Of Recovery and Romance
Sep. 24th, 2013 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraToday is the first day since I officially Got Sick that I woke up feeling normal.
It strikes me that resilience may be one of those things that differentiates old people from young people. You can talk yourself into being resilient when you're young, but honestly? I don't think you can when you're old.
I tried, God knows.
But every day when I got home from work I had no energy at all to do anything but throw myself in my little nest, surround myself with cats, and watch bad movies on Netflix. I'd sleep ten hours, rise just drenched in sweat and get winded on my generally pleasant and down-hill mile and a half walk to work.
No, I didn't see a doctor. For one thing, I hate doctors. For another, I had a virus, and really, there's nothing a doctor can do for a virus. I slept a lot. I drank a lot of fluids. I made salsa with vine-grown tomatoes, chopped purple onions, garlic, oregano and coriander – it was the only thing I had any appetite for at all – and apparently that worked because today I'm feeling swell.
The lady in the mirror frightens me though. I look as pale as death, cadaverous and awful. My eyebrows are practically nonexistent. It occurs to me that I need to start wearing makeup on a daily basis. Happens that I love makeup and I'm one of those people whom cosmetics completely transform: Without makeup, I'm a taller version of those little old ladies in black you see scuttling around the back alleys of Naples; with makeup, I'm still Sarah Woodruff standing on the Dorset Coast, waiting and yearning for the impossible to reoccur.
Eyeliner! Ain't it magical?
Problem is that it takes so fucking long to apply and who cares what I look like anyway?
Although I do kind of have what one might call suitors right now: one from the Internet Dating Site who used to be a reporter and is now a suicidal PR flak working for Mario Cuomo in Albany; _____ ________ from the PSO who writes me long morbid updates on the imminent foreclosure of his Connecticut house; and ___ ____ with whom I shared one perfect evening of mutually hilarious jokes and moments when we said the same thing at exactly the same time. He's the one I like the most (of course), but also the one I'm the least likely to end up with. I have no dowry, and he's a guy for whom material security is important. My lack of security makes him very nervous. He's always asking me things like, "But suppose you get really sick --"
"Then I'll die, I guess," I say. "Life has never been that interesting to me anyway, you know."
That really freaks him out. He's a psychologist by training. People who say things like that are generally deeply clinically depressed. But he doesn't think I'm clinically depressed. He doesn't know quite what I am.
###
While I was sick, I watched the recent movie version of Kerouac's On the Road. It wasn't nearly as bad as Ben had told me it was. Gotta say, I've never cared much for the novel. Not a Kerouac fan, not an Allan Ginsburg fan. The only writer in that whole Beat crowd I have any use for is William Burroughs.
The movie had a kind of lyrical sense to it that the book's images compiled on images never achieved for me – I think because Kerouac didn't actually have much of an eye, but Walter Salles does.
The thing that kept throwing me out of the movie wasn't actually the movie's fault. Kerouac's characters, of course, were faithful renditions of the various people who wandered in and out of his own life. But they're all dead now, and we know the horror shows they turned into before they died. The slight, nervously vibrating Carlo Marx becomes the fat, slovenly, publicity slut Allan Ginsburg; the beautiful Dean Moriarty metamorphoses into the wolfish psychopath Neal Cassady, who dies counting ties on a railroad track (a death Robert Stone borrows most beautifully for Ray Hicks in Dog Soldiers, one of my favorite all-time novels). Kerouac own introject, the soft, sensitive Sal Paradise becomes a fat alcoholic, engaged in constant screaming battles with the mother he moves back in with.
Anyway, it's very hard to suspend disbelief, to see anything about these characters as romantic when you know their inevitable fates. And romance is what this movie is selling – not "romance" in the chicklit sense of the word, but romance, in its purer sense of a defining quest.
Off to read King's sequel to The Shining, which Ben just mailed me today -- a nice gift.
It strikes me that resilience may be one of those things that differentiates old people from young people. You can talk yourself into being resilient when you're young, but honestly? I don't think you can when you're old.
I tried, God knows.
But every day when I got home from work I had no energy at all to do anything but throw myself in my little nest, surround myself with cats, and watch bad movies on Netflix. I'd sleep ten hours, rise just drenched in sweat and get winded on my generally pleasant and down-hill mile and a half walk to work.
No, I didn't see a doctor. For one thing, I hate doctors. For another, I had a virus, and really, there's nothing a doctor can do for a virus. I slept a lot. I drank a lot of fluids. I made salsa with vine-grown tomatoes, chopped purple onions, garlic, oregano and coriander – it was the only thing I had any appetite for at all – and apparently that worked because today I'm feeling swell.
The lady in the mirror frightens me though. I look as pale as death, cadaverous and awful. My eyebrows are practically nonexistent. It occurs to me that I need to start wearing makeup on a daily basis. Happens that I love makeup and I'm one of those people whom cosmetics completely transform: Without makeup, I'm a taller version of those little old ladies in black you see scuttling around the back alleys of Naples; with makeup, I'm still Sarah Woodruff standing on the Dorset Coast, waiting and yearning for the impossible to reoccur.
Eyeliner! Ain't it magical?
Problem is that it takes so fucking long to apply and who cares what I look like anyway?
Although I do kind of have what one might call suitors right now: one from the Internet Dating Site who used to be a reporter and is now a suicidal PR flak working for Mario Cuomo in Albany; _____ ________ from the PSO who writes me long morbid updates on the imminent foreclosure of his Connecticut house; and ___ ____ with whom I shared one perfect evening of mutually hilarious jokes and moments when we said the same thing at exactly the same time. He's the one I like the most (of course), but also the one I'm the least likely to end up with. I have no dowry, and he's a guy for whom material security is important. My lack of security makes him very nervous. He's always asking me things like, "But suppose you get really sick --"
"Then I'll die, I guess," I say. "Life has never been that interesting to me anyway, you know."
That really freaks him out. He's a psychologist by training. People who say things like that are generally deeply clinically depressed. But he doesn't think I'm clinically depressed. He doesn't know quite what I am.
While I was sick, I watched the recent movie version of Kerouac's On the Road. It wasn't nearly as bad as Ben had told me it was. Gotta say, I've never cared much for the novel. Not a Kerouac fan, not an Allan Ginsburg fan. The only writer in that whole Beat crowd I have any use for is William Burroughs.
The movie had a kind of lyrical sense to it that the book's images compiled on images never achieved for me – I think because Kerouac didn't actually have much of an eye, but Walter Salles does.
The thing that kept throwing me out of the movie wasn't actually the movie's fault. Kerouac's characters, of course, were faithful renditions of the various people who wandered in and out of his own life. But they're all dead now, and we know the horror shows they turned into before they died. The slight, nervously vibrating Carlo Marx becomes the fat, slovenly, publicity slut Allan Ginsburg; the beautiful Dean Moriarty metamorphoses into the wolfish psychopath Neal Cassady, who dies counting ties on a railroad track (a death Robert Stone borrows most beautifully for Ray Hicks in Dog Soldiers, one of my favorite all-time novels). Kerouac own introject, the soft, sensitive Sal Paradise becomes a fat alcoholic, engaged in constant screaming battles with the mother he moves back in with.
Anyway, it's very hard to suspend disbelief, to see anything about these characters as romantic when you know their inevitable fates. And romance is what this movie is selling – not "romance" in the chicklit sense of the word, but romance, in its purer sense of a defining quest.
Off to read King's sequel to The Shining, which Ben just mailed me today -- a nice gift.
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no subject
Date: 2013-09-25 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-25 06:56 pm (UTC)I'm probably one of the few King readers/fans who did not like The Shining. I think I'll like Dr. Sleep more, because generally I prefer the newer/recent King stuff.
I hate being sick. It's such a waste of time.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-26 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-28 02:54 am (UTC)I don't like narcissist, sadist, egoist as they are now used they have been generalized. I've known two egoists. They liked being cruel, it was out-loud desperate. Cruel would signify them, add them up to something. The one psychopath I've known, had this strange affair with what'll-happen-if-I-do-this. It was familiar to me. I remember it as part of me age 7 to maybe 15. Alongside it was acting without a reason.
The Grateful Dead practically worshipped Cassady. Charisma's strong. I've never been easy with it. It can drive out any other thought and I've wondered could it do the same if you had it. Dead drunk or from exposure on RR tracks, that is weak and no improving it.