![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sorry, Old Person
Sep. 10th, 2019 09:18 amEverything irritated me yesterday. Everything and everyone.
So I removed myself from all human contact, hunkered down in the Patrizia-torium, and glowered.
I kept thinking about a conversation I’d had with one of RTT’s posse when I was up in Tburg. He’d gone to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“So, Charles Manson was real?” Will asked, his young, intelligent face scrunching up with the impossibility of that assumption.
“You never heard of Charles Manson before?” I’d asked, aghast.
He made a fish mouth and shook his head.
Wow.
The conversation with Will reminded me of the conversation I’d had with Adrienne six weeks or so ago when I was recounting the story of how I’d found the white bunny in the forest and began reciting the lyrics to that Grace Slick song White Rabbit.
“What’s that?” she’d asked.
“You never heard of White Rabbit?” I’d asked incredulously.
Her Sorry, Old Person expression relied more upon eyebrows than mouth muscles. But it was essentially Will’s same look of gentle exasperation: That shit happened a very, very long time ago…
So do practically all cultural referents erode into dust and blow away in the winds of time.
I couldn't really be outraged.
I’d never heard of Sing, Sing, Sing either when I was Adrienne’s age. And yet Benny Goodman was one of the most popular bandleaders in the U.S. throughout the 1930s, and the 1930s were a mere 20 years before I was born.
###
In the evening I started thinking about Big Old Houses and got a hankering to visit Millbrook, which once had quite a collection of them though I believe only Caradoc and Daheim still stand. Daheim is where Timothy Leary used to lived:
There was a wonderful blogger named John Foreman who used to write about these Big Old Houses. He was arch and elegant and funny, and knew a shitload about history and architecture.
Anyway, I went looking for John Foreman’s blog, only to find it had disappeared! The blog he kept on Blogger is still there.
But his personal blog site and the pieces he wrote for The New York Social Diary—gone.
Once he was dead, there was no one to pay for the server space, I guess.
I felt so stricken! I felt such a deep sense of personal loss!
I'd always thought I’d be able to read John Foreman again whenever I wanted to.
But it turns out, I can’t.
So I removed myself from all human contact, hunkered down in the Patrizia-torium, and glowered.
I kept thinking about a conversation I’d had with one of RTT’s posse when I was up in Tburg. He’d gone to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
“So, Charles Manson was real?” Will asked, his young, intelligent face scrunching up with the impossibility of that assumption.
“You never heard of Charles Manson before?” I’d asked, aghast.
He made a fish mouth and shook his head.
Wow.
The conversation with Will reminded me of the conversation I’d had with Adrienne six weeks or so ago when I was recounting the story of how I’d found the white bunny in the forest and began reciting the lyrics to that Grace Slick song White Rabbit.
“What’s that?” she’d asked.
“You never heard of White Rabbit?” I’d asked incredulously.
Her Sorry, Old Person expression relied more upon eyebrows than mouth muscles. But it was essentially Will’s same look of gentle exasperation: That shit happened a very, very long time ago…
So do practically all cultural referents erode into dust and blow away in the winds of time.
I couldn't really be outraged.
I’d never heard of Sing, Sing, Sing either when I was Adrienne’s age. And yet Benny Goodman was one of the most popular bandleaders in the U.S. throughout the 1930s, and the 1930s were a mere 20 years before I was born.
###
In the evening I started thinking about Big Old Houses and got a hankering to visit Millbrook, which once had quite a collection of them though I believe only Caradoc and Daheim still stand. Daheim is where Timothy Leary used to lived:
There was a wonderful blogger named John Foreman who used to write about these Big Old Houses. He was arch and elegant and funny, and knew a shitload about history and architecture.
Anyway, I went looking for John Foreman’s blog, only to find it had disappeared! The blog he kept on Blogger is still there.
But his personal blog site and the pieces he wrote for The New York Social Diary—gone.
Once he was dead, there was no one to pay for the server space, I guess.
I felt so stricken! I felt such a deep sense of personal loss!
I'd always thought I’d be able to read John Foreman again whenever I wanted to.
But it turns out, I can’t.
