Bogey and Bette and uphill days

 

Bogey and Bette. Like faithful friends, they just keep coming around. 

I spent a Jesusly long time, weeks, practically fastened to a chair, laid out like I was in a sarcophagus of heated blankets and squashy pillows. And I watched movies, and movies, and movies, until I was right sick of it. Even my favorites on Turner Classics wore thin after a while, or just weren't as great as I used to think.

It's only now I'm crawling out into the light, more or less, with plenty of backsteps. My newly-reorganized digestive works are still trying to make the adjustment, but I was glad to see I don't need to see the doc until March 6. I want to blow the whole  thing off, as she is glib and superficial and self-interested enough to let me do just that. NEXT!!!

I have never been sick before, at least not like this, and it was an ordeal greater than anything I have endured (up to now). I believe, though no one ever spelled it out for me, that I nearly died twice. The hospitalization of 2 days went on, and on, and on, for nearly 2 weeks. It's one long surreal nightmare, but I am slowly putting distance between myself and the horrors. The mental recovery has been the worst. Slowly, bit by painful bit, I am getting my life back, but it is anything but a straight line.

And I will admit, or just state, that I've been using THC oil judiciously, and it IS actually stimulating my appetite. I lost a good 8 pounds after returning home, and though I'm not exactly a bag of bones, it's weird for me how I have had to reverse everything I've ever done (or thought of doing) with food

All my  life, and I mean ALL my life, I have counted calories and felt stabs of guilt if I indulged too much in anything. Now I must flip this on its head  and INCREASE my calories, or I will end up sicker, weaker, and more prone to further medical collapse. I can't afford this, but I cannot tell you how impossible it is to eat anything at all when you are either nauseated, or just have zero appetite. All the way through this, there has been a great deal of finger-wagging because "you're not eating!". From nurses, from doctors, even from my family. But the greyish-green plastic trays of steamed slop  they call food often made me literally retch, and that's without even tasting it. Prison food would be better.

I wasn't going to go back there. But a scar is a scar. I suppose if I have another one of these, it will likely kill me, or leave me so disabled and dwindled that I won't want t live any more.

Had it not been for the visits from my delightful grandkids, I would have succumbed to despair. I know this, because I was suicidal for weeks. I just was, often leading to MUCH more and more brisk finger-wagging: "How can you do this to your family?" - meaning, MY loss wouldn't really matter too much anyway. Or it sure seems that way. 

I don't think anyone reads this blog any more, but I do it for me, and so that I can look up things I posted years ago. And the comments, which I do get, are always on really old ones. I won't try to figure out how they found them, or why.

So I have to get on with my day, which is (very) gradually approaching my old  life, the one I love so much, basically because it is MINE and no one dares to take it away.

⭐SUPER-BLOOPER: Bogart and Bette Davis ⭐

There is just something so blissfully beautiful about this - my two all-time-favorite Old Hollywood genius actors, together at last, in a truly off-the-cuff moment. Betty comes charging in at the wrong time, quickly realizes her mistake and darts off-camera again. Then she and Bogie come out to ask the director what they're supposed to be doing. It only lasts a minute, and I've slowed it down to make it last longer. . . but oh, is Bogie gorgeous in this, as is Bette the natural firebrand beauty, just so casually blazing. Charisma streams off these two, yet strangely enough, they do not cancel each other out. I don't think they ever starred as a romantic couple - I think this was Dark Victory, in which Bogart only played a minor role. But who cares? Having them in the same UNIVERSE together is magical, powerful and special. No one lives to equal them, but I am grateful that they "were" - and, even better than that, we have a record.

Cigarette psychology

There was a time (think Mad Men) when smoking was so entrenched in culture as to be expected, even required.  A non-smoker was a social pariah, an oddball who lived on wheat germ and drank only celery tonic. Maybe he belonged to the Oddfellows (whatever that is). Old movies abound with cigarette symbolism, usually sexual in nature. It's all part of the art of seduction. Think Bette Davis and Paul Henreid blowing smoke in each other's faces.

Nobody mentions coughing your lungs out in a cancer ward.

The following little slice of post-war wisdom came from one of those oddity sites, so I felt free to borrow it. No doubt they did, too. Let's zero in on it some more. . . 

Even without reading the text, we can already see that hand position is paramount, even if the meaning isn't crystal-clear. The middle position is kind of baffling to me. I've never in my life seen anyone hold a cigarette like that. It's positively weaponlike. Is it meant as a sort of ash catapult, or an enemy smoke-wafter?

All of these photos remind me of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, for some reason. He was constantly smoking in that one, just as EVERYONE was constantly smoking (and drinking). In every picture he made, the cigarette was his signature. But we all know how it ended. One might say that it cost him a lot.

Here the good doctor goes into detail about how smoking style reveals a man's personality. Man's. Not woman's:

OK then. So where do I start?  For one thing, that Dr. Neutra thing is suspicious to me. I think of Mr. Neutron in Monty Python. . .

. . .  and of course the words neutral and neuter. And a nutria, which is a kind of large beaverlike rodent made into coats (and other things).

But the reason women's smoking gestures aren't considered significant is obvious to Dr. Neutron (or whoever he is): "Women are so affected naturally in their regular posture that they're more often than not too conscious of how they hold a cigarette, and therefore useless as subjects for this experiment."

Useless? Affected? I can think of something to do with my cigarette. Dr. Neutron: sit on this and rotate!

But there's more of this shit to trudge through:

Note that the descriptions of women are devastating, even abusive, whereas he goes fairly easy on the men. If they put on airs, they're not "affected" but "sort of the Texas millionaire type". It's obvious the vast majority of the adjectives to describe men are positive (intellectual, brainy, contemplative, direct, straight-forward, hail fellow well-met, daring, calculating, dreamer, replete with business caution). As for women, any analysis is "just a guess" because they are so "affected": "insecure, afraid to lose that cigarette" (? They come in packs, don't they?). "She probably holds on to her man like glue." Greedy, graspy, possessive!  But the next one is worse: "Typical grasp of a female bored with her date. She has to concentrate on the tip to keep from yawning." One has to wonder if this Dr. Neutron has a filthy Freudian mind and sees prick-symbols everywhere he looks.

Is this whole thing a joke, a bit of satire to send up people's smoking habits? I think not! I believe it's drenched with misogyny and contempt for women, and trivializes everything about them.

So what is the conclusion? While you're busy rotting your lungs and throat with terminal cancer, boys, make sure you hold your cigarette in the proper way. Cultivate it for a good impression. Grasp it properly so that the tip is sticking straight up. And good luck in the heart-and-lung ward.

Smoking fish

It's the Humphrey Bogart of the fish plaque world. And whatever did happen to all the fish plaques? You know, those singing fish. I still have a singing lobster, but it may be the only one left. It's a non-smoker.

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Charisma to burn

I would have to call these two my favorites from Old Hollywood. They acted the stuffings out of a part while keeping it real. And they were gorgeous: the camera ate them up.

Both of them smoked too much, but Bogie fell far sooner, in an awful sort of way, consumed. He kept smoking even after contracting fatal throat cancer. Perhaps it was a "what the hell, it's coming anyway" thing. Somehow Bette was tougher, but cancer devoured her too, eventually, until she was an unrecognizable wraith.

Our heroes flare briefly. It's always brief, when you think about it. Each of us climbs only a tiny segment of the wall (just like Harold and his fake aerial sets in Safety Last). It's hard to put any of it together. I once had the thought that if you kept going back and back, and back and back and back, through the thousands and mega-thousands and millions and billions of ancestors that spread out exponentially behind you, you would eventually reach the first cell of life that winked on out of nothingness.

We all go back to the primordial ooze. There goes the  neighborhood.

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