Can I retire from life?

This has been brewing for a while, and whether or not anyone wants to “view” it is quite beside the point.

My husband recently retired from a 40-year career as an environmental engineer. This only happened a few weeks ago, and since then it’s like the air slowly being let out of a balloon – not so much into depression as exhausted relief from a stress that has dogged him for years.

Now he’s tinkering, the thing he likes best in the world, fixing things in the garage, contemplating home renovations large and small, taking over all the cooking (to my endless delight – I am SO tired of fixing meals, and he’s a much better cook than me anyway).

And I am looking at myself and wondering. A friend recently quoted an older woman she knows. “They retire. We don’t.” It made me think. It certainly would apply to the old style of marriage where wife waited on husband hand-and-foot. Not being the handmaiden type, I prefer a self-serve husband who heats up his own  beans because I hate the things (and scrape the bean-scum out of that pot while you’re at it).

But still. They retire. We don’t. Or I don’t. Retire from what? From this miasma of desire, this scrambling to try to get a foothold on something that will probably escape me forever?

Like a lot of people, I wanted to be a published author. It too me oh, so long to get there. And I did. Supposedly.

But “published author” is a relative term. It's sort of like saying “I have an income from writing”: which I do, and which I have had since 1984. But if you mention the size of the income (and you’d be surprised how many people ask), all you get is snickers or looks of amazement that you’d put that much effort into something that earns you less than the average paper boy.

I want to quit the whole thing: I want to quit wanting. I want to quit having my work up there, or out there, where brickbats can be thrown at it. I recently was really worked over for something I wrote, and it was not very pleasant. She had a right to feel the way she did, because what I said was wrong and I will always regret it. I did not think it through at all.   I think my attempt at an apology was only poked full of more holes, so I could not win.

This happens, a lot. Not just to me, though I've been reamed out many a time, often for no crime except being visible and expressing an opinion. I've seen commentary that is simply appalling all over the internet, including on YouTube videos of disabled children and babies with terminal deformities. People can be absolute shits, and they’re almost encouraged to be. Ridicule rules the day. It’s easy, because nobody really knows who you are.

The internet and blogs and social networking have changed everything: it’s often said, but never adequately understood. Everything is lived out in public.  As the old Moxy Fruvous song says, “Everyone’s a novelist, and everyone can sing/But no one talks when the TV’s on.” This  all implies a certain amount of exposure. We’re all nude in front of the cameras, folks, in a way that’s making George Orwell turn over in his grave.

So I was laid bare, peeled, not realizing what the full ramifications would be. The worst name I was called during that whole tirade was “amateur”. What does that mean? Is it tied to a certain amount of money? What amount? Is there a minimum? Could it be ANY amount? Or do you really have to earn anything at all?

I want to quit this. Writing is what I do, and it’s hard for me not to do it. Blogging for the most part has been fun, sometimes exhilarating, with very mixed results in the viewing department. I have had thousands, and zeros, and everything in between.

But that’s just the trouble. Views are like “friends” on Facebook. I know people with thousands of “friends”. How is this possible? How would you have time to “meet” all those people and still hold a job, or even attend to your basic bodily functions?

How deep are these friendships, or do they just bump along the surface in a world that sometimes seems like it is ALL surface?

I tend to illustrate my posts, and some like this, and some hate it and think it is stupid. The title of my blog was recently ridiculed:  never mind that the person didn’t get it, that the intentional sentimental irony of it flew right over their head. Misinterpretation rules in the land of bloghood, does it not?

I want to quit. Quit this. Quit it, resign, retire, leave. Walk. I don’t know if I can walk from writing and I don’t know if I can quit blogging, or caring, but I want to. I don’t want to send any more “queries” by mail. I don’t want to get any more stamped self-addressed envelopes in the mail, miserable little things with (usually) form rejections in them, or, once in a while, personal rejections, which are supposed to be better because they're not forms.

It’s great, in fact we think it’s a potential bestseller, but sorry, we can’t publish it because it doesn’t suit our list. 

I’ve let this get to me, haven't I? Yes. I’ve let critics get under my skin. Shame on me.  If I answer critics, I am peevish and hypersensitive and can’t accept a constructive comment. If I don’t, I don’t care or am too snotty to reply. If I apologize for writing something that is out of line, the apology is never enough because I somehow have to reverse time like Superman turning the world backwards in that movie and unwrite what I wrote. Anything less is cause for more jabs in my most tender places.

My so-called career, the thing I feel so ambivalent about and now would like to drop like a whole bag of hammers, is like a balloon just brushing the tips of my fingers. When I try to grab for it, it pops up beyond my reach. Stop trying then, they say. Just let it fall. Then I probably won’t want it anyway.

From worrying about whether I will ever see my work in print again, I QUIT.

From wondering if writing this will make one tinker’s goddamn of a difference to anyone, I QUIT.

From trying to entertain or please, something I had to do to survive as a child, I quit. No more court jester stuff, it’s killing me.

From trying to figure out whether certain other (mostly scarily anonymous) people are human or reptilian, I most definitely quit.

The internet is a no-man’s-land, a bizarre wonderland/wasteland that nobody has figured out yet. It has its exhilarating aspects, connecting with strangers (who could be anybody, by the way, even psychotic killers), getting “support” from other people who are addicted to sniffing Drano or whatever, and glopping up moploads of information from Wikipedia that may or may not have any truth in it at all. Then there are the darker aspects.

People are adopting babies through Facebook, and selling them on eBay. Men look at internet porn at work: even cops (it happened here not long ago, and they got into a spot of trouble). Suddenly it seems like eroticism has become as ugly as a rhinoceros, torn loose and galloping free. Four-year-old girls are being dressed up like prostitutes and encouraged to act like them.  Sometimes I want to bring back corsets, restraint, Sigmund Freud telling us that if libido is ever let loose, society will crumble in a matter of months.

But I digress. My work is now out there where “some” people can “sometimes” see it, and in fact I probably have had more views in a year of blogging than I had readers in 15 years of writing newspaper columns. I am still beavering away, and just getting so tired. Just wanting to throw away something that feels like an arm. You can’t throw your arm away, can you?

I resign from the monster I have created for myself, tugged and pulled by the nasty little bugger we call the internet. I just want to write because I want to write, because I feel like it. It can be as dumb as dirt. I can call it Barbie’s Sparkle-Plenty Pink Plastic Dream House and laugh if people take it literally and call ME stupid.

Wanting to be understood, wanting someone or anyone to "get" you, is the province of adolescence, is it not? But what happens when it never happens, when at the advanced age of (blbblblb) you realize you're never going to be "got" so you might as well get over it?

From wanting too much, from wanting anything at all, I quit, I resign, I fold, I surrender, I submit! Submission is a wonderful thing, is it not? I do it all the time. Just ask my editor.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

As I went out one morning

(Author's note. I'll be damned if I remember writing this, but it has to be mine because I can't find it anywhere else. As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden is perhaps my favorite poem, so maybe it got the juices flowing. In any case, I must have borrowed some imagery here and there. Auden I'm not, but we must wade in.)

As I went out one morning

Walking the primal road

My shoulders were bent over

With an invisible load.

And down by the creek where the salmon

Sing all day in the spring

I heard a man with holes in his clothes

Say, “Love has no ending.”

I wondered at his heresy

He wasn’t supposed to speak

Of things he did not understand

And shouldn’t even seek.

“I love you, Lord, I love you,”

the ragged man proclaimed,

although his face was badly scarred

and his body bent and maimed.

The man was clearly crazy

For as he spoke his rhyme,

The salmon danced in the shallow stream

In fish-determined time.

I didn’t try to love him

But I loved him just the same

For he broke the diver’s quivering bow

And called his God by name.

“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”

I cried in my anguished state,

“What is the secret of the world?

Where is the end of hate?”

And all at once his face had changed

To an evil, ugly mask

His body had become the hate

About which I had asked.

“How stamp this mask into the mud,

How keep despair at bay?”

“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,

“But my God can point the way.”

“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,

When God’s abandoned you?

How dare you use the Holy Name?

He doesn’t want you to!

Your life’s just spent surviving

With the sidewalk as your bed

And taking poisons in your veins

And scrambling to be fed.”

The man just stood in leaves and mulch

While the salmon sang and spawned:

“Just see the other side of me

And tell me I am wrong.”

Another face appeared just then

A face all beaming bright

Its eyes were streaming like the sun

With pure mysterious light

“You blinded fool, you stand before

A drop of mist made rain

An eye that Paradise looks through

That holds both joy and pain.”

“I cannot understand you, for

You play such games with me!

How can you masquerade as God

And tell me how to see?”

“No one knows how Life began,

From Nothing came our birth.

A stir of seething molecules

Sparked all the life on earth.”

“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one

Who made this world come true!

Imposter, get out of my road,

I cannot look at you.”

“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,

“For no one knows the why.

But you will be forever changed

By looking through my eye.”

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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

Perfect rainbow circle over Niagara Falls

No matter how hopeless: Terry Gilliam's mad quest

Terry Gilliam's infamously delayed Don Quixote is finally happening on Amazon, says Terry Gilliam
By Jacob Kastrenakes
on June 11, 2015 12:16 pm

Terry Gilliam really wants to make an adaptation of Don Quixote. He's been trying to get it made since the late ’90s — Variety reports that he's made seven attempts in total — but this latest attempt may finally get it done. At least, a series of reports and quotes from Gilliam suggest as much. And the most surprising part: it may happen thanks to Amazon.

IS IT REALLY ACTUALLY FINALLY TRULY HAPPENING?

Gilliam told Indiewire this week that Amazon is partially funding his adaptation, titled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and that it plans to stream the film following a short run in theaters. Assuming production doesn't go awry again — it can't happen again, right? — this would be a smart grab by Amazon. It might not attract wide attention, but it'll certainly get Amazon credit from cinephiles, which isn't a bad way to kick off its original film program.

There hasn't been an official announcement from Amazon (perhaps it would rather wait, given the film's history), but the story seems to be adding up. Gilliam said back in Augustthat his Don Quixote had funding, and Deadline later reported quite vaguely that he had a deal with Amazon. Now Gilliam is stitching the stories together. There's even been casting news, which at the very least shows that there's real movement here. The film is, once again, supposed to shoot next year. Entertainment Weekly reports that it received confirmation of the news from Amazon.

Perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising that it took a new media company looking to make a name for itself to make this risky, fan-favorite project start heading toward reality again. It's essentially the same strategy Netflix took when it restarted Arrested Development or, to a lesser extent, that Hulu is trying to take with The Mindy Project. It may not appeal to an enormous audience, but it makes people pay attention.

GILLIAM'S QUIXOTE HAS HAD AN UNFORTUNATE HISTORY

And Gilliam fans have certainly been paying attention to the long and strange journey that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has taken on its way to the screen. In the late ’90s, Gilliam began work on the project and eventually started filming, in 2000, with Johnny Depp in the lead role. A series of issues, including flash floods that destroyed sets, quickly caused production to shut down. Since then, Gilliam has tried unsuccessfully to get the movie going again with different actors. Now, even the script is different.

"I keep incorporating my own life into it and shifting it," Gilliam told The Wrap in August. "The basic underlying premise of the version Johnny was involved in was that he actually was going to be transported back to the 17th century, and now it all takes place now, it’s contemporary. It’s more about how movies can damage people." Basically, it sounds like the story is going meta and incorporating history of the failed Don Quixote into the newDon Quixote. Hopefully we'll all be watching it on Amazon next year.

SOURCE INDIEWIRE

If you'd like to hear Richard Kiley's majestic performance of The Impossible Dream, start the video at 7:00. This was one of those things that doesn't happen any more: a 10-minute chunk of live theatre presented on The Ed Sullivan Show, uncut and uninterrupted. Kiley's performance here far surpasses the many studio versions, since his voice is actually not at its best (no doubt they'd already done a matinee performance that day) but slightly rough around the edges. Like any great singer, he decided to use it rather than fight it, giving him a heartbreaking catch in his voice in a few places, as if he is about to weep. The makeup seems overdone mainly because they're probably still in makeup from the matinee performance, and the facial expressions are exaggerated but would look fine from the audience. This is theatre, people.

And to Terry: FOLLOW THAT STAR!

Narcissists on parade: come on and suck my blood!

Though it did not make me happy and sometimes made me feel downright guilty, I had to cut out a lot of dead wood this year that was becoming oppressive. Denial suffocates me, and of course, deniers deny the denial and turn it around and make it YOUR fault.

There is a lot on the internet now about narcissism, which used to be called, “Oh, isn’t he good-looking!” The perpetrator would slide by on his good looks like a used car saleman rolling back the odometer. Everyone would ooh and ahh and clasp their hands in approval, then wonder where all their money went, or even where their spouse went.  But all this still goes on, vastly amped up by the internet.

Yesterday on the news, I saw yet another story about an attractive, accomplished, well-off woman falling “head over heels” with someone she “met” on a dating site. She had never actually MET him, of course, but that didn’t matter. He sent her photos on Instagram, didn't he? Actually meeting someone in the flesh isn’t a priority these days, because everyone carefully constructs their own image, which seems to be enough to convince people. By some magic of fiscal seduction he wangled away a quarter of a million dollars she had salted away to look after herself and her ageing mother. He sucked it away and disappeared and went on to the next attractive, accomplished, well-off victim.

My psychiatrist (yes, I see one! Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!) once talked for an hour about narcissism, and my eyes were hanging out of their sockets like those trick eyeballs on springs. It was a perfect description of my older sister, for one thing, who always left you with the unpleasant feeling that you had somehow shortchanged her or let her down, while garnering enormous admiration for herself (she thought) by inflating herself like a grotesque balloon. I am still sorting out, or trying to, how toxic that was for me and how much damage it did. 

But back to the main story. There was a movie called Catfish - I just looked it up and reeled at the fact that it came out FIFTEEN years ago! - all about the phenomenon of the phony, narcissistic lure which has grown like a malignancy, affecting women in ways that make me scratch my head. Are people THAT desperate for companionship that they fall “head over heels” for someone who doesn’t really exist except as some sort of heartless parasite? Evidently. Personality disorders thrive in the strange world of the internet, because you can always manage and foster the impression you are giving, hold the mask up, and if that one gets you in trouble, hold ANOTHER mask up to dupe yet another lonely person.

I constantly wonder how this can be. Once Caitlin and I played a hilarious game based on a news story we had seen. A heartless, manipulative man somehow found out about an elderly woman who had not seen her son in a very long time. He phoned her up and said, "Hi, Mom! It's Johnny!" Mom was over the moon, even though she said at one point, "But you sound so different." She ended up wiring him thousands of dollars before someone intervened. Caitlin and I took turns over the phone being the elderly woman and the son, our scams getting more and more outlandish until we were literally rolling on the floor laughing. By the way, at the time, Caitlin was TEN YEARS OLD.

But there’s another side to all this, the narcissist who seems humble or even downtrodden. This is an exquisite form of parasitic behaviour with many evil twists and turns. It's the person who used to exist and has been so eroded by the unfairness of life that just being in the same room with her is completely exhausting and depressing. I call this the “how could you?” model, the one who acts so downtrodden that you dare not say anything to criticize her.  This is usually someone who has buried her ambitions like a corpse, then spends the rest of her life fuming, fuming, fuming over people she hates (but is usually poisonously polite to) who are morally corrupt and doing everything wrong.

Of course she has a gigantic hole at the core, as every narcissist does, which needs constant filling and refilling from others to keep her from feeling dead. Which means that part of the friendship contract (which is never spelled out and which never changes) is that you must constantly build her up to shore up that rotten or non-existent self-esteem. Her traumatic background seals the deal: how could you not be sympathetic to her after the kind of childhood she suffered? (I have come to be wary of any statement or thought that contains the words "how could you?"). 

She is a misunderstood, "good" person, of course, no one appreciates her, and your job is to keep pouring it in and pouring it in like booze into an alcoholic, while it all steadily pours out the bottom. Whatever narcissists have that keeps them manipulating like that, it's never genuine self-esteem, or they wouldn't need to suck so hard.  As Bob Dylan once sardonically wrote, no doubt describing the malignant trappings of fame, "Show me someone who's not a parasite/And I'll go out and say a prayer for him."

The things everyone is doing wrong are the same things SHE does, of course, and far worse, but rather than take responsibility, she turns it around and fumes and fumes. And fumes. And fumes. It never bursts into honest flames but smolders like a shit fire underground. The smoke goes up your nostrils and kills you with its reeking toxicity, but you dare not complain or you are being a traitor and inexplicably disloyal. What has SHE ever done? Nothing! But that’s just the trouble. Too many people shove away their real dreams and ambitions, letting them rot while they insist they never wanted them in the first place, and complain about everyone else's worthless success. The downtrodden have the most hyperinflated egos of anyone I know.

It’s getting harder and harder to find someone who WILL burst into honest flames and be straight with me. I don’t expect them to be any more perfect at it than I am. But please, PLEASE do not try to con me, swindle me with a cry for pity, apologize in a way that feels about as authentic as the proverbial $3 bill, and ask me to pour gallons of my own precious energy down a bottomless hole that you will never acknowledge because you are too busy soliciting even more sympathy and complaining about everyone else. No thanks, that’s over now. Am I lonely? Who cares. It’s a cleaner loneliness, because in spite of having to pay a price I never anticipated, I am no longer buried up to the chin in shit.

The girl on the clock: Harold is everywhere

One of the strangest manifestations of the iconic Harold Lloyd clock-dangling scene: Sofia Vergara selling "eesy, greesy, be-yood-iful" Cover Girl makeup.

When this ad first came out, I thought I was going completely crazy. I was seeing Harold Lloyd everywhere. It was a Sign. Now I just think I was going completely crazy.

But we had a nice run, Harold - didn't we?

Americans Review Japanese Beauty Products

The awful grace of God

Taekwondo Fighting: Ryan earns his green belt!

 

. . . and let's watch that again in slo-mo!

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine

Bentley-kins

Sweet Bentley. We've had him for just three months, but already he's one of us, and we can't imagine the household without him.

Christian ventriloquists: better than bad

Since those strange and tawdry days of Charlie McCarthy and (shudder) Jerry Mahoney, ventriloquism seems to have gone underground. It still shows up  on novelty shows like America's Got Talent (or Britain, or Ukraine, or Mongolia or wherever), an update of the old vaudeville show glorified in the '60s by Ed Sullivan.

Though the ultimate ventriloquist was Senor Wencez with his "hand puppet" (literally, a puppet made out of his hand, which is a device that still delights toddlers), I found a particularly juicy sub-genre of the art in Christian ventriloquism. Perhaps dogma sounds better coming out of the mechanical mouth of a wood-carven mutant.

Most of these poses are from record albums that enjoyed huge popularity (I nearly said "pup-ularity") in the 1950s and '60s. No doubt these were small labels, for how else would "Do You Know Jesus?" starring Uncle Les and Aunt Nancy Wheeler (Featuring Randy) find an audience?  Quite a few of these acts proclaim family relationships, mostly uncles and aunts who somehow produced a ball-jointed wooden robot with their contribution of DNA. And I have never been able to figure out how it is that a ventriloquist's dummy would work on a record album. It wouldn't matter if you moved your lips, for sure.

I can't help but notice that all these dummies look suspiciously alike. Creepy, I mean. That mausoleum look on the puppeteer's face is mighty strange, as if she's taking a day off from Madame Tussaud's. Both dummy and "manipulator" (the technically-correct term) seem to have the same hairdresser. (By the way, like harness-makers in the early 20th century, did the dummy-maker go into decline when audiences became more sophisticated? Or did they all flee to Bible camp?)

Then we have squicky little Marcy, who has so many albums that I had to pare it down to a couple. I can imagine she had a squeaky irritating voice as she prattled on about Jesus and salvation. The manipulator has perfect helmet-like Mary Tyler Moore hair, placing this somewhere in the early 1960s. I wonder if these records were discounted at Bible camp. I know they still show up in garage sales and thrift shops, eagerly snarfed up by collectors, else why would we be enjoying this display right now?

Marcy sings some more. Yikes. We see her standing up here, which is odd for a dummy, but I'm not sure the puppeteer has so much skill as to make her mouth move without any physical contact. That WOULD be squicky, if not downright supernatural.

Obviously a bargain basement record, with an incomprehensible cover. Why is it that all these things exude so much guilt? I guess because that's what religion is all about. There are many red arrows that say "AND" on them, and many grainy b + w photos of dummies, plus choirs. And, as it says in the upper left corner, it is all FUN.

Maybe the ick factor never even occurred to anyone back then, but the thought of Uncle "D" with a girl on one knee and a boy on the other, a huge Bible in front of them and stained glass in the background is alarming today. The "D" seems to indicate a suspicious anonymity, like something from an AA meeting where people are afraid to give their last name.

Oh, rapture! Grace and Wilbur Thrush have a whole family of gaudy dum-dums, not to mention furries such as you'd see in one of those bizarre conventions (and you can't tell ME that funny business doesn't go on in those). What's that on the left, a chess game? I'll have to blow this one up and try to get the details.

Woah.

This is a very odd kind of biker ventriloquist act, with Butch and Suzi (both girls, I assume) sitting on Maralee Dawn's lap. This is an obvious pseudonym to hide her Angel Mama past. They all sit precariously atop a cardboard-cutout Harley, with the caption Featuring The Country Ridin' Preacher, which I won't even try to explain.

It's Sunday School pageant time, with a man dressed in his wife's bathrobe and a kitchen towel. His little disciple is no doubt meant to represent a shepherd boy of some sort. The title is hard to read, but it goes (as they say) something like this: Dan Butler and Louie tell the Bible Classics, Volume III.

No shit, VOLUME III! Volumes I and II must've been hot sellers at Bible camp, or maybe they gave them away free. I must try to track some of these down on YouTube. I need some religion about now to salvage this bizarre day before it sinks in a quagmire of wretched depravity.

I've saved the best until last: the inimitable Erick on the Rainbow label, which (believe me) does not mean the same thing now as it did then. Or maybe it did, who knows. Erick's routine is called Pastor Pickin', which sounds so sinister I don't want to go into it. 

My personal favorite. The seeming eroticism of this, the way their foreheads touch, the way they lean into each other, suggests a love that dares not speak its name, because it's not just interspecies, it's - well, what DO you call having a thing for a ventriloquist's dummy? I'm not sure there is even a word for it. It took me quite a while to realize that Erick and his manipulator Beverly Massagee are PRAYING together, that's all. I mean it. And it's on the Rainbow Label, too.

Psycho cycad

It started at Home Depot. No, it started in Hawaii, actually, when I saw a cycad the size of a barrel and became enchanted. It was the most primitive plant I had ever seen, with a prehistoric look to it. It had emitted a clusters of seeds, pink beanlike things that were just sitting there in the middle of it, so I took a handful of them, hoping to take them home and grow my own monster cycad. I left the seeds in the hotel refrigerator. Good thing, I might have been arrested for smuggling.

THEN came the Home Depot part. Amazingly, a couple of weeks ago I saw a cycad in a pot, about the size of a small pineapple. It had short thick spiky leaves and a whole lot of spiky things in the middle, about 3 inches tall. I thought it would probably die within a few weeks due to the wretched light in our house.

Almost immediately, the sucker began to grow. And grow, And GROW. These insane-looking, militant-looking frondlike things shot up out of the middle of it, at a rate of about two inches a day. They splayed all over the place and I had to keep moving the plant because it outgrew the space it was in. My cat is afraid of it and refuses to even sniff it.

I don't know what all this is leading to. I have a grapefruit tree growing in the front room (visible in the top left-hand corner of these photos) which I started growing in Hinton, Alberta, so far north that it gets dark at 3 p.m. in winter, with temperatures of minus 40 C. It began as a seed in my morning grapefruit THIRTY years ago, and today presides over the entire room. Some years it blooms modestly, with perhaps one small cluster of white flowers that drench the room with honeysuckle scent, and one year it presented me with one perfect, pea-sized grapefruit. It has gone through cycles of dying over and over again, losing most of its leaves, but then it will resurrect and put out a new branch that grows at least four or five inches a week. If you were patient enough, I think you could sit there and actually watch it grow.

I am afraid of this plant. I feel like Morticia Addams feeding that carnivorous thing she kept in the greenhouse alongside the dead-headed roses. I don't know what it eats, actually. Has anybody seen the cat?