DON'T listen to your body!

As is so often the case, this post is something I adapted from my personal journal, which I will admit often amounts to a load of complaining. But keeping a journal is one of the sure symptoms of writerhood. I have had many a person sit down with me over the years saying "I want to be a writer", meaning they want to make effortless money and be an instant best-seller (it can't be that hard, can it?). One of the first things I ask them is, "Do you keep a journal?" Normally I get a blank look, a why-would-I-want-to-do-that expression, as if a journal must be written on pink Hello Kitty stationery with scented lavender ink.

Mostly people merely take stabs at writing, brief ones. Then they sort of run in terror, realizing that they will actually have to put their work "out there". As a friend recently told me about her own former ambition to write, it just got buried under the mundane tasks we all must undertake in the course of a day.

All this leads to something else. (Which is what I seem to do in this blog, though I can't tell you why. Steinbeck leads to Travels with Charley leads to why people treat dogs like babies.) So this is about my never-ending, awful sort-of-relationship with doctors, who have been poking and prodding my sagging old body for a year now trying to figure out why I am having this persistent, nagging, sometimes severely disabling pain.

It's getting in the way of jumping in to preparing my novel The Glass Character for publication (which I wish I could enjoy more). This is what I wrote this morning:

"I want to get the medical stuff over with, which it should be next week when I get told there’s nothing wrong with me again. I have a theory it’s a low-grade infection, but I doubt if he will give me anything for it, will likely say “it’ll go away on its own” when I have been in pain for nearly a year now. They said the same thing about the infuriating ear symptoms which I’ve now had for 13 months. Things do NOT “go away on their own” in many cases, but doctors now let things fester for so long they become ingrained and chronic and really WON’T go away. We then have a "nuisance patient", a hypochondriac completely obsessed with imaginary illness. But someone has commanded doctors from “on high” not to prescribe antibiotics. They’ve swung from one ridiculous extreme to the other, and in both cases it’s to get you out of the office FAST."

So how many specialists or procedures HAVE I been exposed to? Let me count the ways. Gastroenterologist (God, these things are hard to spell). Gynecologist. Ultrasound. Colonoscopy. Ultrasound again, because they couldn't find anything the first time, and now urologist/cystoscopy (can’t ever remember how to spell that one). I have also been to a nephrologists and an otolaryng-whatever-it-is. All uselessly. Each person takes a part of the body, and they are never co-ordinated or put together in any way. They’re not supposed to be. Each body part must get sick in its own way, and if it gets sick outside of certain strict boundaries, then you’re not sick, or at least that part of you isn’t. If you have a condition such as a bladder infection and only have three symptoms out of five, then you don’t have a bladder infection and will not be given antibiotics.

Oh, antibiotics! Like Valium in the '70s, doctors handed them out like candy until relatively recently. Patients wanted something to relieve their fear and distress about being sick. They wanted to come away with something. Doctors wanted them the fuck out of their office so they could go on to the next patient. So they went home with a prescription.

Then all of a sudden, we are being told WE were wrong to accept all those prescriptions for all these years. WE were wrong to seek a fast and easy way out of disabling symptoms. We should have just put up or shut up, because there was probably nothing wrong with us anyway.

Suddenly, in spite of everything our doctors had been telling us for decades, antibiotics were just wrong.

It still comes at us from every side, ads on TV with cute but shaming slogans like, "Not all bugs need drugs." It's a kind of finger-shaking admonishment to the public, because for God's sake didn't we create this situation to begin with? The public, being weak and self-indulgent, demanded antibiotics so vociferously that they created a race of Superbugs which are now resistant to medication.

We have rendered antibiotics almost completely ineffective. How does that make us feel?

Doctors had to stop acting like free vending machines for this seductive candy because "someone" ordered them to, some medical association or other. "It will go away on its own" became the new mantra. This got patients out of the office nearly as fast as "Here, take this prescription for amoxycillin".

Now, you can have pus running out of you and feverish red inflammation and strep throat (and my granddaughter, then three years old and running a fever of 104, might have died from it: my daughter, a dragon when she needs to be, INSISTED she be prescribed antibiotics, which cleared it up completely in two days), and the doctor will not prescribe antibiotics. Once again, the crushing weight of shame is applied to us as she tells us something we have already been told 100 times. "Patients ruined antibiotics by taking them too often. It will go away on its own."

There are two things my doctor never prescribes: antibiotics and pain relievers. When I told her I'd had significant and even severe pain for a year, pain that sometimes prevented me from functioning well, she said, "Advil is the drug of choice."

"But I've been taking Advil for a year now and it has no effect at all."

"Try Tylenol."

"I've tried them all. None of them work."

"Advil," she said, a little testily.

"Can't I have anything stronger?"

Oh, it's the facial expressions, the bodily shifting, the "I know I'm dealing with an addict cadging drugs" manner that gives it all away.

"Advil is the drug of choice." (Meaning: if Advil doesn't work, I am having the wrong kind of pain and need to set it straight. Or else I'm lying.)

Another time she asked me the doseage I was taking and I said something like 800 milligrams. "That's too much," she said. "But the lower dose doesn't do anything." "Always take the correct doseage or you'll damage your kidneys." But the "correct doseage" wasn't doing any more than the so-called overdose anyway.

I have enjoyed good health for most of my life and have stayed away from doctors whenever possible, so I can hardly be called a hypochondriac unless such a damning stereotype can develop in a  few months. I hate taking pills, and it does not occur to me to abuse prescriptions. I have dreaded developing some sort of vague but persistent, painful medical condition that no one can get to the root of. And now it's here. My own theory - and who gives a shit what I think anyway, it's only my body - is that this is a low-grade bladder infection which has been flying under the radar for a year. But doctors refuse to see it that way. "Your urine test is normal," my doctor said, furrowing her brow and sitting back in that "get out of here and go directly to the psych ward" way. If my urine test is normal, I cannot have a bladder infection and have to go home and behave myself.

Over and over again I hear/read the same advice from people: Listen to your body! If anything feels amiss, go see your doctor immediately! I am here to tell you that you won't be in her office for long. Your symptoms will have to escalate until you are in severe enough pain to wait months to see a specialist, who will tell you there's nothing wrong anyway. The cancer diagnosis won't come until it is far too late to treat it. Then you will be asked, "For God's sake, why didn't you DO something about it?"

Is there nothing you can do? Why are you stupid enough to ask? Take Advil, which should get rid of all your symptoms. It's the drug of choice.

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

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

Elephant gif of the day!

The way we die is the way we live: a case study

The way we die is the way we live

Or have lived.

I have seen it over and over. A man I knew who lived fast, sucked down alcohol and smoked like a ruin died hard. At least he died quickly, opening the door of his truck by the side of the road and collapsing. He was dead by the time he hit the ground.

Others, unable to let go, trying desperately to stay in control, waste away horribly for years, and years, and years.

I’ve seen near-miracles, like the woman I knew through my former church who was terminally ill and determined to die at home. This was not a cheery or positive woman, though her saracastic digs were often howlingly funny (so long as they weren’t aimed at you).

But something happened here, something strange and quite wonderful. This woman’s friends knew that her sarcastic quips were just a cover for a fragile and loving heart. There ws a sweetness in her that contrasted beautifully with the sour.

Without even sitting down to work it out, shifts of people  began to look after her so she could stay in her home as long as it was practical.  Towards the end, this involved bathing and feeding and taking care of her most basic needs.

At the very end, when she lay dying in hospital, her two sons, estranged from her and from each other for a dozen years, stood on either side of her bed. There’s just something so powerful about standing by someone, about being there. Attending.

It’s not a fancy and certainly not a squishy-squashy word, but at the end, it means everything.

A lot of people I know, if they are courageous enough to name their ultimate fear, will say “Dying alone.” There is something so hollow about it, indicative of an empty life with no significant attachments.

How you die almost always reflects how you have lived.

A couple of years ago I saw something in the paper and, before I could stop myself, exclaimed, “Holy.” It’s a silly expression – don’t even know where it came from - that just pops out of me when I am truly surprised.

It was an obituary in the Vancouver Sun. I won’t say the man’s name because I don’t wish to be barbecued all over again, but suffice it to say he was a local Vancouver not-quite-celebrity, a newspaper writer for the Sun who pretty much worked in one place all his life.

He was almost always described as “acerbic”, meaning he could be acid, even caustic, but his remarks caused gales of laughter among those who were NOT his target.  He was the master of schadenfreude and could summon it with a snap of his fingers. There is no way you can convince me he didn’t get pleasure out of it.

I knew him as a theatre critic at first, and I noticed right away the carbolic quality which could be quite funny in a mean Dorothy Parker-esque way. Then he was assigned the classical music beat, and was away to the races.

People pretended to be OK with his excoriating remarks, even tried to see them as an honour, though I don’t know what they thought in private.  He did like certain artists, though he was extremely picky and seemed to have supernaturally-sensitive hearing. If a violinist lost a single horsehair from his bow, he noticed, and he wasn’t charitable about it.

His weekly column on the bizarre phenomena of urban life ran for a few years and could be immensely entertaining. But that’s not the thing I want to write about today.

At some point in the early ‘90s I must have sent him something. I do remember a bizarre visitation by Liz Taylor at the local Eatons store to promote some new fragrance, Black Molluscs or something. I sent him my newspaper column about it, and he actually responded: “Ol’ Violet Eyes! I might just steal that one. I only steal from the best.”

This didn’t seem like a mean or acerbic man. Over the years I sent him sporadic bits and pieces, and to my astonishiment, one year he sent me a Christmas card. I couldn’t quite call him a friend, but he did respond to most of the bits I sent, mainly clippings from my column.

Once in typical acerbic fashion, he sent me a couple of CDs - one was of a Russian baritone whose name escapes me - with a note saying, "This is not a gift. It's just some stuff I had lying around." He never wanted anyone to see him as nice.

Then he sort of went underground: wrote a few pieces for the Georgia Straight and disappeared, apparently into retirement.

So that was that, until one day I encountered a very weird sight.

That Grand Master of the poison zinger, that excoriating critic of technology and all things progressive, had a Facebook page!

I couldn’t quite believe it, but there it was. It had all sorts of comments from people, photos, stuff he’d done, etc. It certainly looked real.

It had been, oh, five or six years since I’d heard anything from him. I knew I couldn’t “friend” him, that he'd never respond to it even if he was there, but tried to send a message anyway. It went something like:

Good to see you again! Have you interviewed the countertenor Michael Maniaci?
I have his new CD and it knocks me over.  Interested to hear your view. Hope this gets to you.”

Boy, did it.

Though I wasn’t his Facebook “friend”, he wasted no time in answering me.

“This was a mistake. I am not on Facefuck. I have no interest in joining a herd of vacuous idiots. Hope this gets to you.”

Uh. If you’re not on Facefuck, how can you answer a Facefuck message?

It was all very upsetting.

I did find a few things out. I mentioned his name to someone I knew, one of those I-know-everybody types who was as gay as the day is long (an expression he particularly favors). “Oh, THAT guy. He has a reputation, you know. They tell me he’s the most arrogant, cruel, narcissistic, heartless, ruthless bastard they have ever met.”

Oh my (again)!

So that was that, until my “Holy!” day: I saw  a full-page spread in the obituary section, which is certainly more attention than he had ever received before. You have to die to get that.

He was dead, so they ran a large full-color photo of him and remarks by (all retired) Sun employees about how “acerbic” his writing was, and how wonderful, and how he was wasted in Vancouver and should have been writing for the New Yorker. And about how he preferred to keep his private life private.

Colleagues mentioned his kindness, but there was a hedge-y quality to some of it. There were also stories of him hiding behind a post at concerts when he saw a friend or colleague coming his way.

But apparently, this was OK because he was dead now and already being elevated to sainthood in that strange, strange way the dead are always elevated. I have often wondered if this is nothing more than a superstitious fear that the bastards will come back and haunt us.

I did not react well. I was furious at all the statements about his kindness, how in spite of his poison darts he was a truly gentle soul, etc. The man was an asshole and I wanted the world to know it.

I didn’t think hard about it and I did use his real name, a bad idea. I posted my feelings on my blog, and they were not charitable (though I assumed no one would read it). But I had tagged it with his name (duh: the part of me that DID want people to see it). It wasn’t long until I received feedback, not the kind of feedback you ever want to see.

“You mean you are going to rip into this man and destroy his family before the body even hits the ground?”

“I have never in my life seen anything so merciless. You are a sick, sick woman.”

Message boards said things like “it sounds like she was totally obsessed, maybe stalking him", and "he had probably been trying to scrape her off his shoe for years.”

Someone began to swing the word "lawsuit" around like a great medieval axe blade, a particularly nasty form of verbal bullying I hadn't seen in quite some time.

It’s funny how in moments like this, dynamics are neatly reversed. It drives me completely crazy. Like a bizarre weather vane, there is a complete 180-degree turn, and ALL the nasty things a person has done are heaped on to the person who has been hurt by them.

It’s insanity, and it happens all the time. It's one of the darker, wormier, more cowardly aspects of people, a way to scrape off blame for their sins so they never have to face them or take responsibility.

But there was more going on than that. I think I hit a nerve here, because it was obvious to me that this was a lonely, bitter old man (not THAT old – only in his 60s, but the lonely die young) who died without inspiring much real grief.  A blog post I read later, written by a friend, was much more honest than the verbal Cool Whip posted in the Sun. She spoke of his kindness, but then said he frequently isolated himself and could suddenly and inexplicably cut off friends in the manner of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Oh my, again.

Then came the truly heartbreaking part: as he lay dying in hospital, a few colleagues from his Vancouver Sun days were having trouble piecing together any facts about his life. Where was he born ? Was it Saskatchewan? Didn’t he have a brother? Where did he go to school? Nobody knew.

As far as I know, there was no one from his family there, no one to stand by him as his life ebbed away.

I will never know why he attacked me that way when I was simply trying to renew a connection, not a close one, but one that had occasionally been fun. I don’t know why there was a Facebook page set up in the first place when he said he wasn’t on “Facefuck” and probably despised such things. (Another colleague described his work habits as being out of the 1950s, along with his attitudes and TV preferences: all he watched was Turner Classic Movies.)

Somebody mentioned a wake, and even said, “Will you be there, Margaret Gunning?” I really needed more acid thrown in my face. Still later I read a post on someone else's blog which nearly peeled my skin off in a single piece. I was described as a deranged crank and even a “stinky old biddy” (a masterpiece of description!). The post was accompanied by a goofy picture of me posing with my bird on my shoulder, a clear attempt to paint me as a lunatic. It sure must have taken her a lot of time to track that one down, as I posted it back in 2008.

I guess I should’ve known better than to speak ill of the dead. I broke some sort of primal rule, but I was just pissed off at all this glowing praise of a man who had a few other traits besides kindness and gentleness. Try vitriol and nastiness.

I did take my post down and posted a brief apology on the Straight message board. My timing had been bad. Fury has abated, to be replaced mostly with pity. I wonder about that wake now, whether it ever happened with so few people.  And I wonder if any of his mysterious, even chimeric family members would have attended, because it seems to me that attending was not their strong suit. 


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

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

Why dogs are NOT babies: a strike for canine dignity

I have a bookshelf in our bedroom, one that I seldom add to, if ever. I don’t know what to call it exactly, except that it has books in it that I return to, that I love, that are warm baths to the soul.

The only trouble is, they keep changing.

I will go back to reread, for the 14th time, one of these cuddly old familiar books, and suddenly it’s not so cuddly any more. Or not so well-written. I’d give you a list of them all, but it would embarrass me.

Something has happened over the years, especially since I began taking seriously the process of writing fiction. Oh all right, after being a book reviewer for 25 years: I think I know crap from the real thing, but it’s not exactly that.

It’s the ability to spot writers’ card tricks.

There’s a little bit of conjurer in every writer, whether fiction or non-. Hell, more than a little! What does a conjurer do? He makes stuff appear, usually out of nowhere. Such as plots and scenarios and dialogue which seems to just sprout up off the page.

All this is a long lead-in to one of my warm-bath books, one I decided to pull down off the shelf for the first time in years. It’s a very old paperback, circa 1962, probably belonged to my mother originally and floated into my hands the way these things do. It’s not just yellowed but browned, and has that punky stale smell of very old paper.

It’s Travels with Charley.

This is probably John Steinbeck’s most popular book (and the spiky red banner shouts at the top, “The #1 National Bestseller, Now Only 75 cents! OVER A MILLION COPIES IN PRINT!”) It’s touted as a first-person, nonfiction account of Steinbeck’s road trip across America, kind of like the thing Charles Kuralt did on TV a long time ago, where he travels the length and breadth of the United States (“He saw things which stirred his anger and things which made him swell with pride”), and talks to all sorts of down-home, folksy types, including a few racists.

The only problem with it is that it’s almost pure fiction.

I didn’t find all this out until I Wiki’d Steinbeck and Travels with Charley and discovered this bit of information:

Bill Barich, who wrote Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck's America, a retracing of Steinbeck's footsteps, said:

"I'm fairly certain that Steinbeck made up most of the book. The dialogue is so wooden. Steinbeck was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing ordinary people. He'd become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson. The die was probably cast long before he hit the road, and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country. His perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that."

A genius is a genius, for a’ that. The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men ain't nothing to sneeze at. So the book is still worth a read, but this time through I noticed that, here and there anyway, nails stuck out and seams showed. One whole chapter (which felt suspiciously like padding to bring the page count up to 200) was about snooping around in a hotel room that hadn’t been made up yet, and his detective-style piecing together of details on the previous occupant, whom he called Lonesome Harry. This was supposedly a travelling businessman who had written a guilty letter to his wife (crumpled up in the wastebasket, of course) before getting drunk (empty bottle of Jack Daniels) and entertaining a prostitute called Lucille (carmine lipstick and raven hair on the pillow!).

Steinbeck’s son, John Jr., was quoted as saying, “He just sat in his camper and made up all this shit."

All right, all right. We’re finally getting to the real point of this ramble: not just the discovery of cracks and holes in the work of a legendary writer, but said writer’s observations about dogs.

It’s really the best part of the book. As he drove his camper (romantically named Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse) all over the length and breadth of said United States, his companion was an elderly standard poodle called Charley. If Charley had more character than most of the people Steinbeck supposedly interviewed, it was no accident. He was one noble dog, able to see through the shadiest of humans with aplomb (whatever aplomb is – I’ve never figured it out).

Charley, being far too old to take this sort of trip and probably being let out to pee once a day, keeps getting sick, predictably with urinary problems. This necessitates taking him to vets several times. But it’s Steinbeck’s take on people who treat their dogs like children which made me sit up and take notice.

It made more sense than anything I’d read in a long time and made up for some of the vacuous drivel ("MUST READ: Seven Sex Secrets the Kardashians Don't Want You to Know") that I read on Facebook.

“On the other hand, I yield to no one in my distaste for the self-styled dog-lover, the kind who heaps up his frustrations and makes a dog carry them around. Such a dog-lover talks baby talk to mature and thoughtful animals, and attributes his own sloppy characteristics to them until the dog becomes in his mind an alter ego. Such people, it seems to me, in what they imagine to be kindness, are capable of inflicting long and lasting tortures on an animal, denying it any of its natural desires and fulfillments until a dog of weak character breaks down and becomes the fat, asthmatic, befurred bundle of neuroses. When a stranger addresses Charley in baby talk, Charley avoids him. For Charley is not a human; he’s a dog, and he likes it that way. He feels that he is a first-rate dog and has no wish to be a second-rate human.”

In the past few years I have seen an alarming, even nauseating rise in dog-worship: people who lavish far more energy and attention and even affection on their dogs than they do on their own children or spouse. “He’s my ba-a-aby,” I hear over and over again, in the same swooping, crooning tone, a tone their children have never heard. I don’t know what this means, but it makes me squirm. As Steinbeck states, he’s a dog, not a baby. Is it the fact that this baby never grows up, is subservient and expected to be obedient, that you OWN it and therefore are always in control? Is it the fact that, in loving your dog, you will never have to deal with all the complications and vicissitudes of loving a human being?

Or do some people genuinely prefer them? The whining, the supplicating tail-wags, the slobbering tongue on the face (“Awwwwwww!”), the endless barking, the fleas, the leg-humps, the . . . you get the idea.

The point is, dogs are NOT babies, certainly not baby humans, and an adult dog isn’t even a baby dog. We infantilize them by insisting that they are, and we rob them of their animal dignity. The “unconditional love” they give us has an awful lot to do with the fact that they know where their food and shelter comes from.

I don’t think dogs are capable of “love”. Attachment, yes. Perhaps a certain loyalty, if I’m not anthropomorphizing too much. The capacity to guard and protect, bred in for millennia. It can seem like love. But does something you own really have the capacity to love you?

To a person who has given up on human nastiness and betrayal, turning away from humans and loving their canine “babies” can seem like a step towards emotional liberation. But it isn’t. It's escape. We were never meant to love another species that way. When speaking of authentic, mature, mutual love, there are no substitutions.

Alarmingly, I’ve seen many TV documentaries about people who keep exotic animals such as poisonous snakes and tigers as pets. In almost every case, the owner speaks of the animals as “my babies” (or “muh buhyy-beeze”, depending on where they come from). A 500-pound Bengal tiger, restlessly pacing in a small chain-link enclosure and alertly looking for clues to the next kill, becomes “like one of my own kids”.

What is this all about? I have a dreadful feeling it’s about alienation, about a culture where clicking a little device in your hand passes for conversation and people tweet by their mother's deathbed. It's about giving up on the human species altogether. What alarms me is the extent to which it is escalating and thus becoming "normal". There’s a bitterness about it, along with a strange lack of awareness of the real dynamics of the situation. These people look right at it and don't see it, a form of soul-blindness which I perceive as one of the worst forms of mental illness.

What does it mean when you buy your “baby” from a breeder, keep your “baby” in a yard and walk it around on a leash? It's called "ownership", and it's not that much different from owning a swimming pool or a car or a gun. Your possession won't talk back, grow up, move away from home. Until it dies (its life usually needlessly prolonged as an act of appalling selfishness on the part of the owner), he will belong to you, he will be your property and will never change.

Certain Godzilla-mothers, the kind who devour their children's identities whole, would like to own and operate and control their offspring, but these children usually insist on breaking away to save their own lives. Enter the dog, the boo-boo, the “baaaaaayyy-beeeeeeee” who rescues the whole situation, offering “unconditional love” and face-slobbering in charge for plenty of Kibbles n’ Bits.

I don’t get it. But then, to me, a dog is just a dog. Is there anything wrong with that?

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

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

Did somebody mention George?

I dreamed I was in a movie with George Clooney.

He was very well-dressed and impeccable through the whole movie and had a Cary Grant manner about him. Through the whole movie I felt this longing for him, wanted to kiss and make out with him,  but at the same time I looked on him as a prize Arabian horse or something, just unattainable.

I was both in a movie with him, and watching a movie with him in it. Some parts of the dream were in a movie theatre and I remember trying to snuggle up to him. I wanted everyone to see that I was with George Clooney and he was snuggling up to me. He allowed this, then seemed to sort of lose interest.

I didn’t have too many clothes on during this and was maybe in my late 20s. The movie (an art house film) involved Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson in Mad Men) who was a poor struggling harpist living in a garret. I remember seeing her in one scene very badly miming harp playing, with awful out-of-tune music, and wondering why they hadn’t tried harder to make it seem convincing.

It became obvious as the dream went on that I WAS the Peggy Olson character and was both watching her in the movie, which seemed to take place in an old apartment house with winding staircases in Europe, and BEING her in the movie. I was also somehow sitting with George Clooney in the audience.  He did not seem to like the movie, and as I kept on draping myself over him, it also became apparent he was bored. There was some sort of play-within-a-play happening in the movie that involved Elizabeth Moss, some gorgeous European scenes (? I think), and other famous actors who now escape me. I looked down and noticed I had very hairy legs, and so did the Elisabeth Moss character. George Clooney was now frankly bored by the movie which did not seem to have a point to it. He said “Let’s get out of here” and we left, and I grabbed his hand which he didn’t seem to want.  I hoped as we left that people in the theatre would notice I was with George Clooney, though I continued to worry about my hairy legs.

Similarly to the old apartment building in the movie, the theatre also had very elaborate winding staircases with windows at each landing. I said “Let’s play a Dorothy Parker game.” I grabbed his hand and we began to run up the stairs. When we got to a  window I’d look out at the view and say, “Is this a good place to jump?” Then we’d run up another level. I was disappointed there were only a couple more levels, but then we burst out onto a sort of balcony. The view was mostly obscured by some sort of black-painted glass barrier, but George wiped off a bit of condensation and I could see through it. I just began to gasp at how beautiful it was: snow-peaked mountains, glaciers, blazing-white snow sparkling everywhere. “Oh, it’s just like Alberta,” I sighed. “Switzerland,” George said, by now very bored with me and testy, probably staying just to be polite.

In another scene I was trying to make my way through a maze of corridors (in the movie apartment, not the theatre) which at one point led to a convenience store. I bought two enormous bags of popcorn and felt guilty about it, but it was so cheap, two for one!  I blundered around trying to find my way back. When I finally found George, he was totally annoyed and said, “Don’t you ever go anywhere?” I tried to tell him I had no sense of direction and got lost in restaurants coming back from the ladies’ room. (I didn’t have the popcorn any more.)

Other parts of the dream have already got lost or muddled. One involved Catherine Zeta-Jones who had a very short skirt on. At one point I pointed out to George (who was barely with me by now) that she had no panties on, and he took a look. Renee Zellwegger was there but I don’t know what she was doing. I think Robert Downey Jr. was in it. I had the thought that celebrities just had to stand around to be impressive. At one point I felt like I was in that old Disney cartoon, Mickey’s Gala Premier, in which every celebrity of the day appeared. I still wasn’t quite sure if I was IN the movie or just watching it, but I definitely felt outclassed.

I don’t know if this scene is related or not. It involves bugs, an infestation of them. They were crawling out from a crack in the baseboards which had huge gaps in it. Some of them were enormous cockroaches which made me want to scream. I didn’t know how to get rid of these bugs and ended up spraying very heavily out of a can all along the baseboards (and there weren’t really any baseboards, just wall and floor with big holes and gaps). The bugs retreated quickly, including the cockroaches, and at one point I tried to crunch one under my foot and couldn’t kill it. I knew they would be back.

Another scene (related somehow) had the theatre manager talking to a lot of audience members out in the lobby. He was going on and on about American Presidents. This is garbled in my memory, but the gist was we should be proud and fascinated by how many Presidents had been represented in movies that had played in that particular theatre. At one point he said, very proudly, “We’ve even had an assassination.” The audience was waiting around for some sort of bonus or prize, but I don’t think it ever happened.

I don’t know what happened to George Clooney.

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

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

Nick: you make me sick

This is an actual transcript, word-for-word, of a horrific bucket of swill that just appeared in my inbox. I'm still trying to believe it happened, and decided to address it right away before my fury abated. My comments follow Nick's nice intimate little message.

Hi Margaret,

You know better than most that putting your writing "out there" takes a tremendous amount of courage; readers will find and comment on even the simplest mistakes. At Grammarly we know the feeling - and we've made it our mission to improve writers' confidence. Putting our money where our mouth is, we'd be honored to sponsor your next blog post with a $20 Amazon gift card.

In case you haven’t heard of us, Grammarly is an automated online proofreader that finds and explains those pesky grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes that are bound to find their way into your first draft. Think of us as a second pair of digital eyes that can spare you the cost of hiring a proofreader. If you'd like to join our 3 million users and try the premium version of our proofreader for free, let me know and I'll make it happen!

Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate blog post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time.

Cheers,
Nick

P.S. Let me know if you ever find yourself in foggy San Francisco; I’d love to grab some coffee. :)

I have no idea what-the-fuck this is, or even if it's on the level. It may well be a hoax perpetrated by that old Gandalfian wag, Matt Paust. But I have a queasy feeling that it's real. 

I don't even know where to begin! "Hi Margaret" is a good start: who ARE these people, and why do they feel so completely confident to address me as if I'm an old friend? But it gets worse. That first sentence offends me in the way that only patronizing, ignorant bullshit can offend me. "You know better than most" is meant to massage my brilliant writer's ego: oh, we know you've been there, you've taken your lumps. "Putting your writing 'out there' takes a tremendous amount of courage." No it doesn't. I have no courage whatsoever, and I've been "putting it out there" since I was eight and hand-wrote ten copies of my first novel for my friends and relatives. It's a little like saying to a woman, "You know, it takes a tremendous amount of courage to wear that dress."

"Readers will find and comment on even the simplest mistakes"? What universe does this asshole live in? My blog receives relatively few comments (except the 43 I got for the "I See Dead People" post that garnered over 73,000 views), and since Matt makes most of them, he knows better than to pick at my  "pesky" grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes, not that I make any. (Or hardly any.) But it seems their mandate is to "improve writers' confidence" by helping them spray toxic chemicals on those squirmy little errors and wipe them out. 

This Grammarly thingamabob, whatever it is, is supposed to save me "the cost of hiring a proofreader". I have published two novels which received almost universally positive, even glowing reviews, so do you think I need a fucking PROOFREADER? This sort of invasive, mind-polluting trash is just what makes the internet such a dismal swamp, when it could be so much more. But Mr. or Ms. Patronizing Asshole saves the "best" till last. "Please send me the expected publishing date and topic of your next appropriate blog post (ideally something about writing) so I can give you all the details you need in time." 

OK, Nick or whoever-the-hell-you-really-are, THIS is my "next appropriate blog post" and I hope you see it! And I would LOVE to see what would happen if I tried to hunt you down in San Francisco so we could "grab some coffee :) " My personal theory is that you don't exist, that you are in fact a corporate mirage, an evil and impersonal force out to squeeze the impoverished blogger dry of his or her last few dollars. 

From the first fake, cheery "Hi, Margaret!" to that last noisome verbal oilslick about "grabbing a coffee", this thing sucks like a vampire with 100 insatiable mouths. It has the fixed, sociopathic grin of a Great White shark moving in for the kill.

But hey, Nick baby, if you'd send me that gift card for $20, maybe I could afford a few ropes, whips and chains and a box of condoms for my next trip to San Francisco. 

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

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

Blueberry Butt!

Charge of the Light Brigade: Take 2

De Jarge of de Light Brigade

by William F. Kirk ("The Norsk Nightingale")

(NOTE: William F. Kirk , The Norsk Nightingale, was a 19th-century dialect poet world-famous for his "lumberyack" poetry, best represented by Sonnet on Stewed Prunes ("By yiminy! Dey ban gude"). One of his oevres was satirizing famous poetry, including the "half a league, half a league" refrain of Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade. At least I think it was Tennyson. . . I always used to call him Alfred Lord Tennis Ball. Anyway, try reading this aloud in the home furnishings section of Ikea, and see what happens!)

Yoyfully, yoyfully, Yoyfully onvard,

In dis har walley of death Rode the sax hundred!

It ban a cinch, ay tenk, 

 Some geezer blundered.

 "Hustle, yu Light Brigade! Yump!" Maester Olson said;

 Den in the walley of death

 Go the sax hundred. 

Cannon on right of dem, 

Cannon on left of dem, 

Cannon on top of dem, 

 Wolleyed and t'undered; 

Smashed vith dis shot and shal, 

Dey ant do wery val; 

Most of dem ketching hal,— 

 Nearly sax hundred! 

Yes, all dem sabres bare 

Flash purty gude in air; 

Each faller feel his hair Standing. No vonder! 

Yudas! It ant ban yob 

For any coward slob, 

Fighting dis Russian mob. 

Ay tenk ay vudn't stand Yeneral's blunder.

 

Cannon on right of dem, 

Cannon on top of dem, 

Cannon behind dem, tu, 

 Wolleyed and t'undered. 

Finally say Captain Brenk, 

"Ve got enuff, ay tenk,

 Let's go and getting drenk."

 'Bout tventy-sax com back 

 Out of sax hundred.

Ven skol deir glory fade?

 It ban gude charge dey made, 

 Every von vondered. 

Every von feeling blue, 

'Cause dey ban brave old crew, 

Yolly gude fallers, tu, 

 Dis har sax hundred!

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

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