Harold Lloyd: The Hanged Man of Tarot

I keep thinking I've gotten to the bottom of the barrel of craziness that surrounds Harold Lloyd. Not a bit of it. Here is a piece almost as strange as the "psychic bridging" site I found years ago while still writing the novel, then couldn't find again, ever. It disappeared in the night. The psychic bridging was some sort of time travel or remote viewing, where supposedly you could see into any era or period of time while remaining in the present. Harold Lloyd's name was mentioned in the piece in a most alarming way. The writer said he "became self-detached during filming" in the 1940s (he did make his last film in that time) and had to be hospitalized. But why, how - wtf?? 

Anyway, it all disappeared, and I never did find out if Harold worked for the CIA during the Cold War or what. Being as he was Imperial Potentate of the Shrine, Shriners being  Masons on steroids, there is much to indicate that he had more than a passing relationship with mysticism. That doesn't mean he appears in my living room at night (oh dang, I wasn't going to tell anybody).

I swear I didn't write the following piece, but it interests me, because with all his Masonic orientation (from his late 20s until the end of his life), there might be some sort of subconscious symbolism working its way out in this brilliant, but admittedly very strange movie with the oh-so-Lloydian title, Never Weaken.

Anyway, Just Wondering, whoever you are, I am lifting a piece of this article (which I have since realized has been reblogged all over the place, so who knows where it really came from) because I like it. I will offer my own interpretation shortly.

The Hanged Man Of Tarot In Popular Culture

What do Harold Lloyd, Ringo Starr, and Eddie Van Halen all have in common?

They've all appeared in movies or videos as "a man hanging upside-down from a rope by one leg and crossing the other leg".

That would be quite a coincidence if they were not all mimicking the same thing, The Hanged Man, which is the twelfth card in the Tarot deck.

Harold Lloyd is hoodwinked but then "enlightened" in the short film "Never Weaken" (1921).

Harold Lloyd's "Never Weaken" (1921) is full of masonic imagery.  He sits in a chair and blindfolds himself to commit suicide, but is lifted up through the air by a construction girder.  He hears harp music and takes off his blindfold to see a beautiful angel.  Only when he hears jazz does he realize that the angel is not real and he is not in heaven but high above the street and about to fall to his death.  He makes it back to safety.

In masonic terms, he is initiated by sitting in a throne, being hoodwinked, facing death, and being deceived.  He is a "hanged man", suspended on a steel beam between life and death.  He is then enlightened to a higher plane of understanding when the veil is lifted from his eyes and he perceives reality.

There is also a ring-on-a-string marriage ritual, a blood ritual, and a lot of focus on men's rear ends.

Everyone remembers Harold Lloyd hanging from a clock in Safety Last (1923) but nobody seems to remember the next scene where he swings upside-down from a rope by one leg:

Not bad stunts for a man who lost his thumb and forefinger four years earlier.

Harold Lloyd swinging from a rope with one leg bent in "Safety Last".

There are bank and stock exchange signs in the background, six years prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Get it?  It's predictive programming:  Safety Last-taking huge risks-bank-stock exchange-patriotic flag-nobody gets hurt-happy ending.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I think all that blindfold/shooting-yourself-in-the-heart-for-love stuff is darkly erotic, as is the long, funny but rather disturbing chain of suicide gags (in which he goes to the dictionary to check the spelling of a word - sepulchre - in his suicide note). The helplessness of the blindfold, his chair being suspended in mid-air, the stone angel and harp music, the ecstatic and almost orgasmic facial expression as he unmasks himself and reaches out for Eternity. . . well, it's all pretty sexy as far as I am concerned. Then that immortal scene of realization that he. Isn't. In. Heaven. At. All. 

There is blood in this, yes, actual blood, when he pricks his finger trying to impale himself on one of those spikes they used to stick notes on. Is this an unconscious (pun intended) reference to Sleeping Beauty fatally pricking her finger on a spindle? He does swoon in another scene, losing consciousness, almost falling out of his chair. If you want to look for Freudian flying/falling/bleeding/dying/surrealistic/Masonic/angelic/phallic symbols in this thing, you'll find them. It's chock-a-block.

As for being blindfolded,  Harold Lloyd was blind for a while, after the legendary accident which shaped the rest of his career/life. No one knew if he would ever see again, and one can imagine the terror, the helplessness of having to lie there, burned and maimed and blind. . . The joy and even ecstasy with which he reaches out for the Angel of Death in the movie might even reflect his profound desire to die and be done with this agony. Perhaps he even considered suicide himself: it's not a funny topic, but it somehow found its way into two of his movies. 

Well, why not a hanged man? He was into all that Masonic stuff, wasn't he? Magic shows, Tarot cards, deals with the devil? Haitian voodoo (no, that's me). God knows what else I'll find, that he was a polygamist or something, or worse than that, a Rotarian.

(Weird, weird stuff. . . I've been trying to post a gif of Harold suspended on the chair, and it keeps. . . disappearing. First it half-disappeared. This has never happened to me before, ever, in my entire career of fooling around with/making gifs. Then it just vanished, though a ghostly outline allows me to make it small, medium or large. BUT IT ISN'T THERE! I tried to put it back, and I can't put it back because, in fact, it is already there. . . I just can't see it.)

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I was too ashamed to put this on Facebook

It's a very bad Separated at Birth, which means I am overdue to see my psychiatrist and not yet recovered from Christmas. I kept finding that top picture on Harold Lloyd sites, and wondering what it reminded me of. Voila! It's Bullwinkle! Specifically, Bullwinkle doing that crazy high-stepping dance when he got his own show, with that idiot smile that came and went. Took me forever to find a picture of it. The Harold pictures are from his rather sad comeback attempt, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. There is an even more deranged smile shot in The Milky Way, in which he plays a milkman trapped in the back seat of a cab with a horse. But I can't find that either.

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

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

You'll be blown away by the awesomeness of this post

Nature's Mistakes: Truly Horrific Animals

 

Be aware that I don't choose these things. In my never-ending thirst for knowledge, they come to me, attracted, no doubt, by a mixture of curiosity and disbelief.

This thing, this, I don't know, this whatever-it-is, like a shrimp shell with fur, or a hamster trick-or-treating in a lobster suit,  it scares me to think that these things are scampering around, apparently cute except for the four-inch talons that could probably rip your throat out if you looked at it wrong. It was hard for me to believe it was real, so I had to dig around for more images, sort of like turning over rocks in your back yard to see what slimy things you can find.

This looks like a sea monkey, only bigger. It looks like a sea monkey might look if it actually stayed alive and grew into something, rather than dying in the first week and turning to stinky brown scum on top of the water. Bleahhhhhh.

The larval form. Just not possible, whatever it is. Then I found one that moved. . .

These must actually exist, then, or else animatronics has been taken to a level far beyond what I imagined. This primitive, struggling, fur-clogged thing, this thing that looks like it should have died out millions of years ago with the trilobite (in fact it even looks like a trilobite) is an animal so primitive, so small-brained, so stupid, that when you lift it off the ground it keeps working its feet because it thinks it's still walking.

OK, so having proven it exists and isn't just some taxidermic nightmare, I had to Wiki it (my main source of knowledge because I am incredibly lazy), and found the following:

Pink fairy armadillo

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Pink fairy armadillo[1]
Conservation status
Data Deficient (IUCN 3.1)[2]
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Order:	Cingulata
Family:	Dasypodidae
Subfamily:	Euphractinae
Genus:	Chlamyphorus Harlan, 1825
Species:	C. truncatus
Binomial name
Chlamyphorus truncatus Harlan, 1825
Pink fairy armadillo range

The pink fairy armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) or pichiciego is the smallest species of armadillo (mammals of the family Dasypodidae, mostly known for having a bony armor shell). It is found in central Argentina, where it inhabits dry grasslands and sandy plains with thorn bushes and cacti.

The pink fairy armadillo is approximately 90–115 mm (3.5-4.5 inches) long, excluding the tail, and is pale rose or pink in color. It has the ability to bury itself completely in a matter of seconds if frightened.

It is a nocturnal animal. It burrows small holes near ant colonies in dry soil, and feeds mainly on ants and ant larvae near its burrow. Occasionally, it feeds on worms, snails, insects and larvae, or various plant and root material.
The pink fairy armadillo spends much of its time under the ground, as it is a "sand swimmer" similar to the golden mole or the marsupial mole.^{[citation needed]} It uses large front claws to agitate the sand, allowing it to almost swim through the ground in a manner reminiscent of swimming through water. It is torpedo-shaped, and has a shielded head and back.

It took me a long time to figure this one out. This isn't a pink fairy armadillo, or any sort of armadillo.  AT ALL. This is some sort of Peruvian jello mold. Take a look at those feet - they're made out of cantaloupe spears. Carmen Miranda could wear this thing on her head! Such internet hoaxes should be outlawed, as they only choke my evenings with dross.

Worse horrors awaited me. Salamanders. Giant salamanders. Giant salamanders that thrashed violently in people's arms. Salamanders that attacked. This one looks like a mammoth Chee-toh or a pizza gone terribly wrong. Except it seems to be made out of some sort of vinyl.

When I was a kid, I always wanted a newt, a toad, whatever I could catch that crawled or slithered. I would have loved to collect a salamander, but I never saw one, just read about them. Now I realize I was saved by the grace of God, by a divine Providence that snatched me out of the path of the Behemoth. What would these things eat? Why do they exist at all? What is evolution all about, and why is ANY of it here, when we started off as nothing?

I don't know if this cheers me up, or not.

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

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

The most astounding video I've ever seen (no, really!)

I'd like to call this Mad Men on acid, or the '50s via Hieronymus Bosch, but mostly I call it incredible. I've never seen anything like it, and for once I'm too humble to exploit it for gifs (though I'm sure someone else will).

A simple snap of the wrist: short fiction

Marcy couldn't remember the first time she was 
jerked off-balance by a simple snap of the wrist.

The technique might have been perfected at home, when she was growing up. As the TV ad for the free yoyo in the box of Malto-Meal said: "Yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-YO-yo-yo" (to the tune of the Irish Washerwoman). It wasn't so remarkable then, as her sister Molly was thirteen and Marcy had just been born. It isn't very difficult to jerk a six-pound newborn on a string so it will dance, dance, dance on your hand like a malformed little doll.

This was her not-chosen environment for years. Everything about her was criticized, then the criticism was turned back on her: 

"Oh, you should stop being so self-critical." 

"For God's sake, when are you going to develop some confidence?" 

Her sister Molly, already an adult, played with her like a doll, exclaimed over her, then dumped her down in her crib and went out on a date.

Not to blame her, she was only a teenager, but it got much worse as she grew. Marcy was left in the living room with Tom, her sister's 30-year-old married boy friend, and both of them were drunk (drunkenness being encouraged when she was 15). The inevitable groping would go on in the dark, then when Molly found out, she would stare acid daggers of fury at her and say, 

"So, you want to go sit with my boy friend in there and romance him? Who do you think you are, anyway? What kind of slut would do that?" 

Yank, yank, yank.

Marcy made a life for herself, but it was hard, and her "craziness" was often remarked on, as if her sister had nothing to do with it.  Her "wedding present" was a statement, accompanied by a hard-eyed stare: "Gee, it must be great to have your whole life all figured out at age 19." Called on it later, Molly looked incredulous, said she didn't remember saying it, and looked at Marcy accusingly: how could she even think she could say something that mean? 

When Marcy moved from a small town to Vancouver, she expressed anxiety to her sister that she might not be able to adjust to such a leap. Her response, accompanied by  a shrug and a cool, matter-of-fact expression, was, "Then I guess you'll self-destruct."

At some point Marcy came to wonder: what is it about all this family poison that reproduces itself in your friends, the people who are supposed to be on your side?  At first Roseanne seemed fine, better than fine, and Marcy began to believe she had found her missing piece, the good sister she never had while growing up. But over time, the subtle jerking began. 

Roseanne, who very quickly became her best friend, soon moved away to a small town, and immediately began to believe she was terminally ill. She had no symptoms and refused to see a doctor. Marcy became frantic with worry and flew out to stay with her. Finally coerced into seeking medical help, she found out there was nothing wrong with her at all. But no one addressed the empty abyss inside her, and Marcy stifled the grumble of resentment that she had been sent out on a desperate rescue call for nothing.

Over time, more and more things happened, gradually insinuating themselves, sneaking in while no one noticed, things that were distressingly tangled, snarled up like a ball of useless marionette strings. The writing ambition she shared with Marcy when they met was soon abandoned, or at least denied. When she asked her friend if she had considered writing a column for the local paper (and later, keeping a blog), she made a sour, incredulous face and asked "What would I write about?", as if she had suggested climbing Mount Everest or calculating the value of pi (or, more likely, doing something incredibly stupid and even offensive). Her disdain covered a failed ambition, and Marcy thought she had seen that somewhere before.

Over the years, things escalated. Most of them weren't so much attacks as examples of "here, take this and fix it" or, at least, "listen to all of this unproductive ranting until you feel weary and sick of it and get nothing in return". And there was definitely a sense of entitlement. "Just give it to good old Marcy, I can always count on her." And then, that inevitable statement: "Oh, I feel a lot better now!"

After many years of attempts, Marcy wrote a novel about a silent film star, was excited about it - never thought she'd write a novel again - and showed Roseanne one of his short movies, wondering what her opinion would be. She looked at her with her head tilted at a strange angle and said, "Was he gay?" - then changed the subject.

The gay thing came up more than once, until Marcy realized she had never knowingly had any significant contact with a gay person, not because they didn't exist in her town but because she didn't want to.  When Marcy read a book about pianist Oscar Levant and was all bubbly and enthusiastic about it, Roseanne said in a disdainful, somewhat offended tone, "I thought he was gay." End of conversation, which was then steered to her own agenda. Apparently, anyone named Oscar was automatically gay, like Oscar Wilde. The disdain was automatic: let's write him off, shall we? The narrowness of her perception was shocking.

But the worst, and this went on for years and years (and years) was Roseanne's insistence that she should write a sort of hatchet job, a fictionalized expose of Canadian literature: all the petty, arrogant, narcissistic figures, editors, publishers, writers, hangers-on and wanna-be's. 

"Oh, I still think you should write it, Marcy. It would be so great. You could really stick it to those people and expose all their vanities and power-tripping to the public." Over and over again Marcy said, "But that would surely be the end of my career." A few months later she would say it again. She'd say, "But that would surely be the end of my career." A few months later she would say it again. She began to feel like a yo-yo yanked, a mouthpiece for her friend's frustrations as she rubbed her hands together and cheered on the sidelines, not so much for Marcy as for the expression of all her own frustrations coming out of someone else's mouth, risk-free.

Yank, yank, yank.

By this time, everything was externalized; the whole world was her yo-yo, convenient for never taking responsibility. Her public persona was of a warm, earth-motherish figure who took casseroles over to people she could not stand, a "see how nice I am" gesture while seething inwardly and constantly feeling "betrayed". Finally it became a volcano of bile, with Roseanne's "best friend" the only recipient (deemed "safe" because she didn't live there). Marcy saw her friend yanking the string on her disabled husband, cutting him off from his friends because for some reason she didn't approve of them. Yanking her 20-year-old daughter around, saying it would be "better for me if she didn't date" and going crazy with anxiety because she stayed out till midnight with her girl friends. (She said she would be home at 11:00!) 

After a while it was just an accumulation, and Marcy realized her friend was basically lost. Episodes came back to her that were wildly frightful and so dysfunctional that she couldn't get her head around it. She used to call her friend her "sister", and now she realized that she WAS her sister in all but blood, a frightening and even horrifying replication.

She came to see that she had taken on the role of "safe" confessor: safe because she didn't live there and would be sure to keep her mouth shut. But the more distorted and fucked-up Roseanne's observations became, the more she realized that, far from being safe, she was a repository for a twisted reality that bore very little relation to the truth. Thus her friend could say anything she wanted to, knowing Marcy couldn't call her on it; after all, she didn't live there and didn't know what was really going on.

But of course, when she finally stepped back, it was HER fault for ending a perfectly wonderful relationship for no reason and no warning, out of the clear blue sky.  Roseanne honestly didn't seem to know what had happened between them, an infuriating situation, acres of  blank empty oblivion surrounding what used to be - what should have been - a fine and focused mind.

Marcy writes in her journal, trying to get her mind around it all: 

I wonder sometimes how and why it gets so fucked up. It's horrible to see the worst patterns repeat and repeat, to be jerked around by someone who genuinely believes she is kind and giving. Someone with virtually no self-knowledge, but with a rich library of acid criticism of others, a library she does not use so much as push her friends into and lock the door.

Once when she asked Roseanne what happened to her writing ambition, she said, "It went away." This was a bizarre statement, to be sure; not "I gave it up", not "it was too hard", not "I couldn't stand to risk rejection", but "it" "went away", a separate little entity which got up on its little legs and crept out of her life all by itself.

There has been a theme all through their friendship: Roseanne constantly worries, obsesses that people think she's "crazy". Her behaviour in her town is so circumspect as to be stifling, but she won't let herself out of the box. The craziness swirls around and around in a corked bottle like a tiny, concentrated little genie. But if the genie ever emerges, her three wishes ("escape, escape, escape") won't come true.

Or maybe they will! For a long time now Roseanne has been looking up apartments on the internet - for herself, not including her chronically ill husband - secretly, while insisting she will stay in her town "another 10 to 20 years" (meaning, until he dies). Out of a heavy sense of "duty", she is waiting it out, as if drawing chalk-lines on the wall. Marcy sees that the person she had befriended all those years ago has been replaced by a stand-in of near-Stepford proportions, obsessed with what other people want her to be.

She also sees that, aware of it or not, she has been insidiously trying to torpedo her career for a very long time. There is a slightly nasty, vicarious feeling about it, a knee-slapping sense of "wouldn't it be a hoot" (if she alienated every single person who ever helped her publish her three novels). She was an intelligent woman. Didn't she think this through, or was it a deliberate cobra-strike?

Sometimes people outgrow each other, yes, but does it have to be so painful? Does the manipulation have no end? Invisible strings still yank and twist. Roseanne will have to turn back on herself now, but the choice of looking in the mirror is unlikely, as is the chance she will make a real friend in the community that she can actually talk to.

Marcy writes:

I hate it when I end up carrying someone, and it has happened more often than I care to admit. There must be some need in me, some desperation or fear that if I don't pander to that person's sick need, I won't have any friends at all. Probably that's true. It is tremendously hard to deal with and I have been struggling for some time, mostly with anger as more and more memories emerge, along with more and more anger. My sister too sees herself as a benevolent Mother Superior figure, religious, Christian, unconditionally loving and accepting, praying about everything (especially me!) because it makes her look better to herself. The truth is, she doesn't exist. I have wiped her out. Every few years, too cowardly to do this herself, she yo-yos my brother into checking up on me, making a report.  I suddenly remember the Bob Dylan line from Desolation Row:

"When you asked me how I was doing

Was that some kind of joke?"

Some kind of joke. I know that she hopes for one of two responses:

a) That I'll be a total mess, or dead, in which case she will pretend to grieve and tell herself, well, after all, it was inevitable, wasn't it? In spite of all her fervent prayers and  sincere attempts to help, she knew it was going to happen all along.

b) That I'll be doing well, and she will fly into a fury and say, how can she be so horribly selfish when she tried to destroy the family?

Is there winning here? Does it exist?

Still struggling, but no longer in quicksand - more like an insect emerging from a chrysalis - she writes:

Every once in a while I get piss-angry about all this, and my only solace - hell, it's more of a universe than a solace - is the family I have co-created with my husband of over 40 years, the one Molly said I didn't deserve and attained only through a sort of random lottery win.  (Weirdly, she even killed Rob off once, saying "if anything happens to him I'll help you raise the children" - co-opting them at the same time.) I even married into a relatively sane and basically benevolent, loving family who does not drink or use or molest little girls. I am their kin now in every way but blood.

It's not supposed to happen that way, it's the exception, causing my sister to say, no doubt, "Well, you see, nothing happened! Your childhood was fine. Everybody loved you. In fact, they loved you more than you deserved."

Get a big pair of scissors, please. Pinocchio's strings are cut.

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

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

CA-A-A-ALL for Superchicken!

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These are my first serious gifs of 2014 (under a very loose definition of  "serious"). I started thinking that YouTube must have a lot of very tasty cartoon openings from my youth, but I was disappointed to find that they were either missing, or piss-poor. I couldn't find the original Hoppity Hooper where the frog jumps all over the place, and others didn't even have proper theme songs, if I could find them at all. Many had been taken down: I remember a superb Clyde Crashcup cartoon where Clyde and Leonardo travel to Egypt, and now it's just in Nowheresville. I did find Twinkles the Elephant, but it was a travesty, all of 90 seconds long, with about as much animation as Clutch Cargo. Static is no word for it.

But I DID find Super Chicken!

I remember being crazy about this theme song with its rapid-fire delivery and clever lyrics. I even have a video of Jerry Seinfeld doing this song in front of a bunch of baffled TV executives.

It's not quite as effective without the lyrics (and maybe I should scare them up - excuse me a minute - oh, the internet is wonderful - )

The Super Chicken Theme Lyrics

When you find yourself in danger,
When you're threatened by a stranger,
When it looks like you will take a lickin',
(buk, buk, buk, buk)

There is someone waiting,
Who will hurry up and rescue you,
just Call for Super Chicken!
(buk, ACK!)

Fred, if you're afraid you'll have to overlook it,
Besides you knew the job was dangerous when you took it
(buk, ack!)

He will drink his super sauce
And throw the bad guys for a loss
And he will bring them in alive and kickin'
(buk, buk, buk, buk)

There is one thing you should learn
When there is no one else to turn to
Call for Super Chicken!
(buk, buk, buk, buk)
Call for Super Chicken!
(buk, ACK!) 

This is my other find, and in superb shape. Who could forget Tennessee Tuxedo, with Don Adams in the role he was born to play: not Maxwell Smart, but a penguin. The walrus sidekick Chumleigh was a nice touch, along with the guy hunting them with a rifle (was that Commander McBragg or what?). The theme song was the best: "Come on and see, see, see, Tennessee Tuxedo. . ." Yes, Tennessee Tuxedo and his "tales".

If these cartoons have a similar flavor to them, that's because they were all cranked out (inexpensively - can't you tell?) by the same animators, Jay Ward and Bill Scott, who did Rocky and Bullwinkle. Back then you didn't have to spend much to make wildly popular cartoons, as witness Hanna-Barbera and their primitive creations. In addition to the Flintstones, Jetsons and the immortal Scooby-Doo, H-B also pumped out  Adam Ant, Secret Squirrel, Auggie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Lippy the Lion and Hardy-har-har, Snooper and Blabber, Yakky Doodle, Ricochet Rabbit, Punkin Puss and Mushmouse, and let's not forget "that gorilla in the window", Magilla.)

Frustrated in my attempts to reproduce the gloriously cheap cartoons of my youth with gifs, I had to reach farther back, and blacker-and-whiter too. There used to be a show that came on, oh, "whenever", sort of like My Friend Flicka which literally made my heart pound, I loved it so much. This was a British thing called Tales of the Riverbank, a loose ripoff of The Wind in the Willows, that kept playing endlessly in Canada in various guises, at one point called Once Upon a Hamster. It featured a British narrator and a bunch of animals which were given different (all irritating) voices. This appears to be the very first episode, and it's complete in only 13 minutes, so maybe they had two of them in a half-hour. I like the interplay between hamster, and frog, and hamster, and frog, and hamster, and frog. . . In the wild, that frog would have snapped his tongue out and whipped that little vermin into the half-circle of his gaping mouth in less than a second. Maybe it was like people who own an anaconda or something, having to go through a lot of live mice in a week.

ADDENDA: I found the Tennessee Tuxedo lyrics, more complex than I remember, with more verses and even a sort of (gack) philosophy of "learning something new". We do NOT want to learn from cartoons. Period. Ever.

Come on and see see see
Tennessee Tuxedo.
See see see
Tennessee Tuxedo.
He will be
Parachuting for you pleasure
Sailing seas in search of treasure.
Anything so he can measure
Up to men
That's Tennessee Tuxedo
A small penguin
Who tries but can't succeed-o
Though he may fail
As he vies for fame and glory
Still he tries in each new story tale.
Join along with me
The club of Tennessee
We'll try each day through
To learn something new
To better you and me.
Come on and see see see
Tennessee Tuxedo.
See see see
Tennessee Tuxedo.
Though he may fail
As he vies for fame and glory
Still he tries in each new story tale.
That's Tennesee Tuxedo and his tales

(I realize I have disincluded so many - Don Adams' later, perhaps more famous character, Inspector Gadget; Underdog, voiced by Wally Cox; Linus the Lionhearted, with Sheldon Leonard. . . "and", as they say,"many more". There was even a bizarre sort of sendup of the hamster shows which ran when Caitlin was about five. She would scream with delight whenever it came on (if it came on at all). It was called Tumbletown Tales, starring a very fat cream-colored hamster called Tumbleweed. Old hamster shows never die, they just change form and carry on.)

Prayer of Forgiveness: right or wrong?

And so, another year, this one my birth year, the Year of the Horse. 

It swings around in a very wide arc from 2002, which was actually one of the

 best years of my life.

By 2005, I was at the bottom, on my belly, wondering if I would even survive.

I was never the same after that.

But I am glad I didn't die, as there was more living to do. 

As it turned out. 

But it

 was nothing like before. Now is a shedding, not a gathering up. I cling to

 Ecclesiastes, wondering who wrote it. Mr. Ecclesiastes? These days, the world

 seems to be ruled by that half-assed philosopher, 

Mediocrates.

I came across this on Facebook. I usually hate these things, whatever they're called, Little Cards of Wisdom that tell you what to do. They never suggest: they TELL, just assuming you've got it all wrong and need a lesson. 

But this one stood out. This is one that few people will even approach in a lifetime, and I am not even sure I agree with all of it.

If forgiveness means "it's OK what you did", then I do not forgive. I do not forgive the several men who molested me when I was a child and a teenager. 

If forgiveness means "I don't mind it, I'm over it, it doesn't affect me any more," then I do not forgive.

So what does it mean?

People say it's a  "letting go". If I stay angry, I'll burn the rubber down and run on bald tires (or something). So if I just let go of the memory and the damage and the way it all derailed my life, perhaps permanently, then everything will be OK.

I "should" forgive. I will feel so much better if I do.

This is some sort of psychological/spiritual imperative these days.

I don't know how to do this.

I thought I did.

But then, it has that line in it, "through their own confusions". The men who molested me were having a good time and wanted to grab someone's ass and rub up against me, and it didn't matter if it was the 14-year-old sister of the host of the party. They weren't "confused", they were drunk and lecherous and oblivious to my pain.

If they had it to do over again, they'd still do it, because the fact is, they enjoyed it and were not concerned with how much it might damage me. They did not think of that at all.

So do I forgive them? What does that mean? "It's OK that you very nearly brought about my suicide"? It will never be OK.

What IS OK is that I have a life. 

In spite of an incredible amount of personal pain, 

I have reclaimed it. I don't entirely understand this. I don't want to hate. I feel sorry for those sorry sons-of-bitches. I pity them (and a couple of them are dead), though I also feel considerable contempt.

Feeling sorry for, and feeling pity - are these things closer to "forgiveness", or to "hate"? This may be as far as I ever go on that glorious, impossibly idealized Buddhist path.

(But that last part, well. This is something I need so badly, 

I can't even tell you.)

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Happy New Year, Harold!