Buffa's Buffet: 5 things on my mind

The Good Nurse on Netflix delivers a very good moviegoer experience.

Change can be good and also terrifying. A shift in the depth of your everyday life should never feel like nothing, even if it scares you.

On Monday, I started a new job at Drive Social Media. The “associate” tag is falling off my title, and it will now just read “copywriter.” What is a fine accomplishment, and a regular order of things in a company when you start at the associate level, can unleash the bad parts of your brain to attack you with nerves and anxiety.

In a nutshell, I have never worked in digital marketing before Drive. I went from long-form takes like this batch of unfiltered nonsense to writing Facebook posts and digesting loads of data and strategy that could make a 40-year-old’s head spin. Of course, this is what my mind tells me. A job promotion is great until you get to the point of “oh, they’re looking at me now.”

Here’s the thing, and something I keep telling myself. You never know what you can or can’t do until you actually do it. There’s no way to understand if a task or job is too much for you until it’s standing in front of you. As Joe Buck said in Friday’s Post Dispatch about juggling MLB and NFL television duties, it’s better to focus on what’s in front of you instead of being terrified about ALL the work you have to do.

“I’m the kind of person who is focused on what’s immediately in front of me, so I don’t get overwhelmed by the volume,” Buck told Dan Caesar, who discusses changes and in-depth stories in a weekly column called “Media Views.”

Sage advice, Joe. The guy who I first met in the Busch Memorial Stadium press box over 20 years ago, and who now follows me on Twitter and can spot me in a crowd. As he told Tim McKernan at his book event years ago, “I knew Dan before he used steroids.”

The St. Louis Blues don’t need steroids; they need a win to snap an ugly five-game losing streak. The main culprit is a lack of sound defense, but the goal scoring isn’t exactly a consistent occurrence either. If I remember quickly from a blog I wrote who the fuck knows when, the difference makers this year are Jordan Binnington in net and whoever can replace David Perron’s production. The lack of goals can’t be attributed anywhere else, even new rich for life winger, Jordan Kyrou.

But do me a favor as Kyrou and Robert Thomas come together as the next Tarasenko-O’Reilly prototype pair: Chill. It’s not a snide comment. Just remember there are 74 games left in this extremely long season. Craig Berube won’t be fired but a trade down the line isn’t outside the question. If you need any past examples to enforce this statement, just look at the 2018-19 team. It ended with a Stanley Cup, but it started pretty bad. That’s not saying this 2022-23 team will have the same result, but they can turn it around.

Trust me. I’ve been watching and writing about this team for too long. The Cardinals didn’t do them any favors by winning zero playoff games again.

A quick transition to movies as I use my lunch break to write things that don’t have tangible value or can help a small/medium-sized business.

What should you watch this week that doesn’t include superhero costumes or fill your mind with bullshit? The Good Nurse on Netflix. Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne act their pants off as a pair of nurses at a Chicago hospital who encounter a sticky situation: One of them is killing patients softly but surely, which sets off a police investigation of not only the culprit, but the hospitals that knew about the deaths and stood by. Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ deft script pairs well with Tobias Lindholm’s tense yet diligent direction, creating a slow-boiling detective story for the viewer.

Fresh off her Oscar award win, Chastain simply can’t do wrong right now. She carries this one.

My old pal, Frank Grillo, is starring in a movie about Lamborghini, which is part humorous and mostly ambitious. The action star from who kicked Captain America’s ass and cleaned up The Purge on the streets settles into new threads this fall, and he has Mira Sorvino and Gabriel Byrne to support his endeavor. Honestly, no one has touched this material in a solo fashion just yet--so the relevancy and freshness odds are in Grillo’s corner. While he hasn’t granted me an interview since my negative review of 2019’s “Black and Blue,” I still enjoy watching him kick ass.

Finally, I just love Halloween as an adult. You don’t do shit, get to drink beer and smoke cannabis, and just walk around with your kid. Getting older usually comes with more work and stress, and the second part never wavers. But there are times in life where your brain can actually shut off and just enjoy the world moving around you. As I told Ben Foster in our interview (posted on The Dose btw), sometimes it’s just nice to simply exist. Nothing else. Breathe it in. The clock is ticking.

Once again, I can’t fathom how there was a mass shooting again in Chicago last night. Three children were shot in East Garfield Park, with 14 total being struck by bullets. It’s a mad world out there and it could fuck you over at any minute, so enjoy the time.

I’ll see you when I see you.