(deep sigh)
What is it about modern-day relationships, even those between two people who grew up in the fifties and sixties when commitment meant something, that causes things to run amok? You'd think we'd be old enough, wise enough, experienced enough to put those things aside that drove us crazy in high school and college. Maybe it's just that people are human and that no matter how much we are intellectually aware of stuff we nonetheless still have feelings of insecurity from time to time. And those insecurities, whether they emanated from past failed relationships or something quite different, tend to rear their ugly heads at always the wrong times.
It's been a rough two years for me here, and I'm not sure my sanity is intact as I sit here blogging away. The end of a long, long marriage and the resulting depression and hopelessness was enough to put me away. Eventually I caught my breath and dated quite a bit -- all kind, interesting guys but only one in the course of a year was meaningful. Until I met Bill.
This has been a significant relationship for a year -- a magical one, if you please. But, as in most relationships, there are issues. Issues that we are working to resolve, but the work is slow and tedious. I've never known anyone so thoughtful, so creative, so caring as Bill. He is so different from anyone I've ever known, which is what fascinates me. But this "difference" also perplexes me, as I'm certain my idiosyncracies do him. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it DOES at times jeopardize the stability of the relationship. Both of us have been hurt by past relationships, which tends to sometimes make us tenuous and vulnerable to "perceived" injustices.
At this stage of our lives, I don't think either of us can change the way we think, the individual needs we have, the things that push our buttons. But this guy is worth whatever effort it takes, and I'm prepared to make it. Hopefully he feels the same about me.(more deep sighs)
(sigh)OMG.While trying to recuperate from the crud from hell recently, the efforts of a mindless television industry innundated me with stuff that just blew me away. I lay in a stupor looking at commercials for Doggie Steps, which is a stairway-like thing that pet owners place at the foot of their beds (or sofas, or toilets, or what-the-hell-other places) so that the animal can easily traverse the couple of feet required; and some kind of automatic device for raking cat litter boxes. The "Petsmart" stores have speed bumps in front of them so we almost have to come to a stop if someone is crossing the five-foot area to their parking space with a leashed animal! WE ARE F______G NUTS IN THIS COUNTRY, DO YOU HEAR?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!First of all, a disclaimer. I like dogs. I do not like cats. But I have friends who do. So there. DO NOT WRITE ME ABOUT HOW WRONG I AM ABOUT THIS. YOU WILL NEVER CONVINCE ME! I don't believe a pet's place is residing in the same enclosed space with humans, and I especially don't think an animal's place is on the bed with folks. I don't care how clean you think your pet is, it ain't. Until they find a way to keep animals from licking their private parts and then licking you in the face, I shall feel this way. And the next time I see an animal regurgitate and then dine a second time on it, I shall take a picture and include it on this blog as evidence supporting my case.I know, I know. Cats are supposed to be clean. Not. Think of how many times they've excused themselves to the litter box where there are several days' worth of "business" and then "sprightly and adoringly" leapt to your kitchen counter top where your salad will soon be prepared. Nope. You'll never convince me that the animal dander isn't in the air I breathe, that their behinds are clean, that they don't have odors.......unpleasant ones at that. But since there are all these new inventions out there catering to pet lovers, it's only a matter of time before someone develops a device for cleansing the business areas of pets, all for only $19.95 plus a small fee for shipping and handling.(sigh)
(sigh)A friend emailed me the other day to tell me she had stumbled on a website that just happens to be my name (my REAL name) dot com. I'd tell you what it is so you could check it out, but I'd like to maintain SOME anonymity on this blog. But suffice it to say that it cracked me up big time. This person with my very same moniker is an artist and a free-spirited liberal, which I found to be so ironic since I can neither draw a stick figure nor think free-spirited or liberal. Her website is full of "karma" talk, etc., and a semi-nude of herself -- and she evidently enjoys some acclaim. It just struck me that I'm so far to the right in my thinking that just seeing my name on a site of this kind is disconcerting. But I laughed.....and wondered if I could commission her to do a semi-nude of ME to include on my blog.Hmmm.Maybe I'm not as conservative as I think!(LOL)
(sigh)
I was thinking recently about southern authors -- how many of them there were and are, how varied their works, how much I love to escape in those wonderful books. But aside from their most famous fiction and non-fiction there are a myriad of lesser-known but otherwise wonderful published writings from each and every one of them. Take, for example, Erskine Caldwell. Tobacco Road is his most famous book, but his novel A House in the Uplands is an absorbing story of life on a southern plantation. When we think of Joel Chandler Harris we can see the Uncle Remus stories in our minds. But pick up a copy of Free Joe and get a feel for what Harris was REALLY trying to tell us in Uncle Remus.
Go Down, Moses may not have the literary acclaim of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, but it's a topical treatise of black/white relations in the Old South. And catch up with Mark Twain's "devilishly" (LOL) funny prose in Letters from the Earth. Tennessee Williams, best-known for his plays ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Glass Menagerie") wrote mesmerizing fiction, especially in The Bag People. Do what you can to get a copy of this -- it's hard to find but worth it. Truman Capote's terrific book, In Cold Blood, overshadows most of his other work (possibly with the exception of the "Breakfast at Tiffany's" novella), but read Other Voices, Other Rooms for the true southern Gothic experience.Eudora Welty (read Robber Bridegroom), Carson Mccullers (bring tissues when you settle down with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), Flannery O'Connor (pick up Wise Blood) were inspired women authors from the south, and I love everything I've read of theirs. Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell were one-book geniuses with To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind respectively. And if you read this blog, you KNOW how I feel about To Kill a Mockingbird.What's so amazing about all these writers from below the Mason-Dixon line is that if you're FROM the south, you identify immediately with the mood and ambiance in their writings; and if you're NOT from the south, the flavors of their prose are so rich that you'll KNOW what it's like to be down and dirty in the tobacco fields or sipping juleps on the veranda. I'm sure there are other parts of this country that celebrate their heritage; but I doubt they have the traditions, the drama, the angst even, that the south has. We are so full of ourselves -- and sooooo ready to take you to our bosom. Damn, we're good.(sigh)
(sigh)
Politics, smolitics.
What's the backstory on these two clowns running for the U. S. Senate from Virginia? I'll tell ya. They're both losers of the worst sort......to say one of them will "win" is an oxymoron. It seems that more and more there isn't a candidate who values values -- and, no, that isn't a grammatical error. The ugliness of the campaigns, the sleaziness of the candidates, the ineptness of the speech writers, the over-zealousness of the staffs -- it's all terrifying because it's all we've got.
Confused, I am. But not about the issues. I'm quite clear on those. It's the quandary we face in having to make a choice between candidates, especially when the choices are equally bad. (sigh)
