Booked

I stopped by Goodwill looking for a paperback to take on the flight.  A collection of erotica enticed me, but I put it back.  Maybe if it's still there next time I pass by.  Instead I ended up with Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which I've always been interested in reading.  Never saw the movie. 

Here's a conundrum in gender bias worth considering: I have never been much drawn to erotic fiction written by men for the same reason that I am not drawn to men themselves.  On the other hand, my favorite author of erotica is Pat Califia, a trans author.  Now that he is no longer a she, should it make a difference?  I don't think it changes my response to the work...does that mean I still see the work as issuing from a female mind?  That might be a slight to Mr. Califia. I wish to be mindful of this.   Gender range is  real.  I do think it a mistake to be entirely blind to gender, however, much the same as the argument about being colorblind versus - uh, I don't think there's a short phrase for it, but inclusive and loving of ethnicity.  It's the difference between celebrating diversity and denying it.  I've always been big on individualism.
(I had begun to type 'gender fluidity', but the vocabulary is wrong.  Wrong concept.  I don't mean to say that gender is morphic day to day for most of us (it certainly can be), rather that we exist not poles apart but along a scale.  Like orientation, there's a range we fall upon, each somewhere else.)
I've been missing the news - the Me Too movement has spread to China!  And now Hollywood has something called Time's Up.  Sweet, I was hoping it would be critical mass this time... now if only the public writ large would stop fooling itself that this doesn't apply to the Orange Stain on our democracy, that impervious disgrace.

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My birthday is on Friday.  I can't remember whether I set Facebook not to notify anyone.   Thursday night Scott and I will go take in a movie.   It's meant to be a rainy evening - perfect, I love a rainy night.  Wonder if I'll get that bottle of Bailey's.

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If I'm not talking about Dana, I don't have much to say lately.  It's enough dealing with depression and my dubious, frightening future, trying not to be overwhelmed.  Like I've said before, I am trying to keep all feelings submerged, and my attentions aren't being engaged with anything all that interesting.    No time for art, no dreams worth attention, little news intake, and severely curtailed contact with friends.  I hope when all this settles I can get back to movie reviews.  I could opine about spirituality, though I'm not much inspired to at the mo'.  Or I could go on about these meatballs that refuse to stay warm fresh out of the oven.


(Oh, shit, this flu is almost over but the cough is still worse.  The sore throat is gone today.  I haven't greyed out while coughing in  a long time but I have begun to again.  Eerie sensation. slowly coming back to one's senses while the room orbits gyroscopically.  You can make out sound but not its import, nor remember what you might have been doing.)

No point anticipating what the plane trip will be like.  I hope to just enjoy the flight itself and not think at all about what I am leaving behind.  I'll be flying economy but I do have window seats for both legs of the journey and not over the wings.  Flying by night is a cost-saving measure, but it's more because I'm a night person and always wanted to: I hope to see cities at night, and sunrise from the sky.  I wonder what a nighttime city looks like from that vantage through rain.   Y'know, I was afraid of flying before I went to New York almost nine years ago but it turned out mostly very relaxing.

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And then, I also don't know what else to say about Dana either.  Wednesday morning, had a dream about her, but she wasn't in it.  Wasn't anything new or that I didn't know already.  Guess my dreams are on Winter hiatus, I'm getting reruns.

The one this morning took a strange turn at the end.   It was a gathering of people from school, someone who I knew a little (in the form of John Goodman) was peddling photos of a corpse with its head removed, a close-up of a neck so you could make out the grisly detail.  I thought spreading these pictures a sick thing to do but he thought I was just 'virtue signalling'.  "Think for yourself", he objected.  I know there are a few people who love horror films who love that kind of real-life shock material, but the assumption that all horror fans do is a prejudice not borne out by reality.  Okay...morbid curiosity is human nature, no judgementalism there.  Respect for the dead is an issue, though, as is profiting off the dead. 

Not all horror fans are gorehounds.  In filmmaking, gore is a tool rather than an end.  The goal is the impact it has and the effect on the tone of the movie.  It can be useful, and it can also be detrimental.  John Carpenter's Halloween works, IMO, because it recalls a common fear from our collective recall of our more innocent days:  we were all babysat once, or were sitters, and many of us had that night where our fears ran away with themselves - was that someone looking in the window?  'Halloween' has no gore in it, it is almost entirely bloodless.  It's my belief that graphic violence would have destroyed the impact of that film by shattering that child-memory quality and the movie would not be hailed as a classic today if it had.  By contrast, would Un Chien Andalou be a celebrated film today had it not contained a handful of gory images?  I'm not dismissing the artistry of that film, rather pointing out the impact and effectiveness of the content.  It is intentionally a jarring movie.  If you've seen it, it's hard to see that shot of a thin cloud scudding across the moon without wincing.

Besides, what you're seeing in horror films isn't real.  I can't watch real-life surgical procedures.

Innocence...damn, there's a loaded topic.  People get hung up on that one, torturing themselves that they have somehow become 'impure'.  I don't think innocence is what we make it out to be.  Children sometimes say and do the ugliest things out of innocence precisely because they have not yet explored empathy.  It is by experience that we learn. 

Adam and Eve were innocent.  I once witnessed a conversation about that legend that began as a premise for blame that fell along gender lines.  Whose fault was 'The Fall of Mankind', the man or the woman?  Someone noted that I was remaining silent.  I wanted to say that if you approach the parable as one of blame, then there were two others present - Lucifer and God.  I don't think it is a tale of blame, though, rather the opposite.  It's an obvious parable about adolescence.  Adam and Eve were children.  If you leave children in a room with one particular toy in the center, specified by the command never to touch it, what do you think is going to happen sooner or later?   Turning pubescent (the apple) is not a choice but an inevitability.  You don't blame children for growing up - viewing the whole human race as inherently guilty is perverse, and I think unjustly contemptuous.   'Original Sin' has been a destructive doctrine.

The larger point, though, is the adult's penchant for romanticizing childhood as paradise.  We're being dishonest with ourselves.  We look back and see the lack of adult worries and strife in our own histories and imagine all children lead lives of blissful ignorance and joy.  It's not so.  We forget what it was like to be children ourselves, struggling with things that threatened us or challenged us.  We forget what it was to learn.  The Book of Genesis could only have been written by an adult.

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(Thursday)
Last post I mentioned the first time I saw Dana smoking, and just now had an odd dream in which I took a giant prop joint away from an SNL sketch in some protest of something, ruined the sketch. I dunno, not sure what I was supposed to be protesting - pot, I suppose.  Sometimes dreams have me acting out of character - I never can wrestle control back, lucid dreaming has always eluded me.  Once I dreamt that I was a white cop, star of a '60s TV show, beating a black guy because he was black.  I couldn't break out of the dream's script...and the guy himself just said, yeah, he knew I was racist - but he was talking about me the dreamer, not the character I was forced to play, as if the dream were some kind of test.  The dream felt pre-scripted and I was locked into acting out what had been written for me.

I dunno, I feel like I should elucidate a little, the smoking comment did sound oddly puritan.  I think my reaction to seeing Dana smoking itself may have had a puritan note, it's just that I'd never seen Dana herself smoke before and...eh, it's not so much that she was smoking but that it was HER smoking, if you take what I mean.  Somehow I had had an impression of Dana as very conservative (I'm not). It seemed out of character and oddly jarring.  Never bothered me with anyone else, just Dana.  Now,  Lori Hamilton... Lori used to chainsmoke, and strangely it's one of the things I miss about her - talking with her for hours wreathed in a cloud of smoke. It was part of the mood of being with her.  I don't smoke but I've certainly been around it.   It's not a morals thing, just never developed a taste for it.  My father used to smoke pipes, mom hated it so as a young child it bothered me he'd insist on risking his health though everyone begged him to stop.  Still, some tobaccos have a rich, sweet aroma.  Can't say I hated that.  Burn a lot of incense, me.  That reaction to seeing Dana with a cigarette, that was a singular experience.  Never had another like it.

I want to say that most people aren't Left or Right, but everyone I know really is.  We've become so rabidly partisan.

Huh.  Following stream-of-consciousness, it reminds me of something else.  Jealousy.  I've experienced that exactly once in my life and fucking hated it.  Definitely something to be mindful of.   I was so in love with K., and she was seeing a guy with a fucking swastika in his locker...

In one of those letters Dana wrote in '88, she expressed a concern that I should understand a point about her fellow residents at the time.  I didn't get why she thought it needed saying, so her comment stood out.  It came up again in dreams a few weeks ago as if it still bothers her.  In case she might see this, I wanted to reassure her:  I get it.  It wouldn't matter to me anyway, but I respect that it matters to her.