes with his frozen turkey, steals his boss's truck, drives to a truck stop near a ski lift and amusement arcade that features performing animals, including a dancing chicken.  Bruno rides the ski lift with the frozen turkey and his stolen rifle and kills himself.  The film closes with a protracted shot of the chicken, dancing.  Is this Herzog's opinion of life, or of modern life, capitalist life?  He painted a grim picture of life in Midwest America (Plainfield and Nakoosa, Wisconsin) and an even bleaker picture of life in Berlin.

    Bruno Schleinstein was the protagonist in an earlier Herzon movie, the 1974 The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.  He was a favorite of Herzog's, like Klaus Kinski, who starred in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo.   Both Bruno S. (which is how he is billed in his movies) and Kinski are odd, indeed very odd.  Kinski had uncontrollable rages and spent time in a psychiatric hospital.  He was initially diagnosed as schizophrinic and then as psychopathic.  His daughter accused him of sexually abusing her for15 years.  Bruno was a victim of child abuse and spent part of his childhood in mental institutions.  Roger Ebert's review of Stroczek referred to his character as mentally retarded.  I don't know quite what to think of his character in the movie, but I was reminded of the long-suffering donkey in Robert Bresson's film Au Hazard Balthasar and of Ted Lasso in the eponymous AppleTV series - almost Christ figures, long-suffering innocents in a crel, uncaring world.  Even Eva and Mr. Scheitz seem like innocents in their own ways.

    What I am wondering is what Herzog's story lines and choice of protagonists and actors to play them says about Herzog himself.

I made a loaf of banana bread this afternoon.

The temperature reached 76° this afternoon!!!  'Pneumonia front" tomorrow morning; the temperature is expected to drop 18° in one hour.