My little cat Cinco has been sick for the past few days. She shows up every now and then, but she won't eat. (And usually, she was the biggest Hungry Hippo!) For the past few days, she's been hiding out, never appearing. She was kind of annoying to me over the past few months because she was constantly yowling while in heat (and I hadn't had her fixed). But now that I don't see her every day, especially in the morning/afternoon/evening feeding times----WHERE ARE YOU CINCO? I miss you.
Today (Saturday) was a very nice 78-degree day in Austin in December. In the midst of my 5-day vacation, I got off my butt and completely cleaned up all of the plants inside and outside: Dumped the old soil sitting around, re-planted a couple of plants, planted some "cat-grass" for my cats---in a planter that Cinco could not pee in!
In the midst of my 45-min-long outdoor work, my new neighbor was wandering around... I finally asked her: "What are you doing?" She was looking for an outlet for a hose because she wanted to plant and water grass in her backyard (adjacent to mine). In December. I said that there was a faucet in the FRONT of our apartments (not in the back), and she said she'd thought about that... (Really---stretching a hose from the front, thru your home, to the backyard...)
Our apartment yards are about 4 x 16 feet. In my yard, grass grows naturally in about half, and the other half is rocks. Is there REALLY a need to seek out a hose-outlet in December for watering potential grass??
The unattractive middle-aged neighbor seems basically harmless. But then, when she first moved in a few months ago, she'd spilled a big quantity of red wine on her front door --- loudly, after midnight! So loudly that I had to go out and ask if she was OK upon seeing the big red stain on her front step---and thinking it was blood!
Some people were meant for movie-like "meet-cute"! I, alas, am not.
You can stay up as late as you want!
It's now 4:46am---and I don't have to go to bed just yet, or at any time!
I'm in my 50s, and I've lived off-and-on in various apartment complexes (meaning, among poorer people) in my adult life. But it was only last year that I ever encountered fireworks on Christmas Eve. CHRISTMAS EVE!
In cities (and I've always lived in cities as an adult), there were always fireworks going off on July 4th and on New Year's Eve. As expected.
But just last year, on Christmas Eve, fireworks were going off for so long that I finally staggered out (after many beers) and went to look for the source of the fucking noise at 2am. Next door to my apartment complex was a bunch of Hispanics hanging out in the parking lot. I asked them if they could please not set off any more fireworks that late at night. One guy gave me a big hug and said, "Hey, it's my culture!"
Now, I'm in Austin, and I've been in Austin for most of my adult life, and I've been around Hispanics for most of my adult life, and I'd never heard of setting off fireworks on CHRISTMAS EVE!
Call me old-fashioned, call me Karen---but there is no fucking reason for setting off fireworks on Christmas Eve. It's an eve of peace, you idiots.
Tonight, on this Christmas Eve, I write this just after midnight, with fireworks again blasting all around. This is insane. And why did it all just start last year??
I'm currently reading the 2014 Beethoven bio by Jan Swafford. Well-researched and well-written. One thing that stood out about Beethoven's early years: His drunken father used to come home and wake him up as a kid and make him perform for guests. The exact same thing used to happen to George Jones.
No particular reason relative to today's events or anything (other than the hours-long headache-inducing leaf-blowing guys around my apartment complex). But for some reason, today's perfectly normal day led me to thoughts of past rejections.
I kept thinking of one teacher during my Senior year of high school. I was always in advanced English classes, and she taught basic English classes. But when I was the only student in the school to advance in statewide UIL (University Interscholastic League) competition for journalism, she was the sponsor for that group, and she and I had to travel together for the 3 hours from Azle in North Texas to Austin. And then we had to spend the night together in a hotel room in Austin. I don't remember her speaking one word to me. Not ONE WORD. (I'm sure there must have been a couple of pleasantries exchanged---how do you travel for 3 hours and then spend the night with someone without ANYTHING??)
I still to this day don't know why this adult refused to speak to me, a 17-year-old high-school kid. And a scholastically advanced kid representing the school, on their mutual way to a school event. You'd think the teacher might have had a few words of encouragement, some pleasantries, small talk, ANYTHING.
Back in 2020, all of these tech titans (aside from Musk) were banning any information that contradicted their Democrat/Marxist ideology. And now here they are, kissing the Trump ring. It's a pleasure to watch their hypocrisy come to the fore.
Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever believed Internet news sources were in any way "truthful." (And Bezos also owns the Washington Post, BTW, which once called Trump "a threat to democracy." If Trump is such a threat, why is Bezos now donating $1 million to his inauguration festivities?)
They were fuckin' phonies when they were AGAINST Trump. And they're fuckin' phonies now that they're FOR him. But I enjoy watching the current bowing and shuffling.
(Musk is 100% the exception: He stood up for the concept of "freedom of speech" back when none of his tech-billionaire cohorts did the same, when it was not politically popular to do so. I will always admire him for his bravery---and audacity for buying the corrupt Twitter and transforming it into the X that it should have been all along.)
My parents divorced in '77, I think it was (when I was 12), and after that my dad paid his $200 per month in child support. (Texas doesn't require alimony, just child support.)
My dad was violent during the marriage. And after the marriage, he kept showing up at our house, terrorizing ME at least with his after-midnight visits and phone-calls threatening suicide. (My mother was calm during all of this, but I'm sure she was terrorized, as well.)
Thankfully, he soon moved out of state, way up to South Dakota. Me and my younger brother went to visit him there for a week or so when I was 15. He was awful to me the whole time. Once I got home, I swore to my mother that I would never visit him again.
He came to my high-school graduation when I was 17: I was actually grateful for his presence, because my German mother wanted me to come home right after the graduation ceremony. (He had to explain to her that in the US, graduation was special and kids liked to GO OUT afterwards to celebrate.)
In the years after that, we had sporadic visits and communications. He'd come to Austin every now and then, we'd talk on the phone every now and then. (One memorable unpleasant conversation that we had when I was in San Francisco for grad school in the '90s, right after OJ Simpson had been found innocent: My father told me that Nicole Brown Simpson had been "bought and paid for." Oh---so that makes her murder OK, Daddy?)
We hadn't spoken for a few years when, a few years ago, he sent me a copy of a Certificate of Deposit for 50K that he'd put in my name. I sent him a thank-you note expressing gratitude, we exchanged Christmas cards that year, I sent him a birthday card the following January... Since then (maybe 3 years or more): Nothing.
I just heard via one grapevine or another that he was offended by a blog post that I'd written here. Who knows which one. (I've been writing about my life here for the past 17 years, and I've mentioned both my mother and father several times.) And so, apparently, the 50K CD is now no longer in my name. As he apparently put it: "That's the most expensive blog post that she ever made."
Ooooh! How financially threatening! Please. I'm not 20 years old, impressed by a 50K CD. As I expressed at the time, I was very grateful and appreciative of the generosity. Especially since my father had never made any other effort to try to help his two kids in any way. (Once I got to college and adulthood, I became aware that fathers helping their kids was a normal thing---not in my case. But so be it.) I was pleasantly surprised by the initial 50K gift, but I was also NOT shocked when said gift was taken away. Kind of par for his unstable course.
"The most expensive blog post that she ever made"---So I lost 50K? My honesty was worth every penny, asshole. Fuck you and your alleged $50,000.
Sometimes when you happen to enter the grocery store at the same time, you and certain other folks end up on the same aisles at the same time.
Today, there were two couples traipsing alongside me.
The first couple was a tall Middle Eastern-looking guy, with a shorter, greasy-haired hipster girlfriend: She embraced (jumped on) him frequently upon their journey amid the store aisles, and also exclaimed dramatically about her various finds. Didn't hear much of their personal conversation other than her exclamations of, "Oh, look! The beans!" They looked out-of-state. No one, even in Austin, acts like this in the grocery store. Most people just go in to shop for food, not make dramatic outbursts.
The second couple was a fat hipster couple (very, very Austin): Woman with dyed red hair, boyfriend trailing after her---equally large, wearing Lennon sunglasses indoors. After about our 6th aisle together, I finally listened to their conversation:
Woman: "Look at all of this plastic!"
Man: "Plastic tastes great---I like it with mulch."
Imagine living like that! Where you go into a grocery store and feel the need to make annoying comments about the PLASTIC! And then your desperate weirdo mate must then try to prove how off-beat he is...
Not trying to be mean, but... The above were basically the young Kamala Harris voters. (Older people, you have no excuse.)
The apartment next to mine has been empty for nearly 2 years. (Which has been great for me, as far as silence goes! The last neighbors---two dudes---liked to play their music loud.)
I was always curious by why apartment owners didn't try to lower their rents to attract residents.
(I myself am paying way too much after various yearly increases since I moved in in 2017. In 2017, I paid $1275. Today, in 2024, I'm paying $1725.) I recently learned that the city gives apartment companies tax breaks for their vacancies!
At any rate, I first became aware of my new neighbor last week: A carrier had delivered a package to that apartment instead of mine, and when I went to retrieve it from the doorstep, heard a dog frantically barking inside. Since I hadn't heard any activity there for 2 years, I called the apt office to ask if there was a dog trapped in that apartment (maybe by workers or something?)! Nope, just a new resident.
Just last night, I heard several loud BUMPS outside. After 15 minutes or so of this, I finally opened my front door: There was a middle-aged lady next door attempting to swab up some red-colored liquid that had spilled out all over her front doorstep. I stood there at my own doorway for a minute or so (unnoticed by the neighbor), then finally said something: "Are you OK?"
HER: "Oh, I just broke a bottle of wine."
ME: "Oh, OK. I was worried---it looks like blood! Glad that it's not blood! Goodnight!"
Today (the very next day), as I was heading out to take out garbage and go to my beer-store: When I walked out my door, I heard loud music approaching as I was locking up: When I looked over to see where this was coming from: My new middle-aged neighbor walking down the sidewalk with her cell phone on blast! I waved "hi" to her, and she happily explained: "Don't you hate it when you're on hold?" (Me: "Oh, yeah." Though I've never had "hold" music on that loud in my life.)
I actually think that a middle-aged female neighbor like myself is the best possible neighbor to have. No one wants a a young-male duo playing loud music at all hours! (The "spilling-wine" stuff and blasting phone-hold music is kind of weird, but pretty minor.)
In the past months, I've been re-reading most of my Plath books, then I saw a Hemingway bio on PBS, then I thought about my father at age 19 or so---all of whom received shock treatments for their mental disturbances.
The current trend of people reinventing themselves online, which has spilled over into the real world---with even formerly steadfast fields like medicine and business and sports and politics degenerating into "correct pronouns" and kowtowing to the mentally ill instead of acknowledging mental and physical and biological reality---also led me to think about such films as 1983's "Brainstorm" and 2004's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." In which actual reality can be erased and re-recorded.
I don't know if this was a dream or just a thought: Imagine if some creepy entrepreneurs started offering "mental experiences" (a la physical roller-coasters), including the mental states of famous people at the most intense times of their lives (with the days leading up to the suicides of, say, Plath and Hemingway and Van Gogh being the ultimate). With promises (a la roller-coasters) that no one's going to DIE or anything... But then something goes terribly wrong...
Just imagine if you were caught up in Sylvia Plath's or Edgar Allan Poe's mind in their last week and you can't get out of it... Yikes.
I was watching "Gutfeld!" tonight and saw a bit about jaywalking in NYC now being legalized (with prior enforcement of such being termed "racist").
10/30/24 CBS article: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/jaywalking-legalized-in-nyc/
Earlier 2021 San Francisco article on the same "issue": https://sf.streetsblog.org/2021/05/05/how-and-why-to-repeal-jaywalking-laws
Interestingly (ahem), when I lived in San Francisco in 1993-1994, I was walking in my own Richmond District neighborhood and crossed the street against the light. (After looking both ways for traffic, as I was taught when I was 5 or 6.) The neighborhood was middle-class, I'm a white female, I was 28 then. In other words, there was nothing odd about my appearance. A bike cop stopped me and gave me a ticket for jaywalking. I lied and said I didn't have my driver's license with me, so he didn't get my exact details, but he gave me a ticket anyway, with a date to either pay or appear in court, etc. Luckily, I was about done with my Master's degree studies and I left the state only a few months later, so I could ignore the idiocy of that ticket.
How odd that today in 2024, giving tickets for jaywalking is now considered "racist." Instead of just merely "stupid"---a result of leftist lawmakers trying to control every aspect of a person's existence. That jaywalking ticket was only one of the reasons that I left San Francisco literally the day after I received my degree. I couldn't wait to get out of that creepy, PC city. (Another law that was passed while I lived in SF in '93 and '94 was "no smoking in clubs." At the time, I thought this was entirely ridiculous---"It'll never happen in Texas," I thought glibly to myself as I hurried back home. Ha!)
Hmmm... Maybe some BLM group will file a lawsuit against all states and cities, claiming that banning Salems as part of the greater smoking ban is racist... If that happens, we white people who yearn to smoke in nightclubs might be the side-beneficiaries!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14006861/Michelle-Obama-fights-tears-discusses-debilitating-health-journey.html#v-2119132447088069859
I went to a nearby sandwich shop today, where the usually male sandwich-makers are super-friendly. This particular young man asked me how my day had been going, and I mentioned that I'd been working from home... He then shared with me that his dad also works from home... At this point, I thought, "OK." Until he told me that his dad was a school soccer coach! Wait, WHAAAAT? :)
As it turns out, a school soccer coach CAN now actually work from home, up until it's time to practice, around 4pm. And then he's on the field from around 4 thru 9pm. So it's OK! (Phew: Just as long as that coach isn't giving his kids drills online!)
The last time I remember really smoking pot was in '86 or '87 when I was in my 20s. At some party, I smoked not that much (or what I thought was not that much!), and then tried to drive home by myself. The party house wasn't even that far from my apartment, maybe a couple of miles. But it took EVERY SINGLE OUNCE of concentration to get home. And once I arrived in the parking lot... It took even more concentration to get from my car, up the stairs, and through my doorway. I remember actually CRAWLING into my apartment once I'd managed to unlock the door. (This weird amount of pure concentration/will remains interesting to me---I seriously was not able to actually drive or see the road or even figure out how to get up the stairs and into my apartment through normal channels. I remember, to this day, the pure FOCUS that was required for me to make it home.)
(I did smoke a few more times after that thru the '90s, but only very rarely, and just a puff or two whenever someone might have passed it around. The paranoia and the memory of that '80s literal trip home almost completely put me off of it.)
Today I heard from some federal agency on a cable news show that the potency of today's pot supply is about 30% compared to the 5% potency of the supply 30 years ago. (!!!) If what I smoked over 30 years ago at 5% made it nearly impossible to drive or to navigate stairs or my own doorway, then what in the hell are people trying to function with today at 30%---and legally!
Harris's claims to have worked at McDonald's---and this major company's odd claim that they don't keep records from back in the 1980s---makes me think: How would I prove that I worked at my very first job when I was 16, if the company claimed they didn't have records?
In my case, my first job was at the Azle, Texas, Revco drug store. (Now out of business, Revco was sold to CVS in 1997. I can see how Revco might not have any records since they don't exist any more. But McDonald's?)
OK, so say my work records don't exist. How do I prove that I once worked there? My own memories over 6 months from late '81 to early '82:
A pharmacist with a mustache named Richard. (Often highly agitated.)
A mild-mannered pharmacist husband/wife duo named [can't remember] + Kathy. (Why in the world did they hire 2 people to do one pharmacist's job?) There was also a "stealing scandal" during their time! Not THEM, but us workers who were ringing up each other's free candy bars during our breaks!
A black pharmacist named Dewey who was EXTREMELY slow. (I'd never seen lines in the Revco before, but this guy simply could not fill prescriptions in a timely fashion.)
A "side-hand" named Tim. I can't remember what exactly he did. But he turned me down when I asked for a 15-cent an hour raise. I then quit and went on to work at the Azle K-Mart until I graduated from high school in the Summer of 1983.
My Ford Pinto catching on fire when parked in the parking lot in front of the store!
The co-workers that I remember from the Revco:
Lisa Richardson and Kathy Pullig: Best friends, both pretty and mildly cool (in a Lee Remick sort-of-way, although I admired Richardson's chutzpah in once tweaking a football player's nipples!). They made fun of me three times that I can remember:
(1) For carrying a big black lunch-box with my dinner into work (I was then called "Lunch-Box Joe").
(2) For once disappearing into the work restroom for a lengthy time and emerging very pale... (OK, OK, I'd had diarrhea! Can't remember what name I got after this, but they both giggled about it.)
(3) For admitting that I liked to play PacMan at the 7-11 next door after I got off work. More giggles: "Do you have 'Pacman Fever'"? (Both of these cool chicks had boyfriends, so, yes, my being into PacMan was humorous!)
And another co-worker: My old 6th-grade friend Tammy Bailey, who worked at the Revco only briefly and had at least two major public melt-downs because of her football-player boyfriend Patrick Caddell. (I remember him as always pretty nice and relaxed. I remember her from the 6th grade as always pretty phony.) They later married and divorced. Tammy years later in the '90s came out to my mother's house to see about some white-and-gold bedroom furniture---my old childhood furniture!---for sale. She didn't buy it.)
So there you go: If I had to prove that I once worked at the Azle Revco from late '81 to early '82, then I'm sure that at least one of these people from Azle would remember me at this place during this time. The fact that no one remembers Harris ever working at McDonald's is telling. It's not just a matter of "company records."
Kamala Harris (daughter of two professors), in an attempt to appear "working class,"
claimed falsely that she once worked at McDonald's.
Below: October 20, 2024: Trump working at a McDonald's.
So there's one Presidential candidate who has actually once worked at McDonald's.
(One thing that I've always liked about Trump is his sense of the Absurd.
Check out any of his wrestling videos on YouTube for examples.)
"Awesome!" used to be an extreme peeve of mine a few years ago, but it seems to have died down somewhat today, thankfully.
Still present: "Perfect." (Regardless of what someone actually says. "Perfect" is now apparently used as a generic acknowledgment of any statement, regardless of how obviously stupid or IMperfect.)
"Happy...Monday, everyone!" As a greeting upon the beginning of group meetings. The three dots are there because almost every time the leader of the group pauses after "Happy," pretending like he/she doesn't remember what day it actually is. (Before you get on Group Chat, figure out what day it is!) Nationally, Greg Gutfeld also usually begins his show with "Happy [whatever day]." HATE IT, with or without the pause.
"True that." I just heard someone over 40 say this yesterday. Stop it. It was a mildly amusing black thing ("true dat") back in the '90s, but it's no longer cute today by anyone of any age or any color.
Turned out she was a girl who ended up having kittens in my next-door-neighbor's yard in April 2019 and then dragged them all into MY yard in increments... And I now have all three of these kittens in my home: Pete, Sasha Susie, Mini---plus another stray, Cinco Beasley, who joined up in December 2019, after hanging around looking pathetic, and with Mama Hennessy's marking on her nose!
I'm about halfway through Kroll's "Chapters in a Mythology" on Plath---and it's getting pretty repetitive: Moon = controlling mythological image; Red flowers = succubus. ETC.
At this point, it's getting kind of boring, the same old "mythology." And I think that with "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Plath herself might have been getting a bit bored with it, too---thus her slangy casting-off of her former proper poetic diction in the last months of her life (although the same mythological safety-nets remain).
I don't dislike Plath's husband Ted Hughes. I just think he was rather a non-original thinker. He thought BACKWARD, and repeated versions of myths, instead of receiving new thoughts. Plath bought into his stagnant thought-processes for a very long time, until she broke out in the 6 months before her suicide with some wildly absurdist text, as in "Daddy."
I'm currently reading "Chapters in a Mythology," Judith Kroll's early (1976) critical study of Plath's work, which reveals an underlying mythology of Plath's symbolism throughout her later work and posits that all later individual poems were part of one greater piece. I agree.
Kroll also points out that "The White Goddess" (1948) by Robert Graves was a big influence on first Ted Hughes and then Sylvia Plath. I knew this from past reading, but one thing I didn't know until I just now looked it up on Wikipedia: Graves had a wildly tempestuous (read: sick) on/off relationship with the poet Laura Riding from about 1925 thru 1939, all the while he was going on about the "Muse" and the "Goddess" as some sort of "spiritual" entities. He was also a bisexual---meaning that he obviously didn't take the idea of a female Muse all that seriously. (Ha! I don't think that the uber-male Hughes knew about Graves' proclivities; nor did Plath, who also relished purely female norms, both in mythology and in the "women's magazines" of her time):
Here's the bit from Wikipedia:
She [Riding], Robert Graves and Nancy Nicholson lived in London until Riding's suicide attempt in 1929. It is generally agreed that this episode was a major cause of
the break-up of Graves's first marriage: the whole affair caused a
famous literary scandal.
When Riding met the Irish poet, Geoffrey Phibbs,
in 1929, she invited him to join the household that already contained
herself, Graves, and Graves's wife, Nancy. Phibbs agreed, but after a
few months changed his mind and returned to his wife, referring to
Riding as "a virago" in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy.[3] When they failed to effect a reconciliation, he rejoined the household but rejected Laura and moved in with Nancy.[4]
This was one of the catalysts for the incident of 27 April 1929, when
Riding jumped from a fourth-floor window (or, according to Timothy
Sandefur, 2019, “a second-storey window”) at the lodgings she shared
with Graves, at the height of an argument involving Graves, Phibbs and
Nancy Graves;[5]
having failed to stop her, Graves also jumped (from a lower floor), but
was unharmed, whilst Riding sustained life-threatening injuries.[6]
What a bunch of clowns! (I can literally hear "clown music" in my head while picturing the above menage changes and various jumping-out-of-windows, etc.) And THIS man, the weak and decadent Robert Graves, was considered to be your Messenger of The Sublime?! A too-late wake-up call to these two victims of pseudo-mythology and pseudo-seers, Hughes and Plath: You were more a product of your current time than you were of any thousands-of-years bloodlines. You were both fools.
I: March 23.
Back in the mid-90s, when I got my Master's in Creative Writing at San Fran State, my thesis advisor, and the head of the department, was an on-the-surface genteel lady from Georgia who once asked me, when I told her that my mother was German, if my family "were Nazis." (I didn't dare tell her, or anyone else in that leftist/fascist town, that my father was an Air Force recruiter during the Viet Nam era! Imagine THAT reaction! From Texas, German mother, Military father... I must be The Devil! Or a Pre-Deplorable.).
The leftist academics in San Fran were despicably closed-minded. We've all been taught by the media to expect that sort of narrow-minded thinking from "rural" people. But in my own experience, people in rural towns have always been open-minded to personal quirks and opinions. Whereas leftists in academic towns like Austin and San Francisco insist that you heed a rigid set of prescribed left-wing standards before you're considered "acceptable." Texas/South (Austin liberals say "but, we're not like the rest of Texas!") = Bad. Germany = Bad. Etc.
In my first month or so at SF State, I was shunned by several professors. One gay male prof, in particular, literally sneered after he asked the class what we'd been reading the previous summer, and I said "Norman Mailer." Oh, but after I turned in a poem with a gay theme... He was suddenly a big fan of mine! Same with an Asian woman prof. After she'd disliked one of my "too wordy" poems in class and assigned me to "re-do" it, I went and looked up some of her own poems, and then chopped up my poem to match her style exactly---Voila! I was a hit with her also!
Hated all of those phony professors, so reliant on shallow surface impressions instead of actually reading my writing.
Oh, but the birthday-thing! Back in '94 and '95 when I was at SF State, the department head/my advisor was Frances Mayes. In '96 she came out with her blockbuster "Under the Tuscan Sun" book, which was made into an even more popular movie. And all of this was pre-Wikipedia, so back then you didn't know anyone's birthdays (plus Mayes wasn't yet famous). When I just looked her up last week on Wikipedia, I saw... she shares Joan Crawford's birthday of March 23! Yikes! After decades of researching my beloved Joan Crawford, does this mean that in person she'd have been as shallow as Mayes?! Maybe so! Or maybe not. Mayes was from a rich, obviously smug background, unlike Joan. (I never asked Mayes if HER family had been slave-owners, though she felt free to ask if my own family had been Nazis. Ahem.) Joan was similarly blunt, although her snobbish airs about surface things (clothes, etc.) were primarily received from Hollywood rather than natural, whereas I'm sure Mayes got her own surface intellectual airs from being around leftist academics from a young age. Though I don't like either, I find that "you must look/act a certain way" is actually much less dangerous than "you must THINK a certain way."
-----------------------------------------------------
II.
October 27: Both Sylvia Plath and John Gotti!
I was just watching a lengthy 3-part "Godfather and Son" series on cable this weekend, which I'd seen before (without ever knowing Gotti's birthday). Now, I'm personally primarily attracted to women, but I find Gotti very sexy (and Plath not sexy at all). I like Gotti's strut and that smirk on his face. I like his bad-ass attitude. I admire his blatant audacity in setting up the murder of his own family boss, Castellano---when that gamble could have gone VERY badly for him. (One thing I hate about Gotti: His having the guy who accidentally ran over his young son murdered. It was purely an accident, and the man profusely apologized...to no avail.)
Similarities with Plath: Bold Thinking and Wild Gambling! Plath kept up a genteel public front up until the last year or so of her life, but ultimately wrote just as she wanted to write, torpedoes be damned. And she also cursed both her husband and her mother and told the exact truth, torpedoes be damned----though she wasn't ultimately emotionally tough enough to stick out the husband's leaving (and her mother's having glimpsed her non-perfect-life the summer before).
One thing NOT similar to Plath: In a taped conversation that helped put Gotti away for life in 1992, he's quoted as saying: "I'll sever his motherfuckin' head off!" Interesting to my snobbish English-major self that he knew the word "sever" but didn't know that it didn't go with "off." (In a later videotaped conversation with his son, while Sr. was in jail, Sr. mocks his son for using the word "closure": He says something like "Only overeducated motherfuckers use the word 'closure'"----which is basically true!) OK, that kind of thing is only amusing in small doses!
I wouldn't want to BE like Gotti, but I also wouldn't mind being under his protection or sleeping with him for maybe 3 months or so (as long as he wasn't mean to me personally). To me, there's something cool/sexy about a highly competent man who gets his way, even outside the law. (Not a low-level "punk," mind you, who isn't competent at all. Like my first girlfriend, who was an utterly incompetent idiot while pretending to be both butch and "artistic." And then there was the female-ish Julie-the-Trannie and the too-female Murrah and Sandra, who were both interesting mentally but utterly pathetic in their inability to function in the world.)
As for me---lest I be considered too judgmental: Well, I've done what I could with my abilities. I'm pretty smart and organized. And also appreciative of things well-done, and of beauty. I've found that I'm not a leader of anyone, but rather an astute follower. (Thus I'm better suited for a stronger male or female than trying to lead a wimpy one---however much I might yearn to "fix" them.)
What most disturbed me about Sandra's death in February of this year (aside from me not finding out about it until May):What her stroke in 2018 and death in 2024 taught me (surprise!): There aren't necessarily any happy endings. No real "karma." Sandra was unusually beautiful. And immensely talented. She was also a decent person to those not obsessed with her. Passive re her awful past, when I thought she should have been angrier; passive/aggressive toward me, for instance; very passive when it came to doing anything to support herself post-marriage; very passive when all of her paintings, stored at her elderly lover's house, were tossed out when his kids sent him to a home. (She knew me at this time, and knew how strongly I felt about both her poetry and her paintings. She knew that I would have taken in all of her canvases.) Recounting all of this passivity of hers reminds me that perhaps stifling one's own power is a terribly BAD thing.
Not sure what the "karma" in all of this should have been. Were the stroke and her subsequent final years in a low-level public ward "karma"? For what crime?
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
----T.S. Eliot (speaking for all of us)
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position
With the same trees and headstones.
Is that all he can come up with,
The rattler of keys?
I have been drugged and raped.
Seven hours knocked out of my right mind
Into a black sack
Where I relax, foetus or cat,
Lever of his wet dreams.
Something is gone.
My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin
Drops me from a terrible altitude.
Carapace smashed,
I spread to the beaks of birds.
O little gimlets—
What holes this papery day is already full of!
He has been burning me with cigarettes,
Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.
I am myself. That is not enough.
The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.
My ribs show. What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,
I dream of someone else entirely.
And he, for this subversion,
Hurts me, he
With his armor of fakery,
His high cold masks of amnesia.
How did I get here?
Indeterminate criminal,
I die with variety—
Hung, starved, burned, hooked.
I imagine him
Impotent as distant thunder,
In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.
I wish him dead or away.
That, it seems, is the impossibility.
That being free. What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me?
The Bate book is completely dully written. I'm slogging through it, just as I remember slogging the first time around. He hasn't a way with words, hasn't a way of putting themes together, hasn't a way of moving at least this reader---despite the obvious tragedy of the life he's writing about.
And, one of my pet peeves about any biographer who's had access to academic collections (including the detritus and random scribblings) of the person he's writing about: There is an annoying tendency to try to write the text directly from the journals or letters, while incorporating endless mundane details that have absolutely no psychological meaning re the subject and life. For instance, if Bate found out that Ted Hughes had a dinner with friends in 1973, he then gives an account of the fish and type of wine served, the "laughter all around," etc. So what?! I can't even be bothered to go back and find an exact example of this type of thing, it happens so frequently in this book.
The earlier Feinstein (Life of a Poet) and Middlebrook (Her Husband) Hughes bios were nearly as bad and mundane.
But---which was my goal to begin with upon re-reading---I'm beginning to see a pattern re Hughes himself (probably gleaned more from Plath's poems and journal entries than from the dull biographers): Hughes seems to have been a largely passive person who simply went whichever way the winds blew him. Sylvia Plath asked HIM to marry her, for instance. He went along on her ride for a while, letting her get him published and recognized in the lit establishment, which she was already very familiar with. (Prior to their meeting, he'd signed up to go to Australia to live.)
As for his initial supposed life-long themes of "nature" and "mythology": While in the beginning (with his first two books, Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal), the natural world, with all its simultaneous raw beauty and raw violence, came naturally and refreshingly from his pen and awed the Lit Establishment and made him famous, his "naturalness" fairly quickly devolved into the Crow poems of 1970. This collection was equally lauded by the sheep-like critics, but it was also ignorantly ugly. No world exists like this, other than perhaps in Hughes's mental world at the time, after the suicides of Plath in 1963 and his lover Assia Wevill in 1969. The critics lauded his "honesty," but it was more "confession" of a horrible state of mind than an actual indication of the world spirit, which also happens to contain mercy, not JUST the ongoing self-satisfaction of the Crow re his nasty behavior.
While reading the Bate bio (more complete and better researched than the Feinstein or Middlebrook bios), I became aware of the ongoing Ted Hughes ethos: In the natural world and in mythology (the roots of any culture), the male should/must be allowed to fuck anything whenever he feels like it. That's fine for the non-thinking "natural world" (in which procreation is a necessity for the continuation of the species) and for the fantasy world of mythology---where constant fuckings happen all the time, according to all of the ancient male poets. But in the real human world, there are severe emotional and psychological consequences for betraying your mate. It's NOT just a matter of "I'm a male mammal or fish, just like the Jaguar or Pike---so I should be allowed to fuck (spawn) just like them!"
I never got the sense that Hughes ever recognized that the human species, with its more-developed brain, was part of basic nature, yet also supposed to be advanced from it. His desire to constantly fuck multiple women (while presenting himself as loving and caring to each of them) was confusing to a great many women. Some with terrible results (Plath and Assia Wevill suicides), most with "only" pain rather than suicide. His second wife Carol (married in 1970 when she was 22 and he was 40) had to, according to various bios, put up with his multiple affairs, right up until his death in 1998.
For someone supposedly so well-read in the world mythologies, Hughes apparently also never understood what the core problem was in all of these stories. Instead, he focused on mythological tales of bringing back the loved one from the dead, etc., rather than trying to avoid the death in the first place. In that, he was kind of like the Devil: "Do what thou wilt." If you operate like that, you're only going to bring utter misery/chaos to both yourself and your loved ones.
According to reincarnation principles: Guess he'll be sent back to this earth to try to learn his lesson. He did a terrible job in his last incarnation, despite all his gifts.
As for Plath in HER reincarnation: She'll be dumped into a setting something like my own: Less talented, less well-educated, less funded by beneficiaries, less supportive mother, less married to a fantasy mate. To learn the meaning of gratitude for what she had.
