I wish they all could be. . .

I have a ton of beautiful photos from my grandkids' vacation in California (in which they did seven theme parks in seven days!), but I haven't had time to sort through all of them. Meantime here's one of California girl Caitlin, looking particularly radiant, the sun bringing out the hint of red in her hair. Caitlin, the eldest grandchild, whom I watched get born, will soon turn ten. I remember ten. . . The Beatles had their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, my tenth birthday. A couple of months earlier came the Kennedy assassination (a post in itself, I think, because my memories of it are both distinct and very bizarre.) And Grade 5, now there's a topic: I was involved in one of those infamous educational experiments of the '60s in which there was no curriculum and children were supposed to learn everything at their own pace, according to their own inclinations and interests. Needless to say, no one learned anything all year.

The world this California chestnut-haired girl is growing up in is so radically different. Better and worse at the same time. There's a lot I can't help her with because I don't know what the hell it means. I often feel I'm falling farther and farther behind, but behind what? A bullshit system I want no part of. Sometimes I think that if it weren't for the grandkids, I'd turn into a sour old crank.

Not much has turned out the way I thought. Dreams have come true in fragments, fractions (and I was never very good at those). Most haven't come true at all. And I'm not even sure what I did wrong.

Against the odds, in spite of a rotten and sometimes horrific childhood full of every conceivable kind of (completely denied) abuse, I have co-created a wonderful family that now spans into the next generation. This isn't supposed to happen. It's yet another one of those homilies I hate, beliefs or sayings people swallow whole without thinking about them: "You can't give away what you never received."

Horse pucky! You can so, and I am living proof. I'm the best grandma in the world, and I was a pretty good mother considering I had virtually no mothering myself, nil experience, had never held a baby, and disliked children. 

I have however had that hideous experience of "friends" somehow replicating the most soul-destroying aspects of my upbringing, in full knowledge of  how devastating their behaviour is. Then acting as if they don't know what you're talking about.

So this is my life? I guess so. God, that rain out there is hard.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Crying. . . crying. . . crying. . .

This is one of those oh-my-god-i-never-thought-i'd-get-to-hear-this-again moments. This re-finding, rediscovery of buried treasure. The video goes back to 1989, and I had it on an old VHS tape, which of course eventually became unplayable.

k. d. lang kind of goes around in my life in one of those huge orbits, like hair styles, types of Purdy's chocolates, weight fluctuations, breeds of dogs, belief in God. Keeps changing and evolving and rounding the dark side of the moon, but somehow never quite goes away, because it can't. Try to throw it away, and it will boomerang and hit you in the face.

I figured something out as I watched and listened to this incredible performance just now:  it's Muriel, the protagonist of my novel The Glass Character, and her hopeless longing for the silent screen superstar Harold Lloyd.  "I thought that I was over you" is the heart-cry, the howl of the unrequited. Just when she is sure the rend in her heart has healed, well, he just shows up again, not unfriendly - as a matter of fact, he always seems glad to see her again - but he can't, won't love her. Never has loved her, and even if he did, couldn't possibly love her as much as she loves him.

This song is about the unattainable. I've always had a feeling lang's artistry springs from early abandonment: her father left the family when she was a young girl. Compare this to Streisand, whose father died when she was only a toddler. It leaves some trace on a voice, if the instrument is already exceptional. A something extra, ruby-dust and blood, and it makes for that subtle escalating, the reaching, each time she sings "crying. . . crying. . . crying. . ." , the hopeless anguish mounting and mounting until her voice soars and fills the hall and makes the audience burst into applause when she isn't even halfway through the song.

I wrote about this in The Glass Character, the same feeling, and I just realized it now. Goddamn it, I must tell you the process: I am only partway through the editing, and I don't know who wrote this! I don't even like parts of it, hate other parts, and put check marks beside others. I don't know why this is, and I don't even remember writing it, but Muriel cries too much. I'm having to ruthlessly reduce her tears, because I for one am sick of hearing her sniffle and bawl.

Have I ever lived through anything like this? I won't talk about it now, for it did not happen the way you might think. Well, actually it did. When you read the novel (and you WILL read it, won't you?), you might discover the dynamics of how it happened for me. It lasted five years, and for most of that time it felt like someone was steadily grinding out cigarettes on my heart.

No sex took place. Sex does take place in my novel, but not with Harold. So it's disconcerting to Muriel, who really doesn't get a lot of satisfaction that way. Just pining, endless pining. 

I used to say, about the greatest singers, if *I* could sing like that, I'd never have to see a psychiatrist again. Maybe a simplistic view, because God knows most of the popular singers of the day are melting down at a frightening rate. k. d. still sings, but I don't like her voice as much. She has always had certain mannerisms, and I call them "swoop, yodel and groan". She bends notes too much, or far more than she used to, and begins nearly every phrase with a groany little sound. Her "attack" is off and should be cleaner, saving the groans as an accent. The yodel, more of a  half-yodel or deliberate use of the break in her voice, sometimes shows up a bit too often or is too pronounced. I think she'd do just fine standing on an Alpine mountain with a goat. But never mind. We still have her recordings of when she was in her fiery prime. My favorites are still this song and Pullin' Back the Reins, a hairstanding wail of controlled grief and - yes, again - loss.  

I did see/hear lang in concert, quite a few years ago now when she was still singing exceptionally well. She is overwhelming. It reminded me, strangely, of going to a Renee Fleming concert and hearing the most extraordinary operatic soprano voice I can even imagine. When the audience was filing out, most of us still surreptitiously blowing our noses, I overheard a woman say, "If it had been any more, it would have been too much." That's how I felt about k. d. lang.

I know everyone talks about her sexual orientation and her look and her butchness (and this video is probably the only time you will ever see her in a dress). I'm not keen on her look, to be honest, but I don't care about it. She has gained weight and become stolid and, according to my husband who saw her sing at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics, "she looks like Wayne Newton." Yes, the baggy suits and Elvislike stance are beginning to seem alarmingly Vegas, and one hopes she doesn't pull a Celine Dion and glitz herself into oblivion.

Never mind. The song, the song! Artists express, not just what we all feel and can't say, but what is not supposed to be happening to us. That's an awful lot. The culture is a narrow box. Sex is everywhere, seemingly, but how embarrassing is it when you come right down to it? How awkward? How often does "the act" (always, always referring to penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse and nothing else) match up to the dream? How about never?

Which leaves me crying.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I'm pregnant again (it just can't be so!)

This can either be seen as a sociological treatise - and God knows, I've written more than my share of those - or just a headshaking, gasping peek at life in the mid-1960s.

I don't for a minute think this song was meant to be serious, and the video is even less so. Most likely it was a sendup of Roger Miller's huge hit King of the Road.  Never mind the sexy and semi-glamorous images in the video: the lyrics bespeak domestic drudgery, shabbiness and unquestioning self-sacrifice. (I was sort of hoping they'd dramatize all that, rather than go with all this bustier/leg-lifting stuff.) The acrobatic flips of - who is that guy, the ice man? - help jazz it up a little, and to me the guy looks uncannily like a pre-Star-Trek George Takei.

This song/video sprang from a specific genre, probably beginning with the jaw-dropping 1950s TV program Queen for a Day. Four broken-down housewives would come on the show each week and pitch their tale of woe, after which the audience would determine who was most worthy of financial rescue using an applause-o-meter. This always looked rigged to me, but it was considered sufficiently accurate to determine which horror story was ghastly enough to warrant an array of Lovely Gifts.

There are snippets of this horror on YouTube, jerky, smudgy old kinescopes that look like something out of a bleary dream. People actually took this show seriously and wanted to be on it, desperately. No doubt many of the sob stories were fabricated, but the point is, the show proved to us all that, just like every dog, even the everyday housewife could have her day.

The genre of the downtrodden yet celebrated matron of the house took many forms, including the dreary Loretta Lynn song, Pregnant Again:

Pregnant again oh where will we go
Pregnant again it just can’t be so
But I never could count when the lights were down low
And I’m pregnant again (pregnant again)

There goes the new washer we needed so bad
There goes the vacation that we never had
There goes the new TV I thought we’d enjoy
Oh honey who cares I hope it’s a boy

Now THAT'S a save, embracing noble martyrdom in the very last line (in case anyone thought for a minute she was considering
the last refuge of many an overburdened mother-to-be).

The other one that pops into my head is even more melodramatic. I think Glen Campbell sang it. I remember my mother being quite angry about this one. "What does he mean, 'the good life'?" she would cry. "This IS the good life!" Obviously, her conditioning, positively Orwellian in nature, had taken, and taken completely.(I don't think it's a coincidence that she was also a heavy user of those little yellow pills.)

She looks in the mirror and stares at the wrinkles

That weren't there yesterday
And thinks of the young man that she almost married
What would he think if he saw her this way?

She picks up her apron in little girl-fashion
As something comes into her mind
Slowly starts dancing remembering her girlhood
And all of the boys she had waiting in line

Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
You see everywhere any time of the day
An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me

The wrinkled old drudge who stares into the mirror like something out of that bleak Auden poem ("O look, look in the mirror/O look in your distress") once was a fair flower just ready to be plucked by some handsome young man, a man of class and means, and instead - ? He doesn't spell out how ghastly her life is now, and what kind of loser she got stuck with, probably by getting pregnant. 

And nobody really talked about what a bomb pregnancy could be for a young woman then, an explosive that could blow her life and her dreams to bits. The expression "she had to get married" used to puzzle me, along with an even more incomprehensible term, "shotgun". 

Which, when you think about it, has some pretty ominous connotations of its own.

(Blogger's note. I made these gifs from an old YouTube clip from Queen for a Day. The winner, looking morose even in her supposed victory, was a clear choice because her husband had been paralyzed in a hunting accident and had to lie on his stomach, completely immobile. She won some sort of fancy bed that cranked up and down and a week's stay in a luxury hotel, a dubious prize for someone forever chained to a man who couldn't move.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Lifelike in every detail: vintage advertisements

These ads are from a simpler, yet stranger time, a time when people must have said to themselves, "Oh surely not." People were much more likely to take things literally, advertising in particular.

The text that goes with this blowup doll is pretty incredible.

"Made of soft, smooth, pliable vinyl. Judy looks and feels amazingly lifelike. INFLATABLE - just add air and instantly you have a Life-Size beauty.

GUARANTEE:  This is the ULTRA deluxe model, there is no other inflatable doll as LIFE-LIKE as Judy. You must be 100% delighted or your money refunded.

"I'm Judy, the Life-Size inflatable London doll! You can dress me up for any occasion. Take me riding, or to a party, boating or swimming (I float!). Around the house I'll be the ideal burglar deterrent; prowlers will see that someone is home - me. Just let your imagination go and you will see that I can be the most exciting thing ever invented for party gags. Your (sic) bound to find hundreds of exciting and unusual uses for me."

And so on and frickin' so on, as if blow-up dolls were nothing but flotation devices or burglar deterrents, as if they weren't used for "other" purposes, purposes we can't even name here because this is a Family Blog! And I can't even picture going riding with her, even if you could get her legs apart.

This is, uh, er, just not something we'd see today, though Moms in desperate circumstances are still known to put Coca Cola in baby bottles (not to mention a shot of Red Bull in the Mountain Dew - but that's reserved for child beauty pageants.)

This is from a time when men could be in song-and-dance teams and not seem gay (or supposedly not), when Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby could mince around and pretend to be girls, when men sang in two different languages (I think they were called Sandler and Young) on Ed Sullivan. It's a weird dynamic, because being gay was surely more frowned-upon than it is now. So what the frickin' hell is going on here? What is this guy trying to do exactly? It seems inappropriate to me to WANT to lift up five guys with your penis. You'd have to have the woody of all time, and this was long before Viagra.

Just the idea of a one-reptile circus is intriguing, but it must have  involved a serious suspension of disbelief. I assume all the rest of the pieces were made of plastic, but some toymaking genius must have thought, hmmmm, SOMETHING should be alive here, some component, and it can't be too big. The text is as follows:

"Now - for the first time ever - you can have a real live circus of your own. Just dozens of fine toys, each wonderful in itself, make up this circus set for "The Greatest Show on Earth". You and your friends can have hours of fun setting up the props for the circus, placing the Ringmaster, clowns, performing animals and wild animal cages for the many exciting acts. You can even put on a real live trained animal act with the live performing chameleon who will walk a tightrope, swing on a trapeze and change color right before your eyes from bright green to brown and back again.

"Chameleons are real fun. They love to perform. You'll laugh with delight as they run with delicate balance along the tightrope or swing on the trapeze. They are harmless, clean and no trouble at all to keep as pets. Your friends will really gape with surprise when they see him riding on your shoulder. Your parents will be charmed with this small, clean pet. You'll love him." Etc. etc.

My personal experience with this "clean, harmless pet" came when I bought one with my allowance and attempted to hide it from my mother. It was a difficult matter because I didn't know where to keep him. Since my older brother had a clarinet case with a green velvet lining, I thought that might be the ideal place, since he'd come out of there bright green. It didn't work out too well when my brother went to band practice. Then my mother discovered a brown paper sack in the refrigerator. It was full of live meal worms, which is the only thing chameleons will eat. She screamed and threw the bag on the floor and stomped on it, then threw the whole mess in the garbage. The chameleon soon died, solving my problem. Later I was to learn that these things aren't even real chameleons, but anoles, a cheaper, less-vivid version who barely change color at all.

But maybe they can walk a tightrope, swing on a trapeze. Maybe, as the ad claims, you can walk them down the street on a leash. Who knows? "Can I have one, Mom, can I, can I, huh?"


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

A sexually-transmitted, terminal condition

A few weeks ago I announced, giddily, like a bride-to-be announcing her engagement, the acceptance of my third novel The Glass Character by Thistledown Press. The elation lasted maybe five seconds. Like the song says, “I’ve seen that road before”.

Those who haven’t done it don’t realize. Writing the book is about 15%. There was great joy in writing this one because it’s centred around a subject I came to love – Harold Lloyd, one of the master comedians of the silent screen - but that’s just the trouble. Being too close to a subject can get in the way. 

I haven’t done a really close reading of this thing for some time. When I re-entered it for the sake of editing, which will be a long and winding process, I honestly wondered who wrote it. That person does not exist any more, but if that weren’t true I might be worried.  I know am not the person I was in 2008.

This isn’t good news or bad news, but it’s news nonetheless. In five years I’ve moved house psychologically, and in doing so I have had to leave many things behind. The shell is outgrown and constricting; the lobster must shed it and grow a new one or be crushed to death, not by outer forces but internal ones. 

One of my favourite quotes is the Bob Dylan philosophy-in-a-nutshell: “He not busy being born is busy dying”. I have known people who, for whatever reason, have chosen not to push back on the forces that try to flatten them, the forces that bear down on all of us whether we know it or not. They surrender, but not in the sense of letting that mysterious grace we can never understand work its magic.

The result is either stagnation or martyrdom or sour carping or just giving up. Their world gets smaller and smaller, and dealing with them is exhausting. A kind of blindness sets in, and a “them, them, them” mentality which abdicates responsibility for anything. I’d rather walk through the minefield, myself, though more than once I’ve come close to being blown up.

Anyway, enough about all that, I’ve re-entered Haroldland, and this time it is very different. I see things I want to fix or change on every page. And I have not yet really looked at my editor’s notes, which I know will be another round, or rounds. Will it come out perfect? It can't.  I hope it will glow more, have fewer contradictions or inconsistencies and a surer voice.  And I hope readers will be willing to come along with me.

The road isn’t just long and winding. There are switchbacks that make you think, “Why must I go through this again?” New Agers might say “life presents us with the same lesson over and over again until we learn it. Then we can move on.” Like a lot of ready-made, freeze-dried philosophies which have never been tested, this one is somewhat lacking.

Life is a sexually-transmitted, terminal condition with certain inescapable rules. Or truths. The culture has it all wrong, as far as I am concerned. It demands “triumph”, “victory”, a once-and-for-all conquest of all adversity, especially things like illness (and, God help us, mental illness, which is still seen as an embarrassment, a moral failing and a horror). If you don’t conquer whatever-it-is, if it doesn’t stay conquered, then there must be something wrong with you.

Few things are conquered, because life is ambiguous, complex, a chronic condition. It’s just something you have to live with (like the pompous assholes who always insist, “Oh, I’VE never had that problem. I’m just so sorry for you that you don’t have the strength to deal with it.”) If life-threatening challenges do return, everyone looks away, embarrassed for you, convinced you just don’t have your shit together or this never would have happened.

Aside from family, the fountainhead of my life, writing has been the consistent theme, and while some of my early efforts make me wince to think about, I am still glad I did them, glad I put it out there. The alternative is to let your dream die, and dead things begin to decompose after a while, to blight the soul, to stink.  To put it out there is still sometimes harrowing, but necessary, and because this life is made up of switchbacks and great hills that prevent us from seeing past the horizon, we can’t determine the results. Achieving goals doesn’t make people happy in a lot of cases; they either want more, whatever that is, or become convinced the world owes them a kind of adulation.

I have always been convinced The Long and Winding Road is a spiritual. I love this original version, which sounds pared-down compared to the sudsy Phil Spector wall-of-sound version that appeared on the Let It Be album. Paul sounds best on his intimate acoustic songs like Blackbird and Mother Nature’s Son. (The exception is the hair-raising Helter Skelter, the song that inspired Charles Manson’s act of carnage: strange that the Beatles’ most violent, harrowing song was written and performed by choir-boy-faced Paul.)

Many times I’ve been alone, and many times I’ve cried. Anyway, you’ll never know the many ways I’ve tried. Those annoying little Facebook homily-cards or whatever they’re called always say things like, “It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, so long as you keep getting up and trying again.” And so on. The only problem is, we live in a culture that DOES keep track of mistakes and often punishes people far beyond the extent of their missteps. We’re told to make lots and lots of mistakes, because that’s the only way we’ll learn.  But there's only one problem. Our careers or marriages or friendships or families can be brought down by only one serious, central mistake. 

I’ve written about this before because with few exceptions, nobody ever says it. It isn't popular and is seen as "negative" and somehow party-pooping. “Make lots and lots of mistakes” means – what? Take somebody’s pencil? How about having an affair with your boss, being caught taking office equipment, slapping your kid (just once, ever!), saying something really embarrassing while tipsy at a party, forgetting your seatbelt, forgetting your child's seatbelt,  texting while driving, texting while WALKING, looking at porn "just once" on your computer at work, sexting “just a little” with a co-worker and being caught in the act. . . 

I could go on. 

These are mistakes, are they not? Serious, full-bodied mistakes, but  things that people do every day. Should you welcome and even embrace these “because it’s the only way you learn”? Is losing your job or your marriage or even your child worth it?   "Oh, but we don't mean THAT kind of mistake," some might say. Only "honest" ones.  But the most serious mistakes aren't honest.  And even forgetting a deadline or losing a file can mean the end of your career. It can, and it sometimes does. The workplace is no longer a very generous or hospitable place, and it isn't only the security cameras that are watching you.

As usual, this piece is long and pretty winding. So what’s the conclusion?  Should we stay frozen in one place to avoid mistakes? I'm going to squeeze out one more homily here: "One must look, but one must also leap".  It's a two-part process.  Even the original, less-daring version, "Look before you leap," still assumes the leap will take place. And the "look" part means using your brain and not trying to do something that’s just goddamned foolish. 

I still find it hard to put my work out there, and I still do it, or I wouldn’t be sitting her clacking away every morning. Who reads it is, to paraphrase my favourite e. e. cummings quote, “none of my immortal business”. When you have a story to tell, you’d like to think someone will some day hear it. To that end, but also due to sheer fascination with the process, I have to stay on the serpentine path, bloodhound-like, often with only my nose to tell me what’s hidden in the brambles.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Illicit Encounters: or, blow me down, I'm Irish!

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discombooberator's Profile. (643029)

Personal Information
Religion	Atheist	Eye Colour	Blue
Drinking	Non-Drinker	Hair Colour	Blonde
Smoking	Trying to Quit	Build	Athletic
Height	6'0'' (183cm) or above	Education	Graduate/Masters Degree
Occupation	IT/Communications
Interests	Gym / Aerobics

Send Virtual Kiss Send Virtual Gift Send Message Name: discombooberator Age: 34 Star Sign: Sagittarius Race: Caucasian/White Location: Belfast, County Antrim Marital Status: Living Together Last Active: More than a week Gifts Received Recently:

Ideal Partner:

Female between the ages of 21 and 32

I haven't yet got round to completing a full profile. I've used IE's Profile Wizard to briefly describe myself and what I'm looking for. I'm looking for someone who is: adventurous, classy, erotic, feminine, groomed, hot-blooded, no-strings attached, open-minded, playful, sexy, spontaneous

Type of Relationship Friendship, Casual

More Information

General

I would describe myself as: sexy, erotic, hot-blooded, imaginative, sophisticated, altruistic

My Appearance

If we were to meet this is what you'll see! I am : blonde, fit, groomed, normal, medium build Let me know with a message or VK if you're interested - you may persuade me to complete my profile

Since it's Monday morning, I feel it's time for a sociological treatise

I knew these kinds of sites existed. Hell, this is probably the mildest one you'll find on the internet, a sort of hookup site equivalent to dropping into the local pub. But it's the way I found it that it's interesting, to me anyway (though this is the kind of explanation that makes people's eyes glaze over. I'll have to invent a new story that's more entertaining, because somehow reality never measures up, does it? Which is the whole point of this piece.)

I sometimes watch the original Twilight Zone with Rod Serling, and on one of the episodes - a goofy thing with Orson Bean in it - Serling uses the word "discombooberated". I'm not sure  where this non-word originated, but I do remember it from childhood. Perhaps it was in a cartoon - a discombooberator, like the Wayback Machine in Mr. Peabody? - but to me it sounds like a Steve Allen term.

Never mind, it was unexpected and prompted an internet search. It was called a non-word and a slang word and a synonym for discombobulated, which is supposedly a real word. Then I found this British hookup site for married people called Illicit Encounters, featuring someone named discombooberator, an Irishman who had not even bothered to fill in his profile. He used some sort of mechanized profile generator which probably spewed out consistently Aryan blonde/blue-eyed/smart-as-hell/well-employed/non-drinking stats. The only place the profile generator slipped up was in the smoking department, but maybe that was left in to make the whole thing have a semblance of reality.

The fake swaggering was bad enough, but the conclusion - that an interested chick might make him bother to fill out his real information - was hair-raising. This was a play for the truly desperate, like Howard Wolowitz picking up fat chicks at Comicon (until he got married, of course. . . ). I see women going for this guy, I really do. The less we know about him, the better - isn't that true? And he's Irish! There can't be anything bad about him if he's Irish. Even if he lives across that mighty sea, it leaves lots of room for sexting and phone encounters and all those other baffling activities that seem to stand in for real human contact these days.

\

I've often heard it said that if you want a brief and harmless fling, pick a married person - not a person whose marriage is in shreds, because that might lead to an attachment, but someone who has a semblance of a good marriage (though not an "open" one - deception drips off of this thing, which is really the main attraction). Pick someone who's a little bit itchy and wants something on the side with no strings attached and - preferably - some Fifty Shades kinks in it to mitigate the vanilla sex (or non-sex) of the past ten years.

The site doesn't claim to do anything but provide information for these hookups, then leave the rest to the customers. This looks to be true. I would imagine there are code words for various types of sex ("friendship" meaning -what? "Casual" meaning - I can only think.) But I can't help but picture the face-time meetings they set up at the local Starbuck's, with two people searching and searching for each other: where is that guy, anyway? All I can see is some slob picking his nose. . . Don't tell me that bitch stood me up! And who's the fugly one over there, probably hasn't been laid in years. (Picture all these thoughts being thunk with an Irish accent.)  The flimsy masks they hold up for public consumption are suddenly fallen, revealing sad, lonely, not-very-attractive (and perhaps unemployed) people seeking an hour of escape through meaningless sex.

Then they both go home, wondering why their hookup failed to materialize, each of them sending the same message: Didn't see you. Oh, maybe we got the time wrong! No, I got a ticket for exceeding the speed limit on my Harley (lol)!  I broke a fingernail, didn't want you to see me that way. Heart heart heart. So it's time for another round of musical chairs, featuring human bodies instead of furniture.

Does this, um, like, bother them? Well, haven't people done this forever, before the internet even existed? I have another question for you: why does the fact that it has been going on forever justify it? Does this twisted rationalization make such hurtful, pathetic, dishonest behavior acceptable - and why?

Just askin'. With an Irish accent.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Nervous guy on public access

I promise you, this is the last video! I know I've posted this before, but it bears repeating. It could only be real. Amazing how a man can get through a performance knowing only 10% of the words.

Man and Superman

Wizard of Oz 2011: Hanging Munchkin Found on VHS Tape

I just like the concept. The video is, of course, a hoax. But the vastly slowed-down picture and soundtrack is pretty frightening. Supposedly the munchkin committed suicide because he didn't make the Lollipop Guild.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

k.d. lang - Pullin' Back The Reins (Video)

Just had to do some music today, I feel so played-out. As Oscar Wilde once put it (or was it Oscar Levant, or Oscar Mayer?), the two worst things in life are not getting what you want, and getting it.

Or, to quote Roger Sterling of Mad Men, the worst thing is seeing someone else get it.

I love this song because she is just turned inside-out and must be expressing some pretty heavy stuff. I once heard she was abandoned by her father as a child, a confusing heartbreak that inflicts the kind of unhealable wounds that make an artist.

As a young woman she fell in love with an older, straight, married woman, which must have been agony. This was the Athena that leapt fully-formed from the head of Zeus, the birthing of a supernatural being entitled Ingenue.

Yes. The divine wound that, for just one second, causes us to stop bullshitting (at least to other people) that everything is perfect in our lives. But try it. Try being vulnerable and see where it gets you. For every k. d. there are a hundred Marilyns (or Amys or Mindys or Anna Nicoles). Life under glass destroys people, though it's the thing we're all supposed to want.

To be Famous. To do something Really Impressive, while the really (really) impressive people insist it doesn't matter, that it's all art for art's sake, and that money is the least important thing of all.

So what is the most important thing of all?

I could say love, being an ageing hippie, and I know it for a fact, because it's all that's left when the rest of your life drops away under your feet. Being an instrument of love, embodying it, which I do very poorly, except perhaps when I am with my grandchildren who saved me from certain oblivion.

The least important? Posturing? Vanity? Narcissism? Shallowness? Fine, except that it seems to be exploding under the heady influence of social media.

The refrain goes like this: "My lfe's better than your life, my life's better than yours." It's typical for people to get very depressed after going on Facebook, but as with any other addiction, NEXT time is the charm, the next hit or drink or snort or click or "like" or "poke" or whatever-the-fuck, will do it for them, will get rid of this hollow howl once and for all.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Whatever became of the wildwood flower?

In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but when I first get up, I find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.

I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.

At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.

At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.

There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.

At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.

It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.

That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"

The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially inThe City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm