Horror show: what it's really like to be sick

 

I’ve been reluctant to write in any detail about the medical “issues” I have endured over the past 6 months or so (actually, it goes back to November – so it’s more like 8 months). I swear I didn’t realize something was seriously wrong until a week or so after Halloween, when I suddenly felt an agonizing pain in my lower abdomen on the right side. From everything I have ever heard about appendicitis, I assumed that was what it was, so I  finally caved and went in to Emergency, knowing it would be an almost-worse ordeal.

And it was. THREE HOURS LATER, after sitting there twisting and writhing in agony (hey, I could have done that at home!), the hospital staff finally got around to me – took some blood, poked around, then suddenly wanted to do a CT scan. This surprised me, as you usually have to wait months for one. 

Then suddenly, things changed.

A nurse came up to me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very serious voice said, “Margaret, you have an infection.” Infection? Of what kind, and how? I’d never heard of an infection brewing in an otherwise healthy bowel.

But no, my bowel wasn’t healthy at all, or at least it didn’t look good on the scan. They let me have a copy of the report, and they shouldn’t have. It was mostly technical gobbledygook, but I did see one word that jumped out at me in 3D: MALIGNANCY.

What it said was, “underlying malignancy must be ruled out”. Ruled out?

They kept me overnight, another shock, and then I was fast-tracked for all sorts of things. Almost right away, I saw a gastroenterologist, then had  an “emergency colonoscopy”, which was messy, agonizing and frightening (nothing like the previous ones I'd had). I seemed to be bleeding from somewhere deep inside. Then, on Christmas Day (Christmas Day?), I got a phone call giving me a date for another CT scan. The scan took place on New Years’ Eve. Needless to say, the festive season wasn’t very festive, and I remember feeling rotten on Christmas Day and trying to act normal, so as not to bring the whole family down. 

Then came the surgery. Jesus God, the surgery! I can’t or won’t go into all the details, because half the time I didn’t even know what was going on or what was happening to me. This upset my kids, who seemed to think I was deliberately withholding information from them. But I was on so  many painkillers that I was barely coherent. They had apparently removed about a quarter of my colon and reconfigured my entire gut, but fortunately, since it was done laparoscopically, all I had were two little incisions held together with surgical glue. 

Quite  literally, I was glued together.

The surgeon initially told me I’d  be in the hospital 2 to 5 days. Instead it was nearly 2 weeks. I had no bowel control. The pain meds didn’t work. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I threw up constantly, even if I hadn't eaten anything at all. I had to use a walker just to get to the bathroom, and I usually didn't make it in time.

It was a hospital stay, in other words, but going home was worse in some ways. I had to camp downstairs on the pullout bed – couldn't do stairs, could not even get to the bathroom under my own steam. Having to use a walker made me believe I was now officially in Old Ladyhood. Or was it worse than that?

Since then it’s been one test, one specialist, one procedure after another. I thought I’d be out of the woods by now, but no. The surgeon revealed that had they not removed the diseased tissue, it almost certainly would have turned cancerous (that “underlying malignancy”) within  a year. I really didn’t feel much better, and had it not been for uplifting visits from my grandchildren (bearing flowers, handmade cards and even Purdy’s chocolates), I don’t know how I would have gotten through it. Like angels, they descended on the house with cheery messages, sitting on the pullout bed and gossiping and just being kids. I wanted to join them, as they were clearly in  the land of the living.

But much of the time I felt suicidal, I really did, and my poor 80-year-old husband had to wait on me hand and foot, which with his own mobility problems he could barely manage. I wasn’t cheerful. I kept saying unacceptable things like, “I think I’m going to DIE!” This went on for weeks and weeks. At a followup appointment, the surgeon told me that full recovery might take six months to a year.

Since then, this has actually come to be good news, giving me more time to feel rotten without worrying that I might never recover.

There were so many low points and bizarre happenings. “They” found a spot on my lung during a supposedly routine x-ray, which made me wonder if I had somehow become tubercular. They did more blood tests, and kept finding more and more things wrong.

The spot on my lung was just the beginning. My kidneys were out of whack, there was something wrong with my thyroid gland, and I had to see a hematologist (blood  doctor? Much as I love Dracula, this was not good news.) I had an ultrasound, both kidneys and thyroid, leaving me bruised and worried. I had to wonder: am I really that messed up, or is all this being done out of an abundance of caution (or because I’m 71)?

Bits of traumatic memory from the hospital keep repeating in my head, and in my dreams: being rushed down a dark hallway on a gurney; being told I needed an emergency blood transfusion (!); having a nurse lean over me and saying, “Let’s hope this is the turning point.” Having a disgusting nasal tube shoved down into my stomach for days on end, so my intestines could have a "nice rest".Then another medical person came in and talked to me about my lung, but it made no sense to me at all. My LUNG?

But the worst of the worst of the worst was when they showed me how to use a colostomy bag. Yes. It got that bad.

I have never had serious  surgery in my life, and am wondering, if I need to go through all this again, if it might be better if I just died. I have slowly gotten more  and more of myself back, but since I already had severe arthritis in my spine and hip (on the right side, of course, where the surgery took place), osteoporosis, and – worst of all – sciatica, I'm still not exactly comfortable in my own skin. And lying flat on my back for weeks on end put pressure on the worst possible place, thus activating these various sources of agony as never before.

So where am I now? I wasn’t going to “share” much of this, as nothing is more tiresome than an old person going on and on about their surgical nightmares. But for God’s sake, why do I have this ability to write so well (and hey, if I didn’t think I wrote well, why would I have devoted my life to it?) – is it just  for entertainment, or is it there to save my life in a while ‘nother way?

So this is a more detailed account, which I do not think anyone will be interested in reading anyway. Why do I bother? I”ve been carrying all this around for eight months, and trying to minimize the ordeal for the sake of my worried family. I’m no longer screaming at my poor  husband, and he’s no longer having to carry trays of food to me or help me out of bed so I can use the walker. I no longer need to wear Depends so I won’t crap all over myself. But how am I spiritually? Emotionally?

Changed, changed utterly, as Yeats used to say. I don’t know where I am, these days, as suddenly everything is "different". I lost ten pounds during this whole ordeal, and – realizing if I got sick again my weight might plummet dangerously – I set myself the task of gaining it back. THAT was another weird thing in itself. All my life I have fought my weight, thinking I was obese at 130 pounds (and brainwashed by a culture that was pre-body-positivity and horribly obsessed with being thin). I had to force myself to eat, because nausea was one of the most  debilitating things I was facing. And I had to flip everything over, and everything I had tried to do for my entire life had to be reversed so that I could GAIN weight. No, HAVE the candy! HAVE the chips! Whatever would make me fatter. (As my idol Weird Al would say: "Eat it! Just eat it!")

It was Bizarro-land, in so  many ways, a chronically-well person having to live in the Land of the Sick. Though I appear to have dodged the cancer bullet, there are no guarantees, given how my kidneys, thyroid and blood seem to still be out of whack. And if cancer WAS brewing in my colon, it could recur, and this  time I really WOULD need the colostomy bag. Why else would they have shown me how to use it?

I don’t want to edit this or add clever pictures or whatever I usually do. I probably shouldn’t post it at all, but I am beginning to see why old people talk about their medical ordeals. They’re lonely, and they’re scared, and they wonder what sort of macabre death scene they may be heading towards.

One of the worst things about getting old, for me, has been watching as my most cherished loved ones are taken from me, one by one. FOUR close friends died in the space of two years: cancer, stroke, suicide. My sister-in-law, always in the full bloom of health, died horribly of cancer and was down to 80 pounds at the end. I will never see these people again, and I can’t just run out and “make new friends”. It was hard enough feeding and nurturing these relationships over decades, but trying to start all over again seems impossible.

What keeps me going now is my spirituality, but it is nothing like what I experienced before. My "god" is the life force itself, manifested by nature in all its multifaceted glory, particularly in the form of birds. Not just the backyard variety, but in tiny ducklings peeping and cheeping, Canada geese hissing at me, and a glorious blue heron, its enormous wingspan owning the sky. All of which I saw just this afternoon. By the way, Sky Daddy, as he is sometimes called, is no longer my guiding force, and any thought of attending a church makes me shudder. I’ll be there soon enough at my memorial service.

And, by the way, as I lay flat on my back on the pullout bed, I planned my memorial down to the location (the dock at Burnaby Lake, where the birds are at their most sublime) and the songs I wanted (three of Bob Dylan's spirituals: Death is  Not the End, Every Grain of Sand, and I’ve Made up my Mind to Give Myself to You). At one point, half in a fever dream, I became convinced no one cared about me, nor had anyone ever cared about me in any meaningful way at all. This anguish just came up out of nowhere and overwhelmed me. And at  one point I wrote  a suicide note before tearing it up, not wanting to upset the family.

I wish I could  share better news, and today went OK, so if today goes OK, I have to be content with that.  And that’s about it, that’s the report to date. I can coast a bit  now, until I have more surgery (thyroid biopsy) in October. Then the hemotologist, no doubt wrapped in a Dracula cape like Bela Lugosi.

Can I breathe now? I’d better keep  going, and not look  back – because something might be gaining on me.

(The photo is a shot of  me at eight years old, on vacation at Bondi resort in Muskoka, with a baby kingbird perched on my finger. I have no idea how I got a wild bird to stay on my hand! This image was the cover photo for my second novel, Mallory.)

Mushmouthed English: Why does everyone sound like Sean Connery now?

 

Why can’t anyone talk anymore? Am I being such a grammatical fussbudget? Not if I hear the language twisted into a corkscrew every day. First it was vocal fry, which is about as pleasant to listen to as fingernails on a blackboard (and WHY did young women suddenly decide to croaaaaak at the end of each sentence? Is there a club?) The total mangling of the word “lay” is another one: “He was just laying there.” This has become so standardized that if you say “lying”, people will “correct” you (and how I hate being corrected to the wrong one!). Now I’m hearing something new: a “str” sound comes out “SHTR”. This mushmouthed version crops up everywhere now, so that people sound like Sean Connery: shtrait, shtrong, shtart, shtrain, shtrive, and on and on. It has become standardized from sheer useage. These things sooner or later worm their way into the dictionary as “correct".

I hear this mostly in the young, of course, and mostly online, but it's also cropping up on TV talk shows - and, sooner or later, news anchors, weather people, etc. etc. (teachers?) will begin to use it as standard due to sheer familiarity - hearing it and, I guess, unconsciously mimicking it. Or not? It's like a disease, to my ears. And, of course, once you notice it, you  seem to hear it everywhere.

So how can the English language be warped and twisted that way? I once heard a recording of "old English", and it sounded more Germanic than anything else. Middle English is still pretty squashy. I studied Chaucer once in a literature course, and though I needed Coles notes to translate it for me, our prof was proficient at reciting the Canterbury Tales, the syllables rolling out of him as majestically as a hammy Shakespearean actor.

Not only that. Shakespearean English wasn't like standard English at all. It was more like "pirate talk", full of errs and arrs. Not sure how they found that out, unless someone time-travelled with a recording device.

But I'm still miffed. English developed very slowly over centuries, but this stuff has happened seemingly overnight. The internet is a great source of contagion, whether conscious or otherwise, so the whole process is enormously sped up.

Or something. But I'm shtarting to feel very shtrongly about it. And to be shtrictly annoyed. 

Today, all I want to do is watch 7 hours of drive-in intermission shorts!

Oh yes! Escapism at its finest. Given my medical status (THREE appointments with specialists in the next few months, not to mention multiple lab visits - can't I just leave them a pint of my blood and be done with it??), I need a distraction, and these jerky old things work perfectly. Surrealism at its finest! I never went to too many drive-in movies, and now they're pretty much obsolete (though there was talk of reviving them during the pandemic). You could eat, talk, and (best of all) smoke in the comfort of your own car, with the dog slobbering all over you, the baby crying, the kids whining for snacks, etc. etc. The movie was the least of it.

I see a lot of nostalgia in the YouTube comments sections, as if the '80s and '90s were a kind of paradise (though everyone griped about it back then, and were nostalgic for the '50s and '60s). It's a kind of yearning for a simpler time, which of course it wasn't. Just different. But I never go to ANY movies now, as all I see is the 55th iteration of Superman (GOD not again!) and other stupid, soulless, mass-produced superhero and gaming movies. I used to go to a movie a week back in the '90s, and I'd say 80% of them were watchable, and even if they weren't, I'd get an extra-large popcorn with extra "golden topping", and just stuff my face. Such bliss! 

BETRAYED: A Story of Religious Abuse

This little clip from YouTube claims to be a story of fraud, betrayal and abuse of power. And ironically, it turned out that way after all. 

This trailer for a movie called BELONG is all that exists of that particular feature film. The pastor seen in this clip is one Modise Molefe, the minister of my former church in 2002. Though a new ministry was seen as a marvelous fresh start (and look, we hired a black minister!), it was only many months later we discovered he had been "dismissed" from his former ministry by the larger body of the church. No details were released in order to protect the privacy of the ex-clergy, and it worked. 

Within a couple of months of starting his ministry, things went alarmingly south. It wasn't just his questionable financial dealings, it was the way he shouted at committee members, somehow set them against each other so nothing could happen, and railed at us about our spiritual deficiencies on Sunday morning. Then there was that little matter of the young woman he took advantage of, claiming he was going to leave his wife and kids and start a great new ministry with her. (None of it happened, thank the Lord.)

The result of not knowing anything about his past is that we felt alone with the chaos, and (as he kept telling us) somehow responsible for it. We had to try to chop our way through the incredible wilderness of fraud, damage and shattered trust he had created in a stable, longstanding congregation in just a few months.
When the whole thing finally blew up and the larger body of the church investigated and then "dismissed" him (sound familiar?), the congregation floundered badly after that, and never did recover. 

His "movie" came years later, and I remember he hyped it very hard, making an announcement stating that it was to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival (except for one little detail: it didn't exist!) .
He made several trailers for it, with different titles according to what he saw as trendy at the time. As you can see from the clip, he had a ready explanation for the disaster of his ministry: his African culture had been cruelly rejected by a bunch of comfortable, well-off white people! We did, for the most part, fit that last description, but what dismays me even more is the fact that what happened to us is hardly rare. It's just that no one talks about it, seemingly embarrassed about the fact that they had been "taken". Or, are they protecting certain people, and not others?

But this sort of spiritual abuse is so common now that I seem to see it every day: religious corruption in one form or another. And it is particularly bruising when it happens, not on the stage of a massive megachurch, but within the walls of a very small church which was looking forward to a fresh start in their ministry, and instead were permanently disabled and never found their way back.

Bless him! Damn him! It's Elmer Gantry

Though this started off paranthetical, I want to devote a whole post to yet another movie I re-watched for the first time in at least 30 years - Burt Lancaster's brilliant tour-de-force as a creepy, fake evangelist in Elmer Gantry. Not only did this movie exceed all my extremely high expectations, but I think I had goosebumps for a solid two hours, not just because of the electrifyingly charismatic (and sexy) main character but because every single performance in this thing was so note-perfect, with NOT ONE miscast actor even in the smallest role. Even the characters with no speaking parts were anything but furniture - they all knew what they were supposed to be doing as part of the scene. The directing was tight and dynamic, the music as fierce and compelling as Lancaster himself, and the script - let's just say it all worked.

It worked for me personally because since the last time I saw it in the '90s, I lived through a horrible church scandal in which the congregation completely fell for a charismatic fake who basically destroyed the foundations of the church in a single year. And he wasn't even sexy like Burt! But it was more than that. Gantry was not just a shallow creep. Lancaster knew how to act using his eyes, his hands and face and voice, and at times he expressed a real tenderness towards Sister Sharon and even the prostitute who tried to frame him. Gantry had levels. He had wanted to be a minister of the Gospel himself, and failed due to his inability to live within the rules. So was it really coincidence that drew him back to the revival tent? Why did he fall so hard for Sister Sharon, literally at first sight? In some part of himself, did he think he could start all over again, and this time get it right? There was more than a trace of conscience in Gantry, and even though he was practiced in ignoring it, we could see it peeping through. How the hell did he manage that?

His internal conflicts, no matter how submerged, were somehow communicated. If this seething moral unease hasn't been settled in Gantry's mind, how can we make up our own minds about him? We can't, and that is what makes his character so compelling. We can't hate him. Sometimes we're rooting for him, as when he slides down the church aisle as if stealing third base. In the first 15 minutes, he makes Jean Simmons laugh in a slightly shocking way - raucous, unihibited, followed by the incredible line, "You smell like a real man." So there is a subtext of sexual attraction between them from the get-go. Wasn't this just a little bit provocative for those times?

Adding an even darker subtext is Sister's later confession to Gantry that her Sharon Falconer persona is a complete invention, and that her real name is "Katy Jones from Shantytown". But was this a real confession, or a strange kind of identification, one fraud acknowledging another? She does clarify that she is different from Gantry in that "I believe. I really believe!" But there are moments in Lancaster's flat-out-brilliant portrayal when we see the shreds and tatters of his former faith, somehow communicated in the way only a genius actor can. The theme of religious spectacle is being held up for scrutiny here, and the audience is left to decide for  themselves how sincere any of it is.

There's stuff going on here, so layered, so levelled and striated, that we can't possibly take it all in. I could watch it ten more times and still have goose bumps. Gantry was made in 1960, and received all the accolades it could possibly receive, including an Oscar for Lancaster, who claimed that Gantry was really just a version of himself. That does NOT mean it was an easy role to play - playing yourself can be excruciating, as Marlon Brando was to discover when he publicly gutted himself in Last Tango in Paris. He needed to go into therapy to recover.



True, they don't make them like that any more, and I am not the only one who feels this way. Can I name even one actor who comes close to Simmons or Lancaster, not to mention poor old Monty Clift? Even 30 years ago, real acting genius was disappearing, replaced by the cult of personality. The problem is, you can't smell an actor any more, because no one has the chops. Which is why I have pretty much stopped going to the movies, and why I keep on tuning in to Turner Classics to see pictures which SURELY won't be as superb as I remember. Or not? In this case, Elmer Gantry was like the scene at the very beginning, in which Sister Sharon sees a shooting star - blazing and all too fleeting, but burned into your eyelids through sheer incandescence.

When a good movie turns bad: how many times is this going to happen?

Having come out the other side of The Roosevelts and Taxi  Driver, I'm finding most of my movie nostalgia trips are disappointing. I finally got around to watching Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (triggered by my re-post of the poetic tribute to my good pal Marty). I remember seeing it in the mid-90s, back when I used to go to a movie a week, often commuting into Vancouver if I thought it was worthwhile. And I do rememver loving it, or at least finding it intriguing. It's based on an Edith Wharton novel which is, in essence, about social snobbery and intrigue in 1870s New York. Daniel Day Lewis was in his heyday then, and apparently could do no wrong, for he played a frustrated lover who could not connect sexually with the free-spirited Michelle Pfeiffer because he was already married to an appropriately dull blueblood (Winona Ryder).

It's a period piece, of course, but it's all very  '90s, and even though it was meant to represent deepest antiquity, it just felt dated. For one thing, Day Lewis was probably way more boring than Winona, who actually came across as the most subtle, best-realized character. Michelle Pfeiffer was so unappealing, not just physically unattractive but abrasive and particularly un-charming and un-seductive, that the whole thing just didn't come off, any more than her tight Victorian corset and elbow-length gloves were going to come off.

I hate to have to say it, but I'll say it - Day Lewis came across as so passive and repressed that he bored me to tears. You can overdo the repressed thing to the point of coma. He even seemed effeminate to  me, a word we aren't supposed to use any more - but what I mean is, there was absolutely zero sexual spark between the  two of them. Nothing. Pfeiffer seemed cold and superficial, her flirting seemed like an actual effort (I got so sick of her thrusting her hand out at men so they were forced to kiss it), and if Day Lewis would JUST get that moony-calf look off his face. . . Was there any sexual tension there at all? Did there need to be? 

Well, yes. It's called acting. In some cases, the spark is already there and only needs to be revealed: Bogart and Bacall are a notable example, as are Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in All About Eve. You got the feeling they couldn't wait to hear "CUT!" so they could jump into bed together. But these are actors, folks. Their stock in trade is pretending. So how could this all fall so flat?

Part of it was just the wild popularity of these actors at the time, which must have had a huge effect on casting. Well, we COULD get this-or-that actor or actress, but  Michelle Pfeiffer just had a huge hit with (insert title of hit), and wouldn't she be a bigger draw? And as I study the  so-called Golden Age of movies more closely, I realize how dicey casting can be,with a dozen actors turning down a role, maybe because their agents warned them against it (or they wouldn't be paid enough), or a thousand other actors auditioned for the role and were rejected. So exactly who gets the  gig?

You  weren't supposed to criticize Day Lewis back then, because he wasn't just an actor. He was an ECK-TORRRR. He was kind of like Montgomery Clift, in that even with Liz Taylor he had to fake sexual arousal. He was best buds with Liz, and it showed in the lack of passion in their scenes in A Place in the Sun and Raintree County. It just wasn't there. 

Do we hear of Day Lewis now? Was his middle name really "Day", or was that just an affectation to save him the embarrassment of  being plain old Daniel Lewis? Who'd remember THAT? And how dull would it look on the marquee?

It would be interesting to actually sit down with my favorite movie Mafioso and get Marty's honest take on what Lewis (LEWIS) was actually like to work with. He'd likely praise him to the skies, because that's what you were supposed to do back then.There were certain movie icons that weren't to be criticized. Meryl Streep was an untouchable goddess back then, no matter how pretentious, mannered and even ludicrous her portrayals were. This was brought home to me recently by her narration of Eleanor Roosevelt's voice in the PBS series I just re-watched. It was just  a caricature, a cartoonish take on the somewhat William Shatner-esque halting quality of her speech. Unfortunately, there were a lot of voice clips of the real Eleanor in the last episode, and it became obvious that the halting quality only showed up  very late in her life, as it often does in older people (excuse. . . me. . . yes. . . ). But she sounded like a querulous old lady when she was supposed to be 20 years old.

Why does bad acting get so richly rewarded, leading to such astonishing blunders in casting? I don't go to  movies any more because I am not interested in YET ANOTHER SUPERMAN MOVIE (or movies based on stupid video games or whatever other junk).  Sometimes I miss those long  commutes into Vancouver, mostly the anticipation of seeing something worth the trudge - but I have to tell you, quite  often the popcorn was the best part.

So why did I have such a different opinion of this movie 30-some years ago? It's the usual thing - I'm way different than when I was a mere child of 40. I've seen a lot, lived, loved, lost (etc. etc. - all the rest of it). But a lot of it comes down to the radical change in pop culture. It's almost unrecognizable now. Either Daniel Day Lewis (or Danny Lewis) has died and I don't realize it yet, or he has retired because he's too ugly like Jack Nicholson, or suffereng from dementia (and how  many actors seem to have dementia, these days?), or just got fed up with trying to pretend he was sexually attracted to cold, charisma-less actresses in parts for which they were woefully miscast.

So why did I watch Taxi Driver - again??

A little Italian let’s praise today:
The Topo Gigio of pictures, let’s say.

When Taxi Driver comes on TV,
I always drop what I’m doing, you see,
For Travis Bickle is my main man,
Because of DeNiro I’m such a great fan.

When first I saw this story bleak,
I had to through my fingers peek,
For though the end was a gory mess,
I couldn’t stop watching, I must confess.

Then I saw a picture of Marty,
Who supports the Italian Munchkin party.
Like my Uncle Aubrey his eyebrows were dense,
And his movies didn’t always make much sense.



But to the soul they spoke without fail,
For Raging Bull's a morality tale.
And fluids red from DeNiro’s face
Went gushing and flying all over the place.

When we saw Jake LaMotta bash his head,
It filled us all with horror and dread.
But for our director, comedy was king,
For sociopaths were Marty’s favorite thing.

I can’t tell you all the movies he did,
For I’d be here all day, I do not kid.
But some of them were a big surprise,
Like Age of Innocence, pure sex in disguise.

And "Alice" by Bursteyn, my what a trick,
For feminist views he laid on quite thick.
And when he did that movie of Jesus,
He went far out of his way to please us.

Then there was Goodfellas, my what a pic,
And I can’t say it was my favorite flick.
Every time I try to watch this thing,
It doesn’t exactly make me sing.

No, there’s pictures where human flesh does rip,
And he and DeNiro seem joined at the hip.
It’s an odd sort of duo, a big guy and small,
With both of them Cosa Nostra and all.

Real genius is rare, so let's praise this guy,
And hope that his pic on Sinatra will fly.
His turkeys are few, though with Liza Minnelli
He went on a coke binge and turned into jelly.



Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese,
Your pictures are great and drive film students crazy.
So some day I hope, in my brief mortal span
I can call you just Marty: cuz you is de man!

Blogger's post-mortem. YES, WHY? Why did I watch Taxi Driver again, when I was already sort of depressed and getting over surgery, etc. - ? Was it for the incredible Bernard Herrman score, so intense he literally died right after finishing it? Is it DeNiro's ability to make us feel at least a little bit sorry for Travis Bickle, the sociopath's sociopath?

No, this time it was different. As I was dragged into this dark underworld once again, I thought of a former friend, someone who seemed to have a sort of undercurrent in his personality. A quirk? Worse than that. He was obsessive. He had never been in the military, but constantly talked about guns and tales of military sacrifice and something he called "special forces". He spoke about  martial arts as if he was a master, but had never taken part. He loved Chuck Norris movies and wanted ME to love them, too. And he seemed to have been behind the barn door when the social awareness brain cells were passed out.

It came to a bad end, because he kept on trying to intrude in my life, even when I had decided he was just too creepy to stay friends with . (My other friends actually warned me about him, something like "he's not playing with a full deck" - cruel, but in a way, accurate). I don't know if he ever acted out, but neither did Travis until the bloody end, when he was hailed as a hero for blowing several people away in the most gory movie scene I've ever witnessed.

And yet, I keep watching it, knowing what is going to happen. Why?

I wasn't going to watch it, I REALLY wasn't, and then I watched it and felt heavy and bogged down, and I remembered my former friend, the one who eventually scared me with that sociopathic feeling, the sense something in him was just missing. He seemed to be ticking, almost audibly. The last contact I had with him, he became my Facebook friend (how did he find me?), and it started up again. He posted things "at" me, going on and on about how cruel I had been to him, how ungenerous, how mean I was. The posts were full of self-pity, and did not in my mind match up with what I knew of him back then. Finally, realizing he hadn't changed or had actually gotten worse, I blocked him, and he somehow found my email and ripped into me for my cruelty. Again.

As always when I watch this dark morality tale, what really triggered me and let loose these dark memories was the score. This is music like I have never heard music before. It seethes. It snarls. Snare drums escalate and escalate into the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of a machine gun. Some of it is dark, murky. There are eerie harp glissandos, up and down, up and down, and it's like having sand thrown in your face. 

At the very end of Taxi Driver, having created one of the worst bloodbaths in film history, Travis is not only praised as a hero - he actually gets the girl. And yes, this did actually happen to my former friend - he got married, and last I heard he was still married, though still aimless and unemployed, and vaguely resentful about everyone and everything. His wife is more of a caregiver than a life partner. But how can we question people's needs? They are what they are.

You might ask, as I am asking myself right now, why was I ever friends with this guy in the first place. It's hard to believe, but he really did help me at a time when my life was in such a mess that I quite easily could have died. The echoes of Travis genuinely caring about Iris and wanting to rescue her registered this time as never before. And it's damn hard to see real altriusm in someone who scares you half to death, someone you just can't deal with any more. But the fact is, he needed me to stay needy. When I didn't need his support any more, he couldn't take it and tried to take me down with him.

So this silly little poem just popped into my memory again. It's sort of a detox from last night. And yes, it WAS the musical score that grabbed me the most. It is beyond disturbing, and the fact it is the last gasp of a brilliant composer makes it all the more unsettling.

Then my mind leaped and hopped into present day, when DeNiro gave a speech at the Cannes Film Festival criticizing a certain politician whom I am doing my best to ignore. Not always successfully. But someone had to  eome out and say it. He is destroying the arts, destroying the nation, and no one seems to even notice it, glued to their phones, assuming it's not their problem.

So can a sociopath really gain that much worldly power? Well, what do you think? And why was he actually welcomed back, after four harrowing years of running the nation into a ditch?

THE ROOSEVELTS: Twelve years on, did the series change, or did I?

 

After hugely enjoying the first few episodes, I did finally watch the end of the 2013 PBS series, The Roosevelts, and oh it was hard going. Very well done, but tedious in places, and sort of depressing due to the heavy subject matter and what happened to all of them. Both TR and FDR died at around age 60, completely used up physically and mentally, and it was hard to watch. 

I never liked FDR and saw him as pretentious and superficial, and Eleanor, though you’re supposed to admire her, has an “ADMIRE ME” sign on her, and her querulous voice and matronly print dresses and constant, Roosevelt-esque smiling just irritated me. (They all had a smile that never seemed to leave their faces, replicated a generation or so later by the Kennedys, with their piano keys always on show). Meryl Streep did a parody of her, a Rich Little impression rather than an interpretation.

The first six hours (SIX HOURS!) were the best, and should have been a separate docuseries on TR. It would have been superb as a freestanding series, but it ranged too far and got bogged down. It was as if something changed halfway through, as if other people dominated the research, or the clips, or whatever. Changing horses mid-stream, as TR would no doubt put it.

So it was a bit of a trudge, but it was still better-made than almost any other doc series I've ever seen. I’m still interested in TR, and now have two other books that I hope don’t rip him apart or make him – incredibly! – DULL. The biographer I didn’t like (Brands) was used a lot in the doc, which surprised me and made me wonder if he also wrote other books about them. Maybe he liked FDR, and admired Eleanor as you are required to.

I suppose they helped save the world, etc., but there was every bit as much corruption and deception then, only done as a matter of course. TR  hated it and was the only one who attempted to flush it out of the bushes. The rest of them went along with it because there was something in it for them - maybe, in fact, everything. 

But it remains to be seen if I can get through 2 more long(ish) books about TR, if he even remotely resembles the figure I like so much. Like, for being a badass, a paradox, a historical anomaly, etc. And fierce! I loved the grin with bared teeth, the "Bully!" and "Dee-lighted" (which were not even metioned in the Brands!), and I also liked his tenderness with his wives, children, etc. though one son killed himself and one died in wartime. 

So. Now I have a long-awaited biography of Toulouse-Lautrec, but it’s challenging in a whole different way, SO detailed I wonder why on earth it all needs to be there. Surely the author can say “his mother took him to one health spa after another, with no results”, rather than recounting EVERY single health spa, EVERY useless treatment, etc. But it is interesting to see how positive he was, how almost sprightly, a satirist who wrote funny, pointed letters with tiny ink drawings in the margins, and arrogant in a way that was still kind of endearing.  And I see virtually no self-pity in a man who had every reason to  live in a state of despair. 

This contrasts wildly with Jose Ferrer's portrayal of  a lonely, cynical, embittered genius in Moulin Rouge (which, by the way, I love, and not just for Jose Ferrer's voice which is the sexiest thing I have ever heard!) He was criticized for walking with shoes on his knees, but facially he was pretty close. But who knew about the rest of him?

It was never a mystery what he looked like. There are actually a lot of photos of Lautrec, mostly in weird costumes - clowns, Arab sheiks, women (he loved drag). The pictures are charmingly droll, sort of like walking cartoons or caricatures, and he knew this and even traded on it. He ultimately destroyed himself, of course, but sheer physical and mental pain may have been behind it, burdened with a body that never did work due to what amounted to generations of incest. 

I believe the Roosevelts, with their habit of marrying cousins, suffered the same thing – bluebloods who “married in” with unknown consequences, including mental illness, alcoholism, and early death. Eleanor was not under remotely that kind of strain, and lived into her 70s, but as a figure loved by the whole world, she did not need to actually do anything, just make appearances and shake hands with the right people, and stand there and receive ovations and cheers. She was a nice old lady, homely, dowdy, hesitant in speech, which made her somehow approachable, but she was no more a figure of the people than the other Roosevelts, who were all wealthy, snobbish aristocrats who stooped to save the world. 

Why you should NOT overshare on the internet. . .

Friends:
On the eve of my 62nd birthday, something of a re-birth announcement...
The mania I've been experiencing for the past few weeks continues. I am making every effort to recognize and do what I can to manage it, and with some success provided I stick to certain things. Among these: my online presence. It's become baldly obvious to me that I must reduce my internet activity considerably, and that's why I write to you all: if you're wondering how I'm doing, where I am, if I am, etc., it may take a day or two before you hear from me.
I'll spare you the thinking behind this -- god only knows, but makes sense to me -- but I also wanted to let everyone know that this is a struggle that I absolutely refuse to go through alone. And by that I mean going public. Once I am finally able to trust my thoughts again -- or even to corral them better -- I've got a plan.
I want to put this before everything. I want to re-emerge from this as a public activist. I've already got a semi-public profile, and it seems obvious and necessary that I try to harness this to my own recovery and public function. I know there's a book in this, but also a specialized website (under construction already), but possibly a documentary, podcast and as many public speaking opportunities as I can book.
I mean, who wouldn't want this: the world's first Bipolar standup addict terminally unfiltered movie critic?
See? This mania is K-razee.
Much love to y'all and more to come.

This quote from a Facebook page (going back a few years) haunts me and won't leave my head. It was written by a Canadian movie critic whose heyday was about ten or fifteen years ago, and who specialized in movies about mental illness. No, that's not an exaggeration, as there was an event called Rendevous with Madness (and how I HATE the term, worse than "demons") every year in Toronto, and he seemed to be everywhere, doing this and doing that and, I would imagine, analyzing every movie down to the last detail.

It's, I guess, ironic that this happened to him, and there was a lot more to the story (he mentioned in passing that he had been "kicked out of rehab" twice, though not specifying why). I don't even know how I got onto his posts, as he isn't a Facebook friend - though we do have contacts in the publishing industry in common. But I became fascinated, and for several months his posts got more and more bizarre. I remember something called the Bipolar Cartoon Character Hall of Fame, with pictures of Olive Oyl, Pepe le Pew, and various others I don't remember. 

He also mentioned being "taken in" by the police, escorted to a psychiatric ward which released him the next day. (Yes. The next day, with no support system, not even a reliable source of medication.) His recounting of the story had all the manic delight of Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as if it was just one big jolly romp.  

It came out at one point that he was living with his elderly parents, not so he could take care of them but so that they could take care of him (or try to - but think of the burden on frail, elderly parents trying to deal with a 60-year-old man acting like a wild teenager). He did harrowing things like ask his Facebook buddies what meds he should take, and of course got a lot of terrible advice on milk thistle, turmeric, mountain goat horn extract, and other reliable treatments for major mental illness.

Then - it stopped. I think it stopped just as the pandemic hit, but for a long time there was nothing, and I did wonder what had happened to him. Then I noticed he was posting movie stills, several a day (though not the same ones over and over again, as he had done before). But these were strange, not the polished poses you'd see in a publicity still. These were screenshots taken nearly at random in the black-and-white films he seemed to focus on. Then, eventually, those stopped too.

With my Sherlock mind, I couldn't leave it  alone, and I did find a tweet (back when you could still read them without donating a few pints of your blood) which talked about how he was going to "recklessly" share his story of "multiple arrests", breaking sobriety, disturbing the peace, etc. etc. in an event called But That's Another Story. I didn't see this as an advocacy thing, but more of the "drunkalogue" syndrome you hear in AA - telling the same story endlessly, embellishing each time, and getting lots of laughs from the most painful experiences a human being can suffer. 

One of the things in the description was "undiagnosed sex addict", which made me feel he wasn't QUITE over the manic episode yet - not the so-called diagnosis, but the hypersexuality which is one of the most alarming (not to mention humiliationg) symptoms of bipolar mania. He did delete quite a number of his Facebook posts, including some which were actually pretty gross. Did someone take him aside and advise him on what was appropriate (or not) to share?

So why am I still so obsessed with this? His new save-the-world persona made me wonder, as perhaps he was unable to wonder, just what he actually planned to say. How could you get up there and talk for an hour about reckless oversharing, multiple arrests, and bizarre behaviour that baffled everyone who thought they knew him? It would probably be stream-of-consciousness rambling, but I also know it would be a kind of  standup stuff meant to elicit howls of laughter. Does this take away the horror of it? Is this stuff truly funny? You tell me.

Of course not, but in the moment it might have seemed like a good idea. Advocacy is a way for people to feel important, experts on the subject, which gives you a sense of power, as if you can and should advise people on what they are supposed to think about a subject. It can also involve trying to rescue people who are too helpless to help themselves. That doesn't happen either. And it cannot happen when the "help" is just as sick as they are. 

So now he has disappeared entirely. I do wonder what happened. The last Facebook comments consist of "friends" (in the Facebook sense, not real ones) wishing him a happy birthday, some time last year. I remember with dismay the way my dear friend David West was getting birthday greetings on Facebook two years after he died. Though I know he would have gotten a kick out of it, it points up everything that is wrong with social media, and the internet in general. I get "notices" every day about "friends" having a birthday, and I don't even need to go on the person's page to send them a generic message! How wonderful! No work at all, nor do you need to care - just pretend that you do, because it makes YOU look good.  Which is why so many people send automatic or automated birthday messages to a person, not even knowing or caring very much if they are alive or dead.

Well, I hope this manic guy isn't dead, but he seems to have retreated a long way. It would be nice, once the dust settled, to see some commentary on what he actually lived through, but just as you can't be a heart disease advocate while you are up on the stage collapsing from a heart attack, it is really not such a good idea to display the  extremes of mental illness to an audience too embarrassed or frightened to do anything but howl with laughter.

ADDENDA (sample Facebook posts): 

If anyone knows anybody in the Burlington police or psychiatric biz, please share.
The care and patience I received during my long night of gonzo batshit free fall was AMAZING. I regaled the cops who delivered me to psychiatric emergency — named, God love them, Scott and Geoff — with the dirtiest movie true life trivia I could — and boy did I. I was like the Groucho Marx of psychiatric emerg.
As I was escorting them out — until the psychiatric staff pulled me back inside — I tried to hug them, which they warmly refused. I offered a handshake, and Scott said “How about a fist bump, Geoff?”
And as for Jenn, the gorgeous and deeply empathetic psych muse, whom I fell deeply and obviously in love with inside of three seconds: thanks for the only memory of this whole shitshow that I cherish. That and Scott and Geoff’s fistbump.

. . . Sadly, I have been forced to accept that a raging libido is an indication I’m about to go off the reserve. On both recent flipout sessions, I was hornier than a cartoon goat. Not to put to fine a point, but I’d have happily even filled a doughnut.
So this is it, huh? Antidepressants smother my libido into perpetual remission, and if I get horny it means I’m about to smash my stall. How fucking fair is that?
Doughnuts. Now why didn’t I think of that when it might have helped?
Love and thanks.

(And this, the most disturbing of all):

Talk about a discussion starter. Veronica Liskova's affecting, disturbing and resolutely balanced portrait of a 'virtuous pedophile' cuts to the very heart of the idea of mental illness and social stigma. A documentary profile of a young man who maintains a clinically-assisted regimen of absolute sexual abstinence so as not to act on his desires, the movie not only ask us consider pedophilia as a form of treatable mental illness, but to consider what the real consequences of intolerance, ignorance and moral outrage are: that somebody like Daniel remains ashamed, in the shadows, and possibly poised to act out. 

I never thought I'd see this again!!

 

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

(Click on the link to watch!) I was astonished and deeee-lighted to find this entire series on Internet Archive! There are only fragments of it on YouTube, and a confusing array of chopped-up pieces on Dailymotion, so this was buried treasure, unearthed at last.  I LOVED this series when I first saw it on PBS in 2014 (it's yet another Ken Burns masterpiece), but it was never shown again. It is fourteen hours long, the most ambitious thing Burns has ever done, and by far the best. And it never seems too long or tedious - in fact, I didn't want it to end.

So what do I love about it? Everything. From the superb gallery of  photos and archival film clips, to the meticulous research, to just the right amount of commentary from the inevitable historians, and - most of all - to the superb narration, there is not a false note in it anywhere.

Bad narration, which is nearly universal on YouTube now (most of it AI-generated) is the bane of my existence, but in this case, the main narrator, not to mention the dead-ringer, right-on voices of Teddy, FDR and Eleanor (the last voiced by no less than Meryl Streep!) are so note-perfect that it's no surprise the music is sensitively chosen and utterly appropriate as well. I begin weeping when they feature Aaron Copland at his most tender and majestic, the heroic Richard Strauss (Death and Transfiguration, which is now my theme song), and sublime quotes from Stephen Foster.

It all works. But what was most gratifying to me was watching the first part again, and far from having my usual reaction to something I used to love and now can't fathom, I think I loved it all the more.  I've started reading more about the Roosevelt dynasty, but none of it is more poetic and hard-hitting than this series, which I honestly thought I would never see again.

Comes at a time when I am still feeling pretty rotten at times. Having supposedly dodged the bullet with my surgery, now I am not so sure. "Things" are showing up in my x-rays and blood tests, and I am more than concerned. I will be seeing a hemotologist, which made no sense until I finally clicked with the fact that I had to have a blood  transfusion in the hospital (why?). And I also might be seeing a nephrologist, a kidney specialist, because my poor old ageing kidneys might be out of whack as well. In the hospital, they found a spot on my lung which terrified me, though the followup x-ray seems to have indicated it was resolved. But my doctor is not so sure. So, more tests, more specialists, more trips to the lab.

I am trying to convince myself, and sometimes I even seem to believe it, that the surgery fixed everything and I am now back to full and vibrant health. But once they gut you like that, you're never quite the same, and I feel it almost every day.

I don't want to overshare online, but it gets lonely sometimes, and this blog is supposed to be more personal than, say, Facebook or YouTube (which I am now "off" in many ways, just fed up and not wanting to keep feeding something nobody watches anyway). I feel the same about the blog: I do post links on Facebook sometimes, but I am not sure why I bother.  I am convinced nobody really reads them. They are, however, there for my own reference, so that is something.

Something, but I am not sure what.

So when I find something as superb as this series, whole and complete, and in magnificent HD, it geos a long way (though not far enougth)  to make me feel this is all worthwhile. But I had a thought at the grocery store today, when I could not lift a five-pound bag of sugar into the cart: the natural limits of a human lifespan used to be "threescore and ten" - and by that reckoning, I'm already one year over the limit.

So why is this statement so subversive?

An artist, a man, a failure, MUST PROCEED. Proceed: not succeed. With success, as any world or unworld comprehends it, he has essentially nothing to do. If it should come, well and good: but what makes him climb to the top of the tent emphatically isn’t ‘a billion empty faces’. Even success in his own terms cannot concern him otherwise than as a stimulus to further, and a challenge to more unimagineable, self-discovering – ‘The chairs will all fall by themselves down from the wire’; and who catches or who doesn’t catch them is none of his immortal business. One thing, however, does always concern this individual: fidelity to himself.

- e. e. cummings

Lots of people object to this statement. For one thing, they don't like the use of "man/he/his", which is absolutely not allowed now - for God's sake, why doesn't he say "a man OR a woman", "he OR she", etc., especially with all the pronoun confusion affecting language right now? But the idea that failure is part of the game echoes my all-time-favorite quote from Teddy Roosevelt, which dares to call itself "The MAN in the arena". (Can't have that!)

But even more subersive is the idea that success has nothing to do with you. If it comes, fine, but if you strive for it, you will be chasing a phantom. Our entire culture revolves around success or failure, defined in terms of dollars and one's contribution to the overall economy, the GNP. Very seldom is artistic merit even considered. Popularity and the ensuing financial gain is the whole story.

The last few lines are the most subversive, and totally nonsensical to most people: the claim that how an artist's work is received is "none of his immortal business" (how I love that phrase!), and that the sole necessity of art is fidelity to himself (herself, itself, elephant self, Old Testament prophet self, Joan of Arc self, etc. etc. etc.)

This quote, along with a few others, has informed my life, and I have come back to them again and again because they run counter to cultural pressures and expectations. So many artists are crushed by this. Even artists who make a lot of  money, and are therefore deemed "successful" go through the tortures of the damned, because it is NEVER ENOUGH. Jump high, higher, higher - no, sorry, you failed to grab the brass ring. Maybe next time.

Go get 'em, Teddy! (Read at your own risk!)

 

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, on Americans:

“As for my own country, it is hard to say. We are barbarians of a certain kind, and what is most unpleasant we are barbarians with a certain middle-class, Philistine quality of ugliness and pettiness, raw conceit, and raw sensitiveness. Where we get highly civilized, as in the northeast, we seem to become civilized in an unoriginal and ineffective way, and tend to die out. In political matters we are often very dull mentally, and especially morally; but even in political matters there is plenty of rude strength, and I don't think we are as badly off as we were in the days of Jefferson, for instance.”

Whew! Let me blow out the flames coming from that particular statement. Though it was in a private letter and not meant for public consumption, it's more than candid about what T. R. perceived as the woeful limitations of his beloved country and its (too-often-craven) citizens. 

Of course, you're not supposed to like or admire Roosevelt. He killed animals, he seemed to love war, he pounded the podium when he gave a speech. (And those teeth!) But I've always loved the man, and have always wanted to know more about him. To this end, I'm making my way through an 800-page biography by H. W. Brands, called T. R.: The Last Romantic. But I have to tell you, the portrait he paints of the Old Lion is woefully un-romantic. 

I watched a PBS series on the Roosevelts (and how I wish they'd show it again, all 8 hours of it!), and my favorite two hours was devoted to T. R. And yes, the portrait that emerged was of a true romantic: fiercely passionate about everything (especially his family - he was devoted to them), sometimes too opionated for his own good, and not one to suffer fools gladly (or at all!) - yet at the same time, warm and gregarious, genuine, sincere in his patriotism (his vision was of what Americans COULD be, but somehow never were), and a lot of other things. 

But this Brands character does not even seem to like Roosevelt, and there are little jabs at his character on every page. Talk about thinking in black and white! This fellow has decided T. R. needs to be deconstructed, or should we say, given a hatchet job. I have ordered another bio (there are no doubt hundreds of them) which has been criticized for sentimentalizing Teddy too much. But what the PBS bio got right, and what Brands missed by a mile, was his complexity. 

The man was positively Byzantine, and was full of so many opposite traits that you wonder how he got along. But one commentator said, "What you MUST know about T. R. is that he was a depressive." The fierce exterior disguised a very tender heart, and he was hypersensitive, not to mention a ferocious intellect which soared above most of his contemporaries. THAT is the T. R. I want to hear about, read about, get to know better.

I even wrote in my journal about this! The book critic in me never quite dies, and each book I read comes under analytical scrutiny, but this one. . . I kept getting so turned off that I had to unload somewhere:

I am getting fed up with the TR book, which is a disappointment after a good start. It begins quite positively, but as it goes along the author gets more and more snide, then just starts taking shots at him on every single page. He’s literally attacking the man, claiming he did everything for his own gain and towering ego. Nothing about the latent depression, nothing about the warmth and charm of the man, which his supporters never failed to notice. (They named the Teddy bear after him, for God's sake!) But the book is all about his insufferable ego and how he’s basically a windbag, hot air that is all designed for self-aggrandizement and political gain. He doesn't befriend people - he "cultivates" them. 

I LOVED the PBS program, watched it more than once, and it was far more nuanced, claimed he was actually a secret depressive, his heart irreparably broken by the loss of his first wife. The portrait was of someone far more complex and nuanced than this Brands guy comprehends. I did order another bio, just out of interest. But it does seem the guy really doesn’t like Roosevelt and even thinks he was a phony. Typical politician, full of P. T. Barnum hype and even dishonesty. 

So why did he write this? As with the Van Gogh book, I see contractual obligation on every page. Brands signed a contract to write this, then began to get bored and irritated about ¼ of the way through, a contempt that just grows and grows. I’m reading it now because it supposedly helps me get to sleep, though it did not work last night. 

Enough said!