About Last Night...
First off, let me just mention that yesterday I made great & miraculous headway in the Freak Parade editing project and I hope to make an equal dent in it today, too. It is a book that goes on forever. That said, however, when readers read it, I don't want them feeling as if the book is going on forever, gosh darn it!! In that, lies the never-ending editing challenge. How to choose and/or delete the necessary words to maintain the rhythm and flow and not give the reader even a nanosecond to lose the train and put the book down.
Well, in a perfect world, that is. I know that not many people are going to just plop down and read about 500 pages without stopping; not even me -- and I wrote the masterpiece. Still, I can dream, can't I? So, onward. One of these days (very soon, in fact, as people on my meager payroll are sitting around drumming their anxious fingers, waiting for me to get moving with this project already), the book will be complete and ready for purchasing, and lives everywhere will be enriched by the contents of my stupendously erotic mind as never before. Oh happy day.
Okay, then. So about last night.
After I finished with the day's editing chore, I went upstairs, took a shower, and then curled up on the bed in the guestroom with Fluffy and watched Murder She Said, from 1961, starring Dame Margaret Rutherford -- one of my favorite movies -- and waited for Jay to be done working so that we could get our evening underway. By 6 o'clock on the dot, we were both looking rather spiffy and we headed downtown to a very nice hotel (wherein I was married, in fact, a million years ago) for dinner. We ate in the James Thurber grille. James Thurber, one of the legendary writers of the Algonquin Round Table, was born & raised (& I believe died) in these parts.
We had a very nice dinner. Nothing extravagant b/c when you eat in a nice hotel, even the free tap water is going to cost way more than it does in the rest of the known world. We braced ourselves for the bill, paid it, and then went off to the Jazz concert only to discover that, yes, we were a whole month early! The concert is in late February. Not sure why I didn't look at the tickets until we were standing in front of the locked auditorium doors, wondering why they wouldn't open, but oh well; that's just part of my charm, I suppose. So back into the truck we went. We paid a whole $2 for parking, and then took Main Street (the scenic though now somewhat slummy route) all the way home & we entertained ourselves with how much this old town has changed since we both lived here 30 years ago.
You know, you can't cry over spilled milk, right? But really it was just sort of dumbfounding that we got sort of dressed-up, drove all the way downtown in 15-degree weather and ate in an expensive hotel for basically no reason whatsoever. Oh well. We tried laughing about it, as we always do. And then on the drive home, we made up this funny commercial jingle for Ray's Famous Pizza in New York City: "Ray's! It's just so fucking good!" And we kept singing the little jingle over & over, and cracking ourselves up, and then we got on this F-word kick, just kept using the f-word in really vulgar ways for every mundane circumstance we could dream up. We were laughing ourselves silly. (i.e, perhaps your father-in-law asks you if you'd like a cup of coffee. You reply: "Fuck you, do I look like I want a fucking cup of coffee? Go fuck yourself." etc., etc. The humor relies heavily on the level of vitriol as well as the element of surprise.) Anyway...
Back home, we went down to the family room, got comfy on the not-so-comfy Mission-style couch down there and watched one of my very favorite films, Murmur of the Heart. (French, 1971, Louis Malle.) And even though the day really had been sort of perfect, even in all its imperfections, I wound up, once again, waking up depressed this morning. A constant battle.
This time, it had a lot to do with my biological father, and that very complicated relationship, which came to the fore of my mind b/c of Murmur of the Heart's subject matter. I loved the fact that in the movie, everyone ends up laughing. What a brilliant ending! What a great way to look at life. And I made a mental note last night to re-cast my own life with everyone laughing at the end. Stop remembering it in this awful guilt-ridden sort of way. My biological father is dead now and has been for 10 years. I was his only off-spring and I was born illegitimate when he was only 15 years old. Because of the narrow age difference between us and b/c he was my father but hadn't raised me, we had no recognizable boundaries in our relationship. He told me all kinds of things that he never told anybody else. When you don't have boundaries, you lose sight of a lot of things that are kind of built-in in other relationships. We only knew each other for 10 years before he died, but we loved each other and we were in love with each other -- which is not the healthiest place to be, still I wouldn't trade it for anything. But it kind of sucks to have him swoop into my life and fill it like he did for such a short amount of time, be so larger-than-life for me and then just be gone; dead.
Well, since he is dead, it's up to me, now, to figure out how best to look at it. How to, yet again, get out of my own way and just look at it. Look at the beauty and the joy of it, and the miracle of me & my father and of who we were together. (My father was a very depressed man, with serious alcohol & drug problems that he picked up from so many tours of duty in Viet Nam that he was never able to shake. But he was also brilliant and talented and headstrong and iconoclastic and disrespectful, and very, very funny.)
But it's always up to me, isn't it? (insert your own name here, too, I guess.) It's always up to us to figure out how we're going to look at our lives, choose which light we're going to put it under. I'm not sure why my first response is always to take everything out on myself and feel like I don't deserve to exist, but I am always battling it and always working on it. That's why, when I saw that YouTube clip below of Tom Waits reading a Charles Bukowski poem, I took it as a promise from the Universe that somehow we were going to save this day. So far, so good. I'll keep you posted, gang. Until then -- see ya, and thanks for visiting.
Well, in a perfect world, that is. I know that not many people are going to just plop down and read about 500 pages without stopping; not even me -- and I wrote the masterpiece. Still, I can dream, can't I? So, onward. One of these days (very soon, in fact, as people on my meager payroll are sitting around drumming their anxious fingers, waiting for me to get moving with this project already), the book will be complete and ready for purchasing, and lives everywhere will be enriched by the contents of my stupendously erotic mind as never before. Oh happy day.
Okay, then. So about last night.
After I finished with the day's editing chore, I went upstairs, took a shower, and then curled up on the bed in the guestroom with Fluffy and watched Murder She Said, from 1961, starring Dame Margaret Rutherford -- one of my favorite movies -- and waited for Jay to be done working so that we could get our evening underway. By 6 o'clock on the dot, we were both looking rather spiffy and we headed downtown to a very nice hotel (wherein I was married, in fact, a million years ago) for dinner. We ate in the James Thurber grille. James Thurber, one of the legendary writers of the Algonquin Round Table, was born & raised (& I believe died) in these parts.
We had a very nice dinner. Nothing extravagant b/c when you eat in a nice hotel, even the free tap water is going to cost way more than it does in the rest of the known world. We braced ourselves for the bill, paid it, and then went off to the Jazz concert only to discover that, yes, we were a whole month early! The concert is in late February. Not sure why I didn't look at the tickets until we were standing in front of the locked auditorium doors, wondering why they wouldn't open, but oh well; that's just part of my charm, I suppose. So back into the truck we went. We paid a whole $2 for parking, and then took Main Street (the scenic though now somewhat slummy route) all the way home & we entertained ourselves with how much this old town has changed since we both lived here 30 years ago.
You know, you can't cry over spilled milk, right? But really it was just sort of dumbfounding that we got sort of dressed-up, drove all the way downtown in 15-degree weather and ate in an expensive hotel for basically no reason whatsoever. Oh well. We tried laughing about it, as we always do. And then on the drive home, we made up this funny commercial jingle for Ray's Famous Pizza in New York City: "Ray's! It's just so fucking good!" And we kept singing the little jingle over & over, and cracking ourselves up, and then we got on this F-word kick, just kept using the f-word in really vulgar ways for every mundane circumstance we could dream up. We were laughing ourselves silly. (i.e, perhaps your father-in-law asks you if you'd like a cup of coffee. You reply: "Fuck you, do I look like I want a fucking cup of coffee? Go fuck yourself." etc., etc. The humor relies heavily on the level of vitriol as well as the element of surprise.) Anyway...
Back home, we went down to the family room, got comfy on the not-so-comfy Mission-style couch down there and watched one of my very favorite films, Murmur of the Heart. (French, 1971, Louis Malle.) And even though the day really had been sort of perfect, even in all its imperfections, I wound up, once again, waking up depressed this morning. A constant battle.
This time, it had a lot to do with my biological father, and that very complicated relationship, which came to the fore of my mind b/c of Murmur of the Heart's subject matter. I loved the fact that in the movie, everyone ends up laughing. What a brilliant ending! What a great way to look at life. And I made a mental note last night to re-cast my own life with everyone laughing at the end. Stop remembering it in this awful guilt-ridden sort of way. My biological father is dead now and has been for 10 years. I was his only off-spring and I was born illegitimate when he was only 15 years old. Because of the narrow age difference between us and b/c he was my father but hadn't raised me, we had no recognizable boundaries in our relationship. He told me all kinds of things that he never told anybody else. When you don't have boundaries, you lose sight of a lot of things that are kind of built-in in other relationships. We only knew each other for 10 years before he died, but we loved each other and we were in love with each other -- which is not the healthiest place to be, still I wouldn't trade it for anything. But it kind of sucks to have him swoop into my life and fill it like he did for such a short amount of time, be so larger-than-life for me and then just be gone; dead.
Well, since he is dead, it's up to me, now, to figure out how best to look at it. How to, yet again, get out of my own way and just look at it. Look at the beauty and the joy of it, and the miracle of me & my father and of who we were together. (My father was a very depressed man, with serious alcohol & drug problems that he picked up from so many tours of duty in Viet Nam that he was never able to shake. But he was also brilliant and talented and headstrong and iconoclastic and disrespectful, and very, very funny.)
But it's always up to me, isn't it? (insert your own name here, too, I guess.) It's always up to us to figure out how we're going to look at our lives, choose which light we're going to put it under. I'm not sure why my first response is always to take everything out on myself and feel like I don't deserve to exist, but I am always battling it and always working on it. That's why, when I saw that YouTube clip below of Tom Waits reading a Charles Bukowski poem, I took it as a promise from the Universe that somehow we were going to save this day. So far, so good. I'll keep you posted, gang. Until then -- see ya, and thanks for visiting.
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