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a man who is exercising himself in futility
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| Posted using TxtLJ |
[Feb. 5th, 2007|09:14 am] |
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At eye-doctor's for routine follow up. Been busy last week+, mainly life has been work & Jennifer |
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| Horror and Despair: Co-worker P. and Lovecraft |
[Jan. 25th, 2007|05:59 pm] |
I'm trying to converse with my co-worker P. as little as possible. Although I usually try to uphold the "lucubrated moral niceties" (as Seymour-Smith put it), P. is utterly beyond the pale of polite conversation. A few weeks ago P. got paranoid about missile-toting terrorists. That was really the last straw. I've known the man for near-on ten years and have listened to his ever more voluble ranting about how the organization we work for is corrupt, the U.S. government fatally flawed, the U.S./world economy/society headed for collapse and how he is building himself a behemoth steel sailboat so he can can his family aboard, flee the wreckage of civilization and laugh to himself grimly as the rest of us sink into anarchy. Mind you, I don't disagree with the man on many of his points... although he tends to get his news from "alternative sources," many of which are way, way out there. P. disgusts me on a purely aesthetic level. He is an inveterate whiner and by his vociferous denouncing of everyone else projects the unspoken egotistical assertion that if everyone was just like him the world would be a wonderful place. I admittedly do my fair share of whining in this journal which, if it allows me to vent and avoid voicing my negative thoughts in public discussion, is all fine... and I don't think I have ever held myself up as a paragon of virtue or wisdom. I certainly have not asserted that my existence is either an example of or leading to any solution to the world's problems- my oft-repeated shibboleth that in this age suicide is the greatest act of altruism a person can perform coupled with my regret that I have not the will to terminate my own existence, certainly deflates my ego. Even if I had the means to "escape" civilization as P. plans to do, I would not do it precisely because I do not deserve to escape. I'm part of the problem and I'm going to have to bear my part of the consequences.
I try to keep a stiff upper-lip, as they say, and haven't much time for crybabies like P. who blame everyone but themselves for the problems they encounter. P.'s narcissism extends to the degree that he is proud of the pair of DUIs he incurred six-or-so years ago. Although he has never said it in so many words he has intimated that the pressures of working and living and generally affiliating with people drove him to drink... a habit he has conquered not through therapy and/or AA but simply by exerting the will to stop. He takes great pride in the fact that he just made up his mind to put the plug in the jug and has never looked back since (my therapist/AA mother calls it being a "dry drunk"). It continues to gall him that our organization, which could (and should!) have terminated him after his driver's license was suspended, passed him over for promotion. In P.'s mind his enduring of the DUI process should have been recognized as indicative of his superior character and abilities. P. was once, 20 years ago or so, an apprentice machinist... and I can only imagine what a thorn he was in the side of his shop's owner! Recently P. related to us co-workers how he quit his job when his former employer refused to fulfill P.'s demand (which was wholly reasonable in P.'s eyes) to receive a share of the business's profits rather than a salary. P. then without batting an eye informed us in all seriousness that if World War III should ever break out we should expect to see a government car come just to pick up P. because his machining skills would make him invaluable to the war effort and that he would end up building the next Manhattan Project. Now, I have seen P.'s work around here... and frankly, it is not that impressive. For the past decade he has harped about how he is not paid enough... but all he is doing is rough maintenance work (rather than construction) and infrequent small-boat operation. There is no artistry to it... it is neither rocket science nor brain surgery. I have often wondered why, if he has such skills, he is not working in some trade that would allow him to make use of them and be paid like the skilled master craftsman he thinks he is.
I heartily wish that he would just quit. Last week he injured something in his hand while performing one of his idiotic smash-to-fit installations of a large metal bracket. First our #2 had to convince him to fill out the required injury-reporting paperwork that P. wanted to forgo, figuring that his hand would just get better. His hand has not improved and now he is unable to do much of anything. And forget putting him in our office- he does not know how as to so much as turn on a computer and cannot make any kind of sense of even our logically-arranged paper files. Of course, the problem, P. says, is that everything is disorganized. He strode into the office this morning and boldly declared that "you guys are going to have to take up the slack." I would not even look at him. He just kept muttering "Jesus!" under his breath (a savior he admittedly does not believe in... last year he boldly stated to me that the universal meaning of life was to deal with what life gives you, in a tone that brooked no disagreement) whether because his hand hurts or (more likely) because I won't react to him at all anymore, I don't know... or care. Take up the slack!!! I know what needs to be done and how to do it, and can figure things out when I don't. Nothing around here is that difficult, anyway. I am actually hoping his hand does not heal 'cause then he'll have to go out on disability. He's such a self-centered prick he'll probable end up suing our organization 'cause it is "their" fault he ended up a cripple. I have never in my almost 30 years on the planet met a more miserable human being. He has a wife and a 17 year-old daughter and he resents both because they tie him to the land... literally. After putting up with living on a tiny fiberglass sailboat for two decades, and raising a child there, P.'s wife forced him (probably under threat of divorce) to buy land and build a house. P.'s now up to his eyeballs in debt and the incomplete hulk of a steel boat he has been building at great expense for the last decade continues to rust in a storage yard. He is miserable and his only joy, apparently, comes from bringing misery to others.
Other than his paranoia, narcissistic delusions of grandeur and propensity for whining, however, P. is a great guy.
I can always retreat into the world created by H.P. Lovecraft. The other night I finished "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" and last night read the "Silver Key." There is some good stuff contained the introductory paragraphs of "The Silver Key," written in 1926:
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.
So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.
In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.
Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.
Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they would not have understood his mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher could, and they were long dead.
Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin--veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.
It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above their own level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.
Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged where two had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dreams.
Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bothered to keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in his early boyhood--purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.
With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years those slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every--day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome imminence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.
Good stuff. Seeing the universe for the formless mess that it is and choosing one's own fantasies. My relationship with Jennifer certainly seems like a fantasy. We had dinner at a pasta place with my parents and brother G. last night. G. is leaving for New Zealand tomorrow. After dinner Jen and I headed back to my place & the nest. I was surprised when my usually un-vocal cat uttered an excited meow when he saw Jennifer lying in the nest before the fire and demanded that she pet him. That's another thing about P.- he hates cats and has little love for any animals (although he takes immense pride in the fact that all (he says) dogs like him). We talked of engagement rings (she wants something plain... oh, she is so wonderful!), made out to the point of mutual orgasm and slept spooned together before the fire until 23:00 when I drove her home.
Back to Lovecraft, though, I encountered an article with a scathingly accurate, but reluctantly enthusiastic & admiring, analysis of his fiction:
Master of disgust
H.P. Lovecraft built his reputation as America's greatest bad writer on a loathsome edifice of unspeakable, hideous filth whose nauseating tendrils reach into the nightmarish depths of hyperbole.
By Laura Miller
February 12, 2005 | "From the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent," reads the first line of the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Shunned House," but chances are Lovecraft, who died in 1937, wouldn't have appreciated the irony of his present position as American literature's greatest bad writer. There are two camps on the subject of the haunted bard of Providence, R.I., and his strange tales of cosmic terror. One, led by the late genre skeptic Edmund Wilson, dismisses him as an overwriting "hack" who purveyed "bad taste and bad art." The other, led by Lovecraft scholar and biographer S.T. Joshi, hotly rises to Lovecraft's defense as an artist of "philosophical and literary substance."
The second camp seems to have scored a solid point with the publication of "H.P. Lovecraft: Tales," a new collection from the Library of America, a publisher specializing in "preserving America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes featuring authoritative texts." Lovecraft's champions may comfort themselves with the fact that there is, as yet, no Library of America volume devoted to Edmund Wilson's work.
But ambivalence remains, even on the home team. In an interview with Salon, Stephen King characterized his predecessor as best read by teenagers and other people "living in a state of total sexual doubt." One writer I know, a winner of the World Fantasy Award and recipient of a trophy shaped like a bust of Lovecraft, will insist, when asked, that the statuette is of Jacques Cousteau. Perhaps most tellingly, even the celebrity author brought in to write the notes for the Library of America collection, horror novelist Peter Straub ("Ghost Story"), confessed to Publishers Weekly that Lovecraft had "only a minimal influence" on him and that during his 20s, "being very literary and self-conscious about it," he had written Lovecraft off as inferior.
But whether or not Lovecraft was a bad, a great or (more sensibly) a worthwhile writer is in some ways beside the point. For readers of a certain inclination, his tales are fascinating and addictive. He has a sizable following, manifesting itself in everything from countless fan sites to role-playing games to praise from such notable admirers as critic (and Library of America editor in chief) Geoffrey O'Brien, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, and composer-musician Stephin Merritt, of the Magnetic Fields.
Perhaps the most curious thing about Lovecraft is that much of what aficionados love about his work is exactly those things his detractors list as faults. Take, for example, the fact that while Lovecraft is usually described as a forefather of modern horror fiction, his stories are, to put it bluntly, not very scary. Wilson complained, with perfect justification, that Lovecraft ladled on the frightful adjectives and adverbs when describing -- or even just hinting at -- the nightmarish realizations that typically confront his protagonist at a tale's climax. In "The Lurking Fear," the narrator, recounting his sensations as he is about to discover something awful, explains, "I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time."
Lovecraft's narrators routinely rave about the "hideous," "monstrous" and "blasphemous" nature of their revelations. Wilson went on, again quite reasonably, to observe, "Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words -- especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus." That octopus crack is a particularly low blow, since the most celebrated of Lovecraft's stories and novels partake of what has been dubbed the Cthulhu Mythos, an alternative mythology involving an enormous and malevolent being whose tentacled head resembles a cephalopod.
In classic form, a Lovecraft tale begins with a narrator explaining that ordinarily he'd never impart the terrifying secrets he is about to relate, but some urgent cause compels him. Initially, apart from the occasional allusion to "unmentionable" horrors, the voice is relatively calm, authoritative and rational. Often the story is presented as a semi-scientific or semi-official report, compiled from multiple partial accounts. The story's hero encounters some mystery -- a strangely blighted plot of farmland, a friend or relative's research into bizarre and secretive religious cults, nasty goings-on among the residents of a small New England town, etc. -- and in the process of investigating it has his entire conception of the universe overthrown.
What Lovecraft's typical protagonist ultimately discovers, underneath the placid surface of conventional reality, is the existence of heretofore unknown "gods" and other less exalted but equally unpleasant beings. Important figures in the mythos include Cthulhu ("The Great Sleeper"), Yog-Sothoth ("The Lurker on the Threshold"), Shub-Niggurath ("The Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young"), Hastur ("The Unspeakable One"), the ever-popular Nyarlathotep ("The Crawling Chaos") and the supreme entity, Azathoth, a "blind, idiot god," who, we are told, resides at the center of the universe where he/it "gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes."
Lovecraft intended this pantheon as a metaphor for mankind's harsh encounter with the mindless, mechanical universe unveiled by modern science at the turn of the century. Extensively self-educated, he took a keen interest in science (this makes the scientific passages in his stories particularly convincing) and wrote about astronomy, chemistry and other fields for newspapers and journals. "All my tales," he wrote, "are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large."
The great size, tremendous age and general indifference to humanity of Lovecraft's invented gods is meant to be terrifying in the same way that the contemplation of the infinite and empty reaches of space were to a Western culture shaking off the comforts of religion. Lovecraft intended Cthulhu and company to be utterly alien -- hence the unpronounceable name, the writhing tentacles, and the wonderful detail that the architecture of Cthulhu's city, R'lyeh (usually sunk to the bottom of the ocean, but briefly emerging in "The Call of Cthulhu"), is based on a non-Euclidean geometry that is "loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." Lovecraft's human characters, when afforded a glimpse of such things, tend to "scream and scream and scream," faint or go stark raving mad.
The truth, however, is that hardly any reader finds Cthulhu frightening. In fact, by all indications, the public is very fond of the creature. You can check in regularly at the Cthulhu for President site ("Home Page for Evil"), purchase a cuddly plush Cthulhu or behold the adventures of Hello Cthulhu, a cross between Lovecraft's "gelatinous green immensity" and the adorable, big-eyed Sanrio cartoon character. Sauron never inspired this kind of affection.
Cthulhu isn't scary partly because it's difficult to imagine the unimaginable, and partly because it's hard to convey the terror of limitless nothingness via an entity that, however bizarre, is nevertheless something. Then there's the stylistic problem: The language Lovecraft uses to describe this and other horrors is so overwrought that the words themselves distract you from the subject. "The Lurking Fear," a story about a man who unearths a tribe of cannibalistic "dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes" holed up in a decrepit Catskills mansion, culminates in a hysterical, hallucinatory outpouring that makes Edgar Allan Poe sound like Jane Austen:
"Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scenes; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ..."
This is, as Wilson protested, too much, and yet it is just what the Lovecraft fan lives for, and chortles over and quotes with glee to other fans. Without a doubt, a significant part of Lovecraft's appeal for today's readers is camp. And, as Susan Sontag famously pointed out, true camp is a blend of mockery and love.
To be fair, if the sheer verbiage of Lovecraft's stories does occasionally bog things down, most of his tales maintain the suspense necessary to all pulp fiction. (Lovecraft originally published, when his stories were accepted, in the early pulp magazines of the 1920s.) There is a delicious and inimitable inevitability to the progression of these tales, from the sober first line ("From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceeding singular person") to the florid, thesaurus-taxing convulsions of the denouement (once these were rendered in italics; that format has not been reproduced in the Library of America edition).
Still, the combination of purple prose and ripping yarns isn't enough to earn Lovecraft's work the immortality it has genuinely attained. There is a ferocious imaginative power driving these tales, and all the more so for being, to cop a favorite Lovecraftian word, unwholesome. In the Freud-crazed '50s and '60s it became fashionable to denounce Lovecraft's fiction as "neurotic," to which the only conceivable reply is: Duh. How could anyone think of presenting such an observation as an insight when neurosis lies palpitating on the surface of the work? These tales are veritable carnivals of anxiety, repression and rage; that's the source of their appeal. They aren't in any sense healthy, but then neither is the poetry of Baudelaire.
The kernel of Lovecraft's neurosis is a hopeless tangle of sex, race and bodily decay, fed by the tragedies and frustrations of his private life. He was the scion of an old New England family (he boasted of coming from "pure" English stock) that plunged from affluence into genteel poverty during his childhood. His parents both suffered from mental illness (his father's was possibly syphilitic in origin) and as a teenager he endured a nervous breakdown that interfered with his schooling and any conventional socialization. He was tall, thin, pale and extremely bookish, the pet and the target of a mother who was both smothering and critical, particularly of his physical appearance. A brief marriage to an older woman eventually fell apart and after a disastrous try at living in New York, he retired to his native and beloved Providence to live with two elderly aunts.
Lovecraft's biography offers some clues as to why his fiction isn't particularly good at inspiring fear but can powerfully convey another emotion: disgust. The revulsion tends to constellate around smaller details, usually associated with biological forces gone wrong. The doings in "The Shunned House" involve ghostly manifestations and a spectacular possession scene, but the sole detail that reliably provokes a shudder is the diseased "white fungeous growths" that sprout in the house's accursed cellar; they rot quickly and, when cut by the narrator's shovel, ooze a "viscous yellow ichor." The "singular person" detained in the insane asylum in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is described as having skin in which "the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit."
In what even Lovecraft considered his most successful story, "The Colour out of Space," the narrator learns what happened to an unfortunate farmer and his family after a mysterious meteorite lands near their well. The crops looked lush but turned out to be bitter and inedible. The vegetation took on a strange, unearthly color similar to that of a disturbing "globule" found inside the meteorite. Then it began to turn gray, dry and crumbly. The farmer's wife went mad and had to be confined to the attic. The livestock was struck with an affliction in which "certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shriveled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages -- and death was always the result -- there would be a greying and turning brittle."
As Joyce Carol Oates has written, "The Colour out of Space" succeeds in creeping us out where much of Lovecraft's fiction fails because it is "subtly modulated" instead of merely sensational. A whisper works much better than a shriek. The story also feels closer to the heart of Lovecraft's own fears than some of its more cosmic brethren. Although the parallel to radiation poisoning seems obvious, "The Colour out of Space" was written in 1927 and really reflects a more deeply rooted dread of contamination, disease and degeneration. These are the predominant motifs in Lovecraft's imaginative life.
The ugliest way this preoccupation appears in Lovecraft's fiction is in his depiction of nearly everyone not of upper-class Anglo-Saxon descent. The Library of America collection includes "The Horror at Red Hook," the tale of a policeman's efforts to get to the bottom of cult activities in a section of Brooklyn (a poor immigrant neighborhood where Lovecraft himself had lived). The investigation leads him from meditations on the "swarthy, sin-pitted faces" of the inhabitants to a plunge into feverish visions of subterranean devil worship. He perceives these visions to be "the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding."
It was race mixing in particular that seemed to most horrify Lovecraft. His fiction is rife with scenarios of evolution working in reverse, human beings mating with fish people and producing revolting "mongrels." He clung to the idea of himself as a holdover from a past era, an 18th century "gentleman." It's the kind of comforting fantasy common in old families who have nothing left to distinguish themselves but their breeding, but it's inexcusable in someone who claimed to place his ultimate faith in science. Like a lot of people who proudly declare themselves to inhabit the territory of pure reason, Lovecraft had difficulty policing the borders.
At root, all of Lovecraft's phobias seemed to come down to an elemental dread of the human body: the tentacles and gaping abysses with their obvious genital associations (hence Stephen King's comment), reproduction's disorderly tendency toward mutation and of course the horror writer's primal muse -- the death and decay that lie in store for every living thing. If not all of us share the specific racial and sexual manifestations of that dread, we all feel some version of it. Lovecraft, in his fiction at least, abandoned himself to it with a kind of warped gallantry.
If Lovecraft, unlike Poe or King, hasn't the psychological acuity to get under our skin and make us feel real fear, he does offer us the spectacle of his own unfettered morbidity. And as part of the irony that Lovecraft detected in all great horrors, that morbidity proved to be spectacularly fecund. The energy of his psychopathology fueled the creation of the vast, visionary Cthulhu Mythos, an invention big enough for other writers and artists to crawl into, inhabit and expand upon. There's exhilaration in witnessing that energy allowed to run loose, without shame, without self-consciousness and without limit. Which is not to say it's healthy, let alone wholesome. No, I wouldn't call it wholesome at all. |
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| Another big update. |
[Jan. 24th, 2007|07:03 am] |
I find the biggest problem I am having with this whole being-in-a-relationship thing is that I am losing, to a certain extent, my morbid sense of futility.
I guess that's why my posting frequency has been slacking off. Just read some of my posts from a year ago this week. I have not truly changed. That cynicism, that negativity still seethes within me. Now I have that wondrous thing I often considered but doubted that I would find- love. Jen and I are so in love it is silly. We spend every evening and day-off together. I never would have suspected that anyone could enjoy my company so much or that I could enjoy theirs equally as well.
In the evenings or on free days at my place our primary activity is to lie together nude in our "nest," a mass of pillows and blankets pitched on a air-mattress on my living-room floor before the fireplace. We can spend unlimited hours in there snuggling, talking, laughing, and sleeping in one-another's arms. Jennifer is so incredible. Although we have done just about everything else but, we have not had coitus. We both know that condoms break or come off in the throes of passion... that there is no 100% reliable method of birth control, and even while we bring each-other to orgasm by just rubbing the sensitive parts of our anatomies against each-other we have not yet given in to passion and achieved penetration. The woman has a rational mind at least equal to my own in its staying power.
For historical purposes- last Weds. night we did take-out from a local supermarket and ate back at my place, Thurs. we went to a pasta-joint Jen suggested (and ended up back at my place). On Friday I had dinner with Jen and her mother (Jen's father being out of town). We snuggled a bit on her parents' living room couch, but I begged off early (around 22:00) as I had to get home and get my private's frock, fatigue hat and rifle accouterments polished and ready for the following day. Back at home I also used my rubber stamp kit to create a postmark for a period-style letter I had written earlier in the day to Jen and whose envelope I had graced with a period address and affixed a reproduction stamp to:
Miss Jennifer R---r
B-----t
Jan. 19
My beloved Jennifer,
Your absence compels me to write a few lines in the hope that they shall convey the love I feel for you yet am unable to express in person at the moment. I am trusting to our mutual friend Silas, who is stationed at the Fort, to bring you this letter. If you are indeed reading these words then I know I was right in trusting Sergeant Merriwether to serve as my courrier
My darling, I love you more than my poor pen can tell. Too long have I gone without seeing your smile. Too long have I gone without the feeling of your hand in mine. How much longer, I wonder, must I endure without embracing you once more and holding you within my arms again?
I trust this letter finds you well and flourishing despite the winter's chill. I trust also that your parents are doing fine, too. Hopefully your father's travels were uneventful and his business succesful. Please do give my regards to your mother and extend to her my heartfelt thanks for all the many kindnesses she has shown me.
Even though I must soon close, please know that I shall never cease to think of you. You are always foremost in my thoughts and feelings, so please believe me to be,
Lovingly and Sincerely,
Yours,
C---- B-----
Finally turning I, I awoke early Saturday and donned my warlike gear. Jen picked me up in her Tahoe shortly before 08:00 and drove us up to the Fort. I gave her the code to the secured parking area, we parked, and then alighted and hiked the half-mile-plus up to the Fort. I was carrying my M1855 rifle musket and Jen's chair, Jen was carrying all her signal apparatus. Jen was also dressed in her male persona... which was somewhat off-putting. At the Fort we greeted other reenactors as the arrived and marveled at what some of them were wearing. Chuck turned up presently and confided in Jen and I that he has started seeing someone new. I had been hoping that he'd strikes something up with M.R., the senior ranger at the site... but M.R., as far as I know, remains a confirmed bachelorette. I did take great pride in introducing M.R. to Jen. Introductions and greetings aside... I did a great deal of nothing the rest of the day. The infantry companies drilled on the parade ground, the brass band played from the Fort's second tier... the field music of fifes and drums shrilled as the band marched in and out of the sally port. The event was well attended, both by reenactors and by the public. Jen and I did manage to sneak off for the occasional kiss, and, when in public, I sometimes set my arm on her in a brotherly, respectful fashion typical of the mid 19th century. Chuck kept ragging on us about the joys of marriage and derided me for not yet putting a ring on Jen's finger. Jen's mother looked on in bemused approval. A little before 17:00, after a flag-lowering ceremony that saw me drawn up in the thin rank of artillerists and presenting arms to the colors, Jen, myself and her cousin K. headed down to her Tahoe which we boarded and waited for several other vehicles to form up behind us. Jen then led our ersatz convoy on a whirlwind procession across the old military reservation and the suburb beyond it. Somehow, after some improvised navigating by the three of us in the Tahoe, we arrived at a fashionable Italian place where our artillery column had dinner- all in uniform! Jen even took the opportunity to don her fancy blue cravat that shows her eyes to their best advantage. After dinner our group broke up and Jen and I headed back to my place where we stripped down and cuddled a bit before she headed off.
I bunked down with my cat for a few hours then it was up again and after washing and dressing I drove to Jen's folks' place. After greeting Jen she, myself and her parents (plus the family dog) hopped into mom's Suburban and headed south for the fertile plains of an agricultural area 100 miles or so away. Out in the farmland is the ranch where the artillery club stores is cannons, tack and the teams of horses what pulls 'em. The four of us were there to attend the annual membership meeting for the club. Went well. About forty rank and file showed up, including several we had seen the day before and had dinner with. Mostly it was sitting around in a warehouse-cum-auditorium listening to the club's president and the artillery commander speak. Jen and I were hand in hand the whole time. At one point we broke for lunch, which was pot-luck except for a tri-tip barbecue the ranch owner put on. Good stuff.
After the meeting we hopped back in the Suburban and drove back, stopping along the way at this really scary flea market and antique mall. Back at Jen's parents' Jen and I were sent off to rent a movie for the evening's entertainment. The rental place seemed to have nothing in their "new releases" section except for soft-core Lesbian porn and slasher horror flicks. Great. I stumbled across a foreign film I had heard good reviews of, a movie which regarded a fictional encounter between Scottish, French and German troops in the trenches of WWI during the Christmas of 1914. Had a heavy-handed antiwar message that appealed to me greatly, and dovetailed nicely with the pacifist statements I had uttered to Jennifer during our drive home from the Fort the day before. Jennifer was not sure about my choice (hmph!) so she grabbed the HBO miniseries on Elizabeth I... only she unknowingly grabbed part II by mistake without part I. Back home Jen's mom ordered pizza and we sat around watching the foreign flick which was really good and appealed strongly to Jen's mother's theatrical aesthetics. Afterwards we watched the second part of Elizabeth. Not bad.
Afterwards Jen and I staid up a little and made-out, before I stumbled off for home and my cat. Next day Jen came over and we immediately hopped into my 'nest.' We snuggled for hours with the occasional orgasm then emerged for lunch, buying sandwiches at a supermarket and then back to the nest. At some point during the afternoon I showed her an old home moview of a gladiatorial combat my brother G. and I once staged with brother J. filming. On the same tape was a documentary on gladiators which we also watched. After the show, as the sun set and the room went dark, Jen and I started a delirious dialogue in redneck hick voices the body of which is not to be described. I ordered some food to be delivered for dinner, after which we were back in the nest until after 23:00 when Jen departed.
Yesterday I pounded a newsletter together at work and chased down various clerical details. Jen texted me at one point and invited me to dinner with her and her parents which I accepted. After work I pedaled my bike home, being accosted by that homeless woman who lives under the highway overpass, but I just kept riding. At home I changed, washed some accumulated dishes in my sink, fed the cat, and hopped in the Jeep. I drove to Jen's and spent a delightful evening with her and her parents... Jen and I ending up asleep on the couch. After 23:00 we roused ourselves and I headed for home. |
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| Treasure Island |
[Jan. 17th, 2007|07:42 am] |
One thing I forgot to include in my last post was that after Jen left on Sat. night I finally set up the VCR-DVD recorder I got from my parents for X-Mas '05. For the initial run I dubbed the 1989 Turner production of "Treasure Island" from VHS to a DVD-R. It has been awhile since I watched the Turner TI... I posted the following review on IMDB on 2/19/05:
Most film adaptations do horrible things to the books they are based on. The 1950's Disney "Treasure Island" set the tradition that continues up to "Pirates of the Carribean" that pirates wore ridiculous costumes of garish technicolor hue and spoke with preposterous accents. Robert Louis Stevenson intended TI to be a realistic portrayal of pirates in the 1700's. Stevenson's pirates are not swashbuckling heroes or buffoonish villains. Instead they are shown to be a rather pathetic and desperate set of men who, though they have undoubtedly victimized others, are victims themselves of the discriminatory social class system of the age. We see all this through the innocent eyes of Jim Hawkins, the young son of an innkeeper. Jim witnesses both the hard lot of the common seaman with its poor living conditions and harsh discipline, as well as the amiable simple-mindedness of the wealthy Squire Trelawny and his feudal collection of loyal servants.
The Heston film does a superb job of capturing the book. It features as the central prop the sailing ship "Bounty" (as the "Hispaniola"), built for the 1962 MGM 'Mutiny on the "Bounty"' and which was owned by Turner at the time. Paying intense attention to detail, the film is set in gorgeous locations both in Britain and Jamaica. The cast of British stage actors collectively deliver a flawless performance. The class conflict is subtly but firmly brought home by contrasting the polished and exquisitely dressed Squire and Dr. Livesey, (backed by their eccentric collection of "gentlemen's gentlemen") and the rough pirates with their lower-class accents and cheap, soiled garments. Charleton Heston convincingly portrays an aging Long John Silver who manages to be both menacing and sympathetic. Christian Bale wanders between the two camps with wide-eyed innocence which slowly turns to adult skepticism.
This is one of those films that makes me curse the coming of computer generated effects, because the advent of CGI means movies like this probably won't be made anymore. The fact that they really had to shoot on location, with an actual, fully-functional sailing ship adds tremendously to the realism of the movie. Nowadays a modestly-budgeted for-cable film such as this would most likely be forced to use blue screens and CG effects which would not be nearly the same. An outstanding example of this is the climatic showdown between Jim and Israel Hands as they clamber all over the deck and rigging of the ship. This scene must have been incredibly difficult to shoot on the water in the open with the wind gusting and with deck fittings in the way- not to mention having to film with the camera hoisted up on a mast- but they did it and the result is fantastic. Other technical merits are the way the film was smoothly and unobtrusively edited and the haunting score by the Chieftains.
I was 13 when I first saw this movie on TNT and have adored this film ever since, a feeling reinforced a few years later when the 'Bounty' stopped in a nearby port on a tour and I was able to go aboard her.
While writing this it occurred to me that the film may have had a bigger effect on me than I realized- for the last five years I have been a volunteer docent at a historic fort located on a small island... and a couple of times a year we stage a mock artillery battle with a replica 18th century pirate ship! |
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| Filling a void |
[Jan. 17th, 2007|07:26 am] |
Spent almost every waking hour of last weekend with Jen. Saturday evening I took her to dinner at the "fun" chain-restaurant with antique junk tacked to the walls. The meal was less than pleasurable for Jen, however, as a) her erupting wisdom-tooth was killing her, and b) she was embarrassed to admit that my revelation of my tawdry involvement with Michelle had aroused jealousy in Jen's heart. I kept telling Jen that if anyone was to apologize it was me... but she would not have it, she was incredibly ashamed that she even felt jealous. We ended up back in our "nest" before the fire at my place, but Jen left early because her tooth was killing her. Poor girl.
Sunday a.m. I picked Jen up and at my suggestion we drove down to that wacky Egyptian museum run by a goofy cult. It had been over two-years since my last visit, and I was somewhat surprised to see that they had changed the exhibits around. They same artifacts were on display, they had just been swapped around however in differently-themed galleries.
After our museum visit Jen and I drove back to my neck of the woods, stopping to buy sandwiches at this great little Italian deli not far from my house. We took them back to my place, ate lunch, then ran out again because Jen determined to make me lasagna for dinner. Back at my place I assisted her as best I could in the kitchen... between our cooking-duties we also watched her home videos of various Civil War reenactments and battlefield visits with her parents, taken over the course of the last five-seven years. Jen's lasagne was wonderful, after eating it in our nest while watching videos, we continued to snuggle, view her tapes, and nap until somewhere around 23:00 when I drove her home.
On Monday Jen came over to my place and we hopped right back into the nest. Made-out, watched more of her tapes, then drove over to the greasy spoon for lunch. After lunch Jen suggested we take a walk, which we did, along the shoreline north of my work. We strolled a couple of miles before returning back to my place and our nest. Dinner was left-over lasagna. After our meal, we got to talking, lying there in each-other's arms, mainly about children. Jennifer is scared to death of having kids... but does not want to miss the opportunity either. I feel much the same way, but the question really bothers Jen because, as she puts it, she "is used to having an answer for everything." I laughed gently at that, telling her that was one area in which we are very different, as I am quite used to and comfortable with uncertainty. A little after 23:00 jen drove herself home.
Yesterday, after I spent my day at work making up a modest deposit and running it down to our admin. office, I picked Jen up at her place. Jen said she wanted to do something light for dinner, as her pants were getting tight. I agreed, as I had gone to the Chinese place with the boss for lunch and downed an entire order of chow fun. I suggested this goofy cafeteria-style place that advertises itself as healthy... probably because the food is so bland that there is no way anyone could over-indulge on it. The place is also family-friendly and there were screaming kids all over the place. After dinner we returned to my hovel where we took to the nest. Jen resumed our discussion of children. I chided her at one point saying that for someone who has such serious misgivings about carrying, delivering and raising a child, Jen certainly has devoted a great deal of time thinking about it- and it would be a waste for her not to have a kid.
Jen ultimately raised a point I had not considered regarding her- up to this point in her life her existence has been overshadowed by her mother's strong personality. At 23, Jen is finally and fully ready to have her own life, free from her mother's well-intentioned interference. Although she fears that it is selfish, Jennifer does not want to limit this new-found freedom by taking on the responsibilities of motherhood.
Over the course of the last two-months I have come to appreciate Jen's desire for independence more and more. I first suspected it after our initial mentor-mentoree meeting. More and more it has become clear to me that this desire to escape her mother has colored many of Jen's decisions and inclinations. Jen has no desire to pursue a commercial career... but as such is limited by her finances which have continued to force her to live under her parents' roof. In high school and college Jen intended to ultimately become a nun (a main reason why she never gave child-rearing much thought before), and work at a Catholic school. My Kierkegaardian streak thrills at the thought that on some level Jen would have been making use of a teleological suspension of the ethical- her commitment to love and serve God would trump her commitment to love and serve her mother. Indeed, Jen told me that when she told her mother of her intention to take vows her mother became quite upset and they had a series of heated arguments on the subject. I was initially surprised to hear that Jen's Catholic mother was not supportive of Jen's calling... but it makes sense when viewed from the aspect of Jen abandoning her nuclear family for the larger family of the Lord. Jen ultimately decided not to take vows. Still wanting to serve others, and escape her mother, Jen began to pursue a career in firefighting. This line of work would offer excitement and the satisfaction of serving- and Jen would be able to bunk in the firehouse while on-duty, again distancing herself from her mother.
While we were on our drive in the mountains on New Year's Day, Jen told me that she was going so stir-crazy at home last summer that she seriously considered moving to the area and taking a job with at a local historic park. That cynical side of me that I cannot suppress wonders if Jen loves me just because I am the wedge that might finally split her from her parents. Her mother adores me, has even frequently half-jokingly stated that she would love to "adopt" me. I wonder how Jen would feel after being married to me for any length of time? Would she come to resent me and desire to be free of me as well?
In all fairness I ought to state that Jen's mother is a wonderful, intelligent, friendly and all around fantastic person. I think that only makes it harder for Jen as it is so difficult to resent her mother. The other night at one point Jen stated rather acidly that her parents only adopted her to fill some void in their own lives. Jen's adoption (as an infant) has left her with some deep-seated issues. I believe that some of Jen's ambivalence for parenthood and over-rationalizing of child-rearing comes from the knowledge that her birth-parents (whom she has never met and has no desire to see) conceived her so carelessly. Likewise, her adopted mother has always treated Jen like the precious and long-hoped for gift that she was... perhaps (and this is merely my surmise) more as a treasured possession than as an individual who should be raised to make her own way in the world.
Weekend before last when we were in the capitol Jen mentioned something she saw in the news about the parents of a brain-dead girl who had the child's sexual organs surgically removed so that the girl would always be their "little pillow-angel." Jen's disapproval of this activity was outspoken, to say the least. I have begun to wonder if it is because on some level Jen identifies with the girl whose case is an extreme example of the extreme attachment parents can form for their children.
In other news, I have had a few phone-chats with Michelle. On Saturday I called her, she was holed up with her ex-junky ex(?)-boyfriend someplace. We chatted a bit. Michelle was still bleeding vaginally from her miscarriage, but had not yet sought medical care. She sounded like she was stoned out of her mind. Evidently her dalliance with her boy-toy Ray is over as he was evidently abusive towards Michelle. Yesterday I called her again, the ex-junky was driving her up to the city so she could visit her latest sugardaddy. We talked a little bit, but then her ex-junky got mad at her and she had to ring-off. Lovely.
I fiddled around with the Club Dumas page of my website. Changed the text a little bit and moved all the graphics to a new directory to confute all the pirates who have linked to them from their myspace & c. pages. |
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| Vikings and Cougars from the Id |
[Jan. 13th, 2007|08:19 am] |
Life keeps rolling on. Weds. night I picked Jen up, we had dinner at an Italian place halfway between our homes, then I took her back to my place where we made our nest before the fire, made out, and napped in each-other's arms. Thursday evening I accompanied Jennifer and her parents to the elementary school both Jen and her mother work at. Jen's mom, a science teacher, was holding the science-fair. The science-class's mascot is a full-size articulated plastic skeleton known affectionately as "Sal." At the end of the hall where Jen, her father and I were hanging out was a trophy case featuring a Viking helmet as the school's mascot is a Viking. My suggestion was to put the helmet on Sal ala Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armor." Neither Jen nor her father were familiar with that work so, on a nearby internet-connected terminal, Jen brought up the poem. I also explained the how the discovery of a real "skeleton in armor" in a river in Massachusetts in the mid 1800's inspired Longfellow, and how in the poem he makes reference to the cryptical Newport Tower which, depending on who you ask, was either a windmill built by Benedict Arnold's grandfather, an ancient Portuguese or Chinese lighthouse, and/or evidence of Viking/Saxon/etc. settlement in pre-Colombian North America. I grabbed the keyboard and brought up what I could find on the tower. Thus passed the time until the end of the fair when the four of us went to dinner at this fancy restaurant with a really hoppin' bar. After dinner Jen and I snuggled a bit on the couch in her parents' living room before I headed home.
Yesterday I had lunch with Dad at the greasy spoon. It was my brother G.'s birthday, but he was not sure if he wanted to be taken to dinner or anything. I told my Dad that if G. did want to go out I'd love to come but wanted to know if it was okay for me to bring Jennifer. About 15:30 I get a text from Jennifer that she has a toothache and has made an emergency appointment with the dentist at 16:30. I was immediately was overcome with concern, and buried myself in work in the office. As I am getting ready to leave work late around 17:15, my Dad calls, says that he, my mother and brother G. are meeting for dinner at their favorite Japanese place at 17:30. I hop on my bike and, aided by a fierce arctic headwind, pedal like mad for home, reaching there right about 17:30. Foregoing changing, I just threw my brown leather jacket over my work-clothes. Just as I pull the Jeep out onto the driveway Jen texts me. I call her back, she's okay, a wisdom tooth is just coming in, so I invite her to dinner with us and she accepts. Next I call Dad, fortunately Mom and brother G. have not yet arrived at the restaurant. I drive the six-or-whatever miles to Jen's place, arriving there a little before 18:00, then head for the restaurant, arriving there around 18:20. My family had kindly just had appetizers and waited for us to arrive before ordering.
Dinner went well. I gave G. a card which had been mailed to my place from his 'cougar,' this crazy middle-aged woman who is pretty much stalking him and from the surname in the phonebook must have thought that G. lived at my duplex. I also gave my Mom Jen's mother's card as she (Jen's mother) wants to meet-up with my mother and talk grandchildren. Jen and I regaled the assembly with a narrative of the ball weekend. My parents were somewhat under the weather and had to excuse themselves as they were about to fall asleep at the table.
Jen and I went back to my place, where I had not stopped to close the windows when I had passed through after work, so it was freezing cold. I closed said windows, turned on the heat and built a fire, both Jen and I stripping down and building our nest. Then we hopped in and shivered together until the room and ourselves warmed up. During our pillowtalk session I finally told Jen most of the sordid details of my involvement with Michelle... including the harrowing incident that launched this journal when I was prepared to shoot Michelle's sugardaddy (in self-defense, of course). Jen forgave me for all that... I think in some crazy way my foolish quest for nobility may appeal to her. She also said that if Michelle needs me that I can go on being her friend and Jen won't be jealous. Jen is so amazing! Shortly before midnight we dressed and I drove Jen home. Fell asleep reading The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.
I tidied up my website a bit. I still have not told Jen about it. From the index page I deleted the links to the Club Dumas engravings and that fatuous article I did on Civil War uniforms as those would be most objectionable to her. Also, on the IMDB board for "Forbidden Planet" I encountered a moron who dislikes FP because it is chock full of Darwin's "Descent of Man" theory... which I just don't get... so I posted the following:
Call me uninquisitive if you will but I don't really care if humans and apes had a common ancestor or evolved separately and then interbred. On that note, I don't see what this discussion has to do with "Forbidden Planet."
Roquefort, as I understand it, you see "Forbidden Planet" to be offensive as it is full of references to the "Descent of Man Theory," which you described thusly:
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The Descent of Man theory , formed in 1871, told us (A) that apes and humans have a common ancestor, and that (B) " the civilized races of man (Caucasians)will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world." ... The Descent of Man theory predicts "man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian".
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I find your connection between this theory and the movie to be confusing. The movie proposes that all sentient life, regardless of its origins, is subject to the same principles of psychology- expressly the Freudian concept of the "Id". I don't see how that touches on the argument of whether or nor apes and humans have the same ancestors or if they evolved separately.
Other than the underlying presumption that all sentient life has a vestigial "Id" left-over from early in its evolution and Morbius' throw-away sneer about an "ape's brain" the film makes no reference to humanity's origins. Nor is the goal of either the passengers of the original colony ship Bellerophon (whose namesake was ironically the Greek hero who slayed the Chimera) or the military crew of the C-57-D to subject native savages to European/American culture for by the time the human explorers from Earth came along Altair-4 had been uninhabited by intelligent life for millennia.
The fictional Krell are described as having possessed a culture technologically and ethically superior to any mankind has known and in the lab Dr. Morbius points out how at best his boosted mind makes him a "low-grade moron by Krell standards." However this does not, Roquefort, meet your quotation of the "Descent of Man" theory which looked for "man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian". The Krell are not really "men" as they are not the product of the same evolutionary processes (be it separate or intertwined with apes) as humans. Indeed, the long-extinct Krell race is expressly stated to have evolved previously, separately and differently than humanity (note the triangular doorways!) It is neither stated outright nor tacitly implied that the Krell seeded the Earth with life, either- just that the Krell picked up biological specimens such as the deer and tiger on Earth and brought them back to Altair-4... which tends to run contrary to your statement, Roquefort, that "We got a dose [in "Forbidden Planet"] of panspermia (life being transported to seed life on new planets)". I honestly don't see what panspermia has to do with the "Descent of Man" theory, either.
Correct me if I am wrong, Roquefort, but it is my impression that you scorn the "Descent of Man" theory, and by extension "Forbidden Planet," in part because the theory is caucasian-centric and justifies world domination by Western civilization. I don't necessarily disagree with your attitude towards the "Descent of Man," but I just do not see it in the movie which continuously belittles the place humanity (caucasian or otherwise) occupies in the universe and the self-important view we have of ourselves and our institutions. Far from justifying the way "civilized races of man (Caucasians)will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world", instead the film presents a cautionary tale regarding the hubris of believing that we, either as solitary individuals or as a collective society, can safely control vast amounts of power.
The point the film is trying to make is that neither the mighty Krell nor us puny humans (regardless of race) are free from our base subconscious instincts towards violence, no matter how noble our conscious intentions are. In the 1950's this cautionary message reflected the contemporary uneasiness regarding the looming threat of nuclear war which very well could have exterminated the human race (and may yet).
It is also not necessary to list, as you do Roquefort, all the religious/literary references contained in the film as evidence that it reflects Western cultural values. The movie is, after all, a product of Western culture and as such it was intended to reflect the values of its Western audience.
The main Western concept espoused in the film is not "Descent of Man" but Freud's concept of the Id. I can understand debating whether or not Freud, and hence the movie, was correct in believing that we each have a primitive Id in our subconscious and the further supposition that any other non-terrestrial lifeforms must also have Ids, but why invoke the uber-cerebral "Forbidden Planet" in a piddling argument over whether humans and apes had a common ancestor or evolved separately? |
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| Another day |
[Jan. 10th, 2007|05:32 pm] |
Spent yesterday evening at Jen's. Had dinner with her and her folks, then we cuddled on the couch 'till 2300. Before dinner, Jen's mother mentioned that their dog was limping. I checked his paw and saw that this rather unattractive benign growth on it had torn. Poor little guy.
I have reserved a hotel room for our reenacting club's winter lecture series. Its a funky little bed-and-breakfast type place. The only other place in town, a Best Western was booked. Oh well. $119/night ain't too bad. My experience is that it is hard to find anything decent for less than $100/night. The best I could do at the Best Western, if they had rooms, would be about $107.00.
Spoke with Michelle on my cell yesterday. She's still not doing too well. She was not feeling very well so she went to the hospital... turns out she is 4 months pregnant and was having a miscarriage. I asked her how she could be four months pregnant and not know it... she said she was still having her period. I said maybe she has taken the "plan B" pill so many times that it is messing with her hormones... she agreed that might be a possibility as she has taken that pill somewhere in the order of 20 times! She lamented the fact that she has such a high libido and how she and her bad-boy boyfriend are relying on the withdrawal method.
I talked to her last week as well... at that point she was even more negative. Her ex-junky ex-boyfriend was stalking her, her car is dead, she was out of cash, had quit her stripping job but was waiting for the train so she could go up to the city to "meet a client." |
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| Ball Weekend |
[Jan. 9th, 2007|05:53 pm] |
Thursday at work I backed-up the database... having to play around with our CD-Rom drive... and I set-up our new fax machine... oohh. That night Jen brought Mexican and we dined at my place before practicing a waltz and stripping down/snuggling in front of the fireplace. Friday a.m. I drove to Jen's (arriving about 0900) and left the Exploder there, transferring my heavy art. sgt's frock, Hardee hat & duffel bag into Jen's Chevy Tahoe... after I shame-facedly admitted that I was afraid to drive the Exploder in its present condition. Jen and I then hit the road, her driving, taking about 2 hrs. to reach the state capitol. At the capitol we had some time to kill until check-in at the hotel, so on my suggestion we headed for the historic "old town" and wandered around amidst a fierce bone-chilling wind howling down from the surrounding snow-clad mountains. We toured the military museum, with a 80 year-old-plus guide who was an old Marine aviator who flew out of Henderson Field in Guadacanal during WWII and off a carrier in Korea. Jen and I bit our tongues as much as possible while he muddled his way through Civil War history. At one point, standing before a cannon limber, he rhetorically asked "can you imagine what it would have been like to ride on this thing?" To which Jen responded that she did not have to remember as she has ridden on horse-drawn limbers many times at reenactments. Other than that, there was not much to remark on of our visit to the military museum... except for my admiration of a reproduction of an old Spanish lancer's uniform. I told Jen how they had similar repros at the old fort and how I always wanted to wear one and do a lost-lancer impression speaking my broken Spanish... err, maybe not.
We wandered back through the preserved and replicated buildings, strolling down the riverbank past the reconstructed steamboat landing with its early 20th century paddlewheeler permanently moored there as a hotel. At the end of the park we reached my favorite of the area's many museums- the "discovery" one that interpreted the region's history for people of all ages. Jen had never been inside, so I bought us tickets and she admitted herself to being impressed. Afterwards we recovered her Tahoe and took lunch at a cheap chain diner not far away. We then tried the hotel and were able to check-in early. In our room, which overlooked the overgrown far-bank of the river, we quickly found the king-size bed and settled down for a marathon make-out/snuggle session (the only blight on the weekend's amorous activities being that jen was having her period and her nether regions were strictly off-limits). After sundown we finally roused ourselves to go find dinner, walking back to the historic district where Jen had suggested an eatery. While strolling along the boardwalk arm-in-arm, A woman waved at us from inside the restaurant. She proved to be one of Jen's friends from the reenacting club... and she was quite surprised to see the two of us together. We took our meal together (at one point while Jen was in the washroom I checked my phone messages and found that the garage was stymied with the jeep because the fuel-rail was cracked and they could not find a replacement part), then returned to the hotel, stopping to visit Jen's mother who had also taken a suite there. Jen's mom was frantically mending dress-components and ironing petticoats & c. She stopped long enough to load us up with cans of soda, bottles of water, iced tea and apple cider, as well as teabags, a tin of chocolates and some microwaveable popcorn. I was wondering if we were staying for two nights or a month! Jen and I said our goodnights and returned to our suite where we were asleep in each other's arms not much after 21:00... if not before!
Good thing, too, as Jen was up again at 0600 and off to have her mother put her hair in rollers. While she was gone I roused myself, put a barrier coat of epoxy on the heels of my old brogans, took a shower, made a cup of earl grey, and set to polishing the brasswork on my NCO's frock. Jen returned to the wafting odors of epoxy and Nvr-dull. That done, we snuggled/made out some more, until about noon when jen suggested we get some room-service for lunch. This I did, ordering us a pizza. After lunch we finished dressing and headed for the lobby, where we had the valet bring our car around. Also at the curb were Jen's folks who were also waiting for their car. We boarded our respective vehicles, myself driving Jen's Tahoe with her in the passenger seat. We drove across town to the memorial auditorium where the ball was to be held. Jen and I wandered around, trying to find an open door... finally achieving success. Inside we found the ball committee, including the girl we had seen at the restaurant the night before and Jen's folks. All set to work decorating the auditorium, stringing bunting, wrapping faux flower garlands around railings. At one point Jen and I drove (with me at the wheel) over to president S.H.'s house and borrowed his cd-player for the dance-practice. S.H. confirmed an invitation he had extended to us on Monday for dinner and also invited Jen's parents. I drove us back to the auditorium where we finished decorating just as folks started to show up for the ball-practice. The practice went well enough... despite the dance-master's frequent confusion over the steps for certain dances.
After the practice I drove Jen back to the hotel, where we snuggled a little more before dressing for the ball. I threw on my frock and escorted Jen to her parents' room, where her mother had her dress. After jen got all the rollers out of her hair and she donned her ballgown we once again headed for the lobby... turning not a few heads with our garb. Around 17:30 the valet brought up the Tahoe and I drove us to S.H.'s... where we found a bunch of guys in kilt-based outlandish uniforms but no dinner. I let Jen use my cell to text her parents "no dinner," but they still arrived and we just sat around casting curious looks at each-other and our surroundings. As soon as possible we made our exit.
Shortly after 18:00 we arrived at the auditorium, with me again at the wheel... parking in a $15 flat-rate lot. Yikes! We checked in and I beheld the wonder of what some people call ball apparel. I led Jen everywhere by the hand, the two of us caused quite a stir, especially among Jen's admiring female acquaintances.
Jen grumbled about the overpriced catering, mostly desert. She and I had been going a long time on a few slices of pizza! Soon the pageantry of the ball consumed our attention, however. I carried her dance-card, and came near to monopolizing it, except for a couple of waltzes she gave, with my permission, to officers. One to T.S., the future Federal chief of staff, and one to M.F., the outgoing artillery lieutenant whose father, the battery's 1st. Sgt., loudly proclaimed that he was the one who made Jennifer my mentor. Hmph.
All in all I had a ball... so to speak! Among other notable incidents was Jen's father being asked to help form the sword-arch for the debutants at the ball, and Jen and a long talk Jen and I had with the assembled Federal brigade staff. Jen's parents took plenty of pictures of us, and we had a professional photographer working the event take another of the pair of us and one more of Jen and I with her folks. Less pleasant, perhaps, where a few dance-steps I flubbed, Jen's tripping on a soft-spot in the floor... and Jen's mother loosing her petticoats during a waltz-mixer! Perhaps most memorable of all was a conversation with S.H., who rebuked Jen for her e-mail provider's registering her account as "non-existent." I cavalierly declared that I hoped that she existed, for I'd hate to find out that the last two months (the night of the ball marked two months from our first meeting at that cafe for lunch) were all a dream. Jen responded that it could not have been a dream, as neither one of us had gotten much sleep for the last two months. S.H. took this to mean that we had been bumping uglies the whole time, and he got a good laugh out of it, much to Jen's chagrin.
After the ball ended, I helped take down the bunting and then a small group of us ended up at the Chinese restaurant across the street from the ballroom. Altogether there were four couples, Jen and I, her parents, and two other sets who I have long known from events and from their having been guests at Jen's mother's recent holiday parties.
Sometime after 01:00 I drove Jen and I back to the hotel where we were asleep within minutes, once again wrapped in each-other's arms.
Sunday Jennifer and I had a lazy morning in bed... Jennifer went out and snagged some breakfast muffins from the continental-breakfast bar. We finally checked out around 11:00 (the hotel did not charge me for the $18/day parking, hoorah!) and, now with Jen at the wheel, we headed back to her house. Along the way we discussed the history and future of the U.S. and world... my side of the conversation being colored by the dark thoughts I have frequently vented in this journal. Once back, I through my junk in the Exploder and went inside, where Jen and I made out for a bit before Jen drove us in search of lunch in her late grandfather's 1983 Cadillac. After driving over half the county with our sandwiches from a supermarket deli, we parked and ate in a County park. After lunch we returned to her place where we made out a bit on her bed, before her parents came home.
The four of us hung-out together, looking at pictures from the ball on the father's digital camera, before we all piled into Jen's mom's car (Jen and I snuggling in the back seat) and heading up to the swanky restaurant up in the hills which is Jen's mother's favorite place. Jen's father and I had the chicken pasta... Jen had elk... while her mother had the Thai chicken. After dinner we drove back... both ways the iPod Jen's dad had bought for Xmas was playing this crazy Italian dance music... which Jen frequently sang along to even though she hardly knows any Italian. Odd, but cute.
Back home Jen and I headed for our favorite place on the couch, falling asleep together. I finally roused myself sometime before midnight and headed home.
The next day I slept in a bit, finished Lovecraft's "Horror in Red Hook," and did a little laundry, etc. While checking e-mail I saw Jen was on-line so I traded a few instant messages with her. The garage called around 10:00- miraculously they had found a fuel rail and my Jeep was ready to pick up.
I called my father on his cell, he, my mother, and brother G. being in Arizona to watch the BCS championship, and asked if he wanted me to leave the Exploder at the garage. Yes, he did.
I left the house around 10:30, hit the bank and the grocery store, went to a routine dentist's appointment for a cleaning and check-up (teeth look good but the doc is still giving me grief about my refusal to get my wisdom teeth yanked).
It was about noon that I was done with the dentist. I called Jen and picked her up in the Exploder. At my suggestion we stopped for hot-dogs at a little drive-through relatively close to both her place and the garage. After lunch I picked up the Jeep, leaving the Exploder (repair bill on the Jeep- $773- ouch!), and we headed back to my place where we made our "nest" before the fire and cuddled made out, Jen's period being over I tried to make up for lost time with her most feminine of organs. After a three-hour Duraflame log burned itself out, we went for dinner, stopping along the way to feed my parents' old cat. For dinner I chose a cutesy little cafe at a nearby shopping center. Jen insisted on paying half of the bill, declaring vehemently that she never wanted me to think that she was taking advantage of me. After dinner we went back to my place and "burned another log" (translation: we spent another three hours making out and cuddling in front of the fire). Lumpy came down and joined us in our "nest," favoring Jennifer in his choice of person to lay down on.
Around 23:00 I drove Jen back to her place, then returned home. I stayed up a bit doing laundry, watching Letterman and some of the extras on the "Forbidden Planet" dvd, and reading "In The Vault." |
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| Missiles & Eve |
[Jan. 4th, 2007|05:58 pm] |
So... where to begin? Had lunch with the boss & #2 yesterday at this freaky little place the boss knew of, on account of our favorite greasy spoon being closed for an extended holiday break. At work I updated my database and ordered office supplies- including a cheap, new fax machine to replace our superannuated mid 90's model. Yesterday evening I biked home, changed (Lumpy was sound asleep under the covers in the middle of my bed), and drove the Exploder over to pick up Jen. Took Jen to dinner at a fun chain-restaurant whose atmosphere is created by all sorts of antique junk hanging from the walls. On the way back to my place afterwards I impulsively stopped at a 24-hr. pie place and we did desert. Once home we made out, cuddled, and napped in each-other's arms before the fire. She's on the rag, and did not shuck her shorts. At one point I climaxed over her and it was obvious that she has not much experience with ejaculate, being amazed at how it "starched up" the spot on her shorts where it landed.
Around 2300 I drove her home, then came back to my place... almost getting caught by a police-cruiser sitting blacked out by an intersection and evidently remotely-triggering a stop-light to unexpectedly go from green to a quick yellow and red as lone vehicles, such as mine, approached along the near-deserted suburban streets. I was glad that I was able to stop quickly enough.
Back home I finished Jen's book, started reading HPL's "Horror at Red Hook" and sacked out.
Today I rose, performed my ablutions, and tossed a bag full of trash into the Exploder (the garbage schedule has been all messed up by the two recent holidays, so I drove my trash to work and dumped it in a debris box there). At work I spent most the morning setting up the newly-delivered fax machine, then finished updating my database and, during the afternoon, generated the monthly reports we use in our office. Boss and I had lunch at the once-again-open greasy spoon. During the afternoon our dour co-worker P. came in and expressed his serious concern that a makeshift windbreak on the perimeter of our facility could serve as cover for a terrorist to fire missiles at aircraft passing overhead on their descent to a nearby airport. We scoffed at him for his paranoia, #2 asking the semi-rhetorical question of when it has ever been tried to down commercial airliners with shoulder-launched missiles. I said that I knew it had been unsuccessfully attempted in Africa several years ago, but to this verifiable case P. added the TWA flight that went down on the Atlantic seaboard of the U.S. about a decade-or-so ago. I objected that the TSA had ruled the cause of that disaster to be an explosion of fuel-vapors in a prematurely-emptied tank, but P. doggedly stuck to his assertion that some of the debris examined in a second, secret hangar had revealed that it was a missile that brought down the plane. Paranoid much?
I am beginning to think that P. is losing his mind. I don't like to talk to him anymore because for the 10 years I have known him he has constanstly brooded loudly on what he sees to be sinister machinations on the part of our organization... without any real evidence, I might add. For the past half-decade he has been muttering about the secret objectives of the Bush administration... somehow viewing Bush's gross incompetence as an intentional effort to undermine both the U.S. and the world at large. Now he is seeing missle-toting terrorists behind every rock and shadowy conspiracies behind lamentable, yet wholly explicable, accidents.
Speaking of shadowy, Jen and I have been discussing ever-more personal issues. After she asked about my "Miskatonic U." license plate bracket, I gave a terse summary of HPL. She has also informed me of her take-what-you-like, leave-the-rest approach to Catholicism. I can't help but find her spiritual philosophy hopelessly naive. We have also discussed much of the sciences- last night we had a rip-roaring post-orgasm discussion of sexuality. Everything from the mechanics of arousal and orgasm to fetishes to the mating habits of various creatures was discussed. I expressed my dismay at the duckbill platypus- how can a mammal lay eggs? Working up to fever-pitch, as Jen has been bemoaning her period, I jokingly brought up the Fall from Grace and how Eve's punishment for eating of the forbidden fruit was that she and her daughters would forevermore suffer in childbirth... I did not force the issue, but how does that jibe with her view of a loving and compassionate God? What was up with the Tree of Knowledge, anyhow? Jen's response was that Eve was "stupid." I argued that Eve was merely "innocent" as such terms as "stupid" or "wise" did not apply until after the fruit was eaten. Eve innocently trusted the serpent... in retrospect, of course, it was a pretty bad idea.
Good stuff. |
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| A night and a morning |
[Jan. 3rd, 2007|09:42 am] |
Jennifer came over last night. On her suggestion, I ordered us a pizza. We made out, talked, cuddled, and napped in each-other's arms until just after 2300. She gave me some more details of her recovery from having her left leg badly broken in that auto wreck several years ago. I also loaned her my copy of this amazingly good Civil War book for young-adults I discovered at the fort's bookstore. After Jen left last night I read more of her novel.
This morning, with great trepidation, I drove my Jeep down to Jen's. I was sure that the thing was going to burst into flames at any moment. Before, when I did not know what the problem was, I was not too worried. After I identified that leaky injector last week, however, I have not driven the thing since for fear that the fuel might puddle up and catch fire and/or the fumes blow up. I was running late, but texted Jen and she decided to wait for me at the bottom of her driveway. She followed me to the garage, which was just opening, and I checked the old wreck in. Then she dropped me at work. |
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| Year's End, Year's Beginning |
[Jan. 2nd, 2007|05:40 pm] |
2006 went out like the odd roller-coaster it has been for me all year.
With my Jeep's leaky injector, I figured I'd ride my bike to my parents' place after I got off work on the 30th and pick up my brother J.'s old Ford "Exploder," throwing my bike in the back. In pursuit of this, after quitting time (and making a pro forma response to a kid who crashed his bicycle outside my office... kid's dad said the kid was fine, I dunno), I did indeed hop on my bike and, as the sun set, make a mad-dash half-hour ride covering the 7 miles of shoreline trail between my work and the folks' (average about 14 MPH!). At the folks I grabbed the Exploder keys and headed out the door... but my parents and brother G. laid a guilt-trip on me about how I never spend any time with them anymore and G. insisted that after I picked up the Exploder down on the road that I come back for the microwave which is surplus from his apartment now that he has moved back in with the Folks. I did so, and noticed that all the interior lights for the Exploder were stuck on. Besides being detrimental to the battery, made driving at night difficult and illegal. After calling Dad from my cell as I drove away, and getting no help besides the obvious and futile suggestion of playing with the rheostat, I pulled into a nearby lot and checked the owner's manual. Find nothing useful in the manual on the lights I flipped to the fuse panel diagram and then yanked the one that controlled the interior lighting. Lights out, I bucketed over to Jen's, where her parents were having yet another party. At the door I related all of the above tribulations to Jen and Jennifer, while taking my coat, bestowed upon me a three-ring binder containing one of her unpublished novels! In this one the protagonist is an eccentric elderly nun with a PhD. who serves as the founder and principal of a small Catholic high school. I'm just a little past the half-way mark... I'll relate more about it later, I guess. The party was otherwise a blast, older couples, some with children present, some with grandchildren present. I, as always, tried to hold up my end of the conversation and at one point even steered the talk to a frank and open discussion of English vs. Spanish in the American workplace. There was no lack of opinions in the crowd assembled. The party did not peter out until shortly before midnight, when Jennifer and I parted, both of us vowing from now on to text-message the other when we leave at night so that we know that the driving party has arrived safely.
Next morning, the 31st, I invited Jen to go on a walk at a trail which is part of our County parks system. The trail, a now-paved former logging road, overlooks a pristine reservoir and its nature-preserve watershed. We walked about a mile and a half in, found a bench, sat for awhile, then walked out. I suggested we do lunch at the restaurant of a nearby golf course, of which I had fond memories from my childhood, but we found the place much changed and the restaurant now a tawdry cafe serving indifferent fare.
After our morning adventure we returned to my place where we spent much of the afternoon naked before my fireplace. We managed to achieve simultaneous orgasm on not one but two occasions while doing no more than rubbing our respective sex-organs against the other's skin. Woo-hoo. My ejaculations did make an unfortunate mess, however.
About 1700 we dressed and emerged, looking for an early dinner, which we found at the Chinese place my boss likes so much. After dinner, and a brief visit to the grocery store, we returned back to my place where we lay before the fire again, were visited by the cat (for whom Jen is developing quite an attachment), and on my suggestion started to watch the restored cut of Forbidden Planet I had received for X-mas. She fell asleep halfway through, and I turned off the t.v. and joined her. About 23:00 she suggested I take her home as otherwise we'd be driving after midnight and she worried about the drunk drivers. That done I came home again and, after reading some of her book, sank into the arms of Morpheus.
Next day Jen picked me up at 08:30 and we set our course for the state capitol which is also home to both our reenacting club's president and secretary. Jen is the outfit's treasurer, and she had some business with the other two. I went along as a fly-on-the-wall. It was an interesting experience, very educational. By about 1300 the club business was complete, so we drove up into the nearby foothills and Jen gave me a whirlwind tour of the area which in historic times was a mineral-prospecting region. We found lunch in a "country cafe" in one town, and stopped just long enough in another to photograph the monument set up by an old fraternal order that Jen and I have been desultorily researching. Jen also drove me past the scenic alpine campground her family has frequented for years and even stopped so I could touch some of the snow on the ground after I confessed that it had been about 20 years since I had last seen the white stuff up close. During our drive Jen mentioned how last summer she almost moved up here out of frustration with her inability to further her firefighting career goal in our suburban area. I commiserated with her over how difficult it had been for her to find her path in life, and she confessed to me that her wacky dream in life was to buy some land out here and run a Christmas tree farm... I told her that I could probably be co-opted into that dream rather easily... that I wanted to make a life with her.
Following our ride through the hills we made the approximately 2 hour drive back to her place, where her mom had made tortilla soup for dinner. I dined with them and after some delightful conversation Jen and I headed for our accustomed place on the living room couch where we cuddled and kissed until after 23:00 when Jen drove me home. At some point she also let me know that she was having her period. Good to know.
Today I made up and took in a deposit at work... ordered several thousand gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline... had lunch at the Chinese place with the boss... and helped a guy get his 60' wooden cabin cruiser secured to our pump-out dock.
There are a million and one details I am leaving out of this narrative, for lack of time, energy and the fact that I am still reeling from it all. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 2nd, 2007|05:32 pm] |
Text messages exchanged between Jennifer (R-received) and I (S-sent):
S122806/1336 After the last few days it is hard for me to be away from you this many hours
R122806/1354 I miss you too
R122806/1425 Waving as i cross the sm bridge
S122806/1426 Helo!
R122806/1427 Kiss
R122906/0828 Good morning my love. Sleep well? My darling, how i miss you already. I love you.
R122906/0907 Have not yet heard back from you. I'm getting worried. Are you alright? I love you.
S122906/0911 Sorry to worry you, my love, but I was dashing around getting ready for work (started at 9 today)
R122906/0913 That's an acceptable answer.
S122906/0914 So I am not in trouble
R122906/0916 Never my love just deeply loved
S122906/0917 As I love you
R122906/0918 A draw
S122906/0919 :)
R122906/0919 ;)
S122906/1334 I love & miss you immensely
R122906/1340 That goes for me as well. I was just taking about how wonderful you are.
S122906/1453 I miss you. Are you available tonight?
R122906/1454 Only if you are
S122906/1510 Am going out to tow a disabled boat right now. Should be back by 5
R122906/1512 Ok ill come over around 6? be careful.
S122906/1520 Always! Just East of (a major airport) right now
R122906/1522 You better have a life jacket on
S122906/1523 Of course!
R122906/1524 Good
S122906/1533 Got our tow- a 40' powerboat- in the middle of the Bay off O----r Point. Slowly heading back to the Marina
R122906/1535 Wow stay safe
S122906/1657 Back again, safe & sound
R122906/1703 Glad to hear it. Thank you for telling me. I love you. See you tonight. Shall i bring dinner?
S122906/1708 That would be wonderful
R122906/1709 Want anything special?
S122906/1710 Whatever is easiest for you, my love
R122906/1711 Ok see you in a while
R122906/2339 I'm home. Good night my love.
S122906/2340 Good night darling
R123006/0904 Good morning my darling, excuse my not typing sooner. I wanted to give you more time this morning. I love you
S123006/0911 A good morning to you, my beloved
R123006/0913 Have a good day
S123006/0914 You too
R123006/1225 I miss you.
S123006/1226 I miss you too, my beloved
R123006/1227 :)
S123006/1227 =)
S123006/1415 Thinking of you
R123006/1416 And i you dearest.
R123006/1807 Missing you. See you when you get here
S123006/1818 On my way
R123006/1820 Ok was just worried about you
S123006/1821 You should be!
S123106/0023 I am home, goodnight my love
R123106/0024 Good night my dearest love
R123106/0840 Good morning darling, happy new years eve. I love you.
S123106/0844 As I love you. Thank you for making the end of 2006 so memorable
R123106/0846 And to you, for giving me a reason to look forward to 2007
S123106/0848 I love you so, my darling
R123106/0850 So, feel like doing anything today?
S123106/0853 Of course! Maybe we could go for a walk at C-----l S-----s Trail or something?
R123106/0856 Ok that sounds like fun. I've never done that. What time?
S123106/0857 Never? When are you available?
R123106/0901 Nope, never been. Deprived i know. Hahaha. Time today? How about any time?
S123106/0904 If you REALLY want an adventure, I'll pick you up in the Exploder, say around 10?
R123106/0909 Lead on then. I shall await the arrival of my fearless explorer.
S123106/0910 OK. Until then, my love
R123106/0910 Until then.
S123106/1001 Am running a trifle late but on the way
R123106/1002 Ok thank you for telling me
S123106/2336 Home again, darling. In my fatigue I have forgotten- when may I expect you tomorrow morn?
S123106/2347 Jen, did you receive my last?
R010107/0102 Good night my darling, see you tomorrow about 8:30. Happy new year love
R010107/0103 Did you get it i resent it
R010107/0749 Good morning love
R010107/2340 Good night love. I'm home.
S010107/2342 A good night to a wonderful 1st day of 2007 my darling
R010207/0853 Good morning my dearest. Have a wonderful day. I'll be missing today as always. I love you.
S010207/0857 Good morning my love, my thoughts are ever with you. I have good news- my request to take Friday off was approved
R010206/0859 Wonderful news my love.
S010206/0902 Have a great day, my love
R010207/1341 Miss you.
S010207 1344 Miss you too |
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| A Dream |
[Dec. 30th, 2006|08:45 am] |
Had this goofy dream last night that I was at work and escorting Jen down a dock as she was staying aboard a boat located at the northern end of the complex. Once we reached the boat I asked if she'd let me come aboard, but she declined. The sun was setting and I was closing the place down, driving around in the truck in the central part of the facility. A new office-structure was there and as I drove by I noticed the door was ajar. I parked the truck, went inside and found on a desk some paperwork that needed attention. As I shuffled the papers I heard some commotion outside and, as the last glow of the evening faded, found my boss, #2 and our other regular staffie, P.C. While #2 and P.C. loaded equipment into the truck I asked the boss what the three of them were doing there as I was in the process of shutting the place down for the day. The boss told me that a boat had sunk at the southern part of the facility, and that three people had drowned. I was flooded with guilt because I realized that while I was with Jen on the northernmost-dock I had been unable to see the sinking occur on the dock located to the south. The boss told me to take the pumps #2 & P.C. had just loaded into the truck down to the south dock where a recovery effort was underway. I hopped into the truck's cab and found in the passenger's seat L.K., a former part-time employee of ours who has been dead for two years. In the dream, however, L.K. seemed to have every right to be there. I drove down to the area by the gate for the south dock and L.K. jumped out of the cab and ran down the dock to where the Coast Guard/Sheriff's office was busy rigging worklights and oil-absorbant booms. I got out and went around to the back of the truck, pulling out our high-capacity gasoline-powered pump and a 5-gallon jerry can of gas which could not have had more than half a gallon in it. In real life the pump weighs a ton, but in the dream I shouldered it easily and made my way to the dock, intending to send L.K. off for more gas once I had the pump deployed.
Then I woke up.
I think what was going on here is a feeling that my love for Jennifer may in some way be causing me to neglect my work-duties. I have dreams with L.K. in them from time to time... the poor man lead a very sad little life. I think I am haunted by his failures. |
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| Toxoplasmosis vs. HPL |
[Dec. 30th, 2006|08:34 am] |
I stumbled onto an article referencing an Australian researcher who claims that in humans the parasitic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii, long known to prey on cats who can pass it on to other mammals, causes rather extreme behavior modifications depending on the sex of the host. In the words of the researcher:
"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
This scares the tar out of me as I a) have been around cats all my life, b) dropped out of college, c) am fairly complacent with breaking rules and taking risks, and could be described as fairly independent, anti-social, suspicious and morose. I'd like to leave the attractiveness-to-women issue open at the moment. On the other hand, however, I would not at all describe myself as jealous, last time I checked had a rather high IQ and a fairly good attention-span. Although introverted and contemplative, I'd also say that labels such as anti-social, suspicious and morose are a little extreme to describe me. Yet- think what I could have been if I did not have toxoplasmosis (if I even do)- I could be an atom-splitter or a televangelist or something!
The Wikipedia article on toxoplasmosis, which cites that recent Australian article, makes some good cautionary points:
Human personality changes
The findings of behavioral alteration in rats and mice have led some scientists to speculate that toxoplasma may have similar effects in humans, even in the latent phase that had previously been considered asymptomatic. Toxoplasma is one of a number of parasites that may alter their host's behaviour as a part of their life cycle. [6] The behaviors observed, if caused by the parasite, are likely due to infection and low-grade encephalitis, which is marked by the presence of cysts in the brain, which may produce or induce production of a neurotransmitter, possibly dopamine, [7] therefore acting similarly to dopamine reuptake inhibitor type antidepressants and stimulants.
Correlations have been found between latent Toxoplasma infections and various characteristics: [8]
Increased risk taking behavior
Slower reactions
Feelings of insecurity and self-doubt
Neuroticism (neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits)
The evidence for behavioral effects on humans, although intriguing, is relatively weak. There have been no randomized clinical trials studying the effects of toxoplasma on human behavior. Although some researchers have found potentially important associations with toxoplasma, it is possible that these associations merely reflect factors that predispose certain types of people to infection (e.g., people who exhibit risk-taking behaviors may be more likely to take the risk of eating undercooked meat).
Studies have found that toxoplasmosis is associated with an increased car accident rate, roughly doubling or tripling the chance of an accident relative to uninfected people.[7] [9] This may be due to the decreased reaction times that are associated with infection.[9] "If our data are true then about a million people a year die just because they are infected with toxoplasma," the researcher Jaroslav Flegr told The Guardian. [10] The data shows that the risk decreases with time after infection, but is not due to age.[7] Ruth Gilbert, medical coordinator of the European Multicentre Study on Congenital Toxoplasmosis, told BBC News Online these findings could be due to chance, or due to social and cultural factors associated with toxoplasma infection. [11]
Other studies suggest that the parasite may influence personality. There are claims of toxoplasma causing antisocial attitudes in men and promiscuity [12] (or even "signs of higher intelligence") [13] in women, and greater susceptibility to schizophrenia and manic depression in all infected persons.[12] A 2004 study found that toxoplasma "probably induce[s] a decrease of novelty seeking." [14]
According to Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter in an article that appeared in the January/February 2007 edition of Australasian Science magazine, she said Toxoplama infections lead to changes depending on the sex of the infected person. [15]
The study suggests that male carriers have lower IQs, a tendency to achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans, a greater likelihood of breaking rules and taking risks, and are more independent, anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose. It also suggests that these men are deemed less attractive to women. Women carriers are suggested to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
Although different traits are apparent in each gender, the differences in traits may not be only be a cause of the disease directly, but may be the result of different environmental feedback (social stigmas in this case) that girls receive vs boys.
Hmph. I have long known that pregnant women were supposed to stay away from litter boxes as toxoplasmosis can affect the physical health of an unborn child, and that toxoplasmosis has been linked to the deaths of sea-otters in California, but this behavioral stuff is kinda spooky, although I am more inclined to hold to the qualifying paragraph in that Wikipedia quote:
"The evidence for behavioral effects on humans, although intriguing, is relatively weak. There have been no randomized clinical trials studying the effects of toxoplasma on human behavior. Although some researchers have found potentially important associations with toxoplasma, it is possible that these associations merely reflect factors that predispose certain types of people to infection (e.g., people who exhibit risk-taking behaviors may be more likely to take the risk of eating undercooked meat)."
Another factor nobody seems to have mentioned as yet is that there is probably a much higher incidence of toxoplasmosis in cat owners rather than those who have never owned cats. It may just be that men who own cats as pets are also more likely to naturally "have lower IQs, a tendency to achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans, a greater likelihood of breaking rules and taking risks, and are more independent, anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose" while female cat-owners instinctually happen "to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men".
Hey, I think I am on to something, here. Dr. Boulter, the Australian researcher who was cited in the article linked at the start of this entry, also said that toxoplasmosis "can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens". That may be flawed logic if my rational assumption that more people with toxoplasmosis are cat owners. People tend to choose pets that reflect their own personalities. Men who choose to own cats may do so because they identify with "alley cats" while women get cats because they like the "sex kitten" image.
The defense will next call to the stand a man who certainly had a low level of formal education, took risks and suffered the barbs of being labelled anti-social, suspicious, morose and less attractive to women. I call Howard Philips Lovecraft who, perhaps better than anyone, explained the psychological attraction cats held for a man like him:
Cats And Dogs
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written November 23, 1926
Published in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Arkham House, 1949
Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in your literary club, I cannot resist contributing a few Thomastic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the dispute, though conscious that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely have much weight against the brilliancy of such still active adherents as may bark upon the other side. Aware of my ineptitude at argument, a valued correspondent has supplied me with the records of a similar controversy in the New York Tribune, in which Mr. Carl van Doran is on my side and Mr. Albert Payson Terhune on that of the canine tribe. From this I would be glad to plagiarise such data as I need; but my friend, with genuinely Machiavellian subtlety, has furnished me with only a part of the feline section whilst submitting the doggish brief in full. No doubt he imagines that this arrangement, in view of my own emphatic bias, makes for something like ultimate fairness; but for me it is exceedingly inconvenient, since it will force me to be more or less original in several parts of the ensuing remarks.
Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur to me to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have for monkeys, human beings, tradesmen, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls; but for the cat I have entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy. In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.
Naturally, one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon one's temperament and point of view. The dog would appear to me to be the favorite of superficial, sentimental, and emotional people -- people who feel rather than think, who attach importance to mankind and the popular conventional emotions of the simple, and who find their greatest consolation in the fawning and dependent attachments of a gregarious society. Such people live in a limited world of imagination; accepting uncritically the values of common folklore, and always preferring to have their naive beliefs, feelings, and prejudices tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and philosophic pleasure arising from discrimination, contemplation, and the recognition of austere, absolute beauty. This is not to say that the cheaper elements do not also reside in the average cat-lover's love of cats, but merely to point out that in ailurophily there exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not possess. The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such. He is unwilling to set up himself and his cruder feelings as a measure of universal values, or to allow shallow ethical notions to warp his judgment. In a word, he had rather admire and respect than effuse and dote; and does not fall into the fallacy that pointless sociability and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience, constitute anything intrinsically admirable or exalted. Dog-lovers base their whole case on these commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes. Cat-lovers escape this delusion, repudiate the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship to man are supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and individual personality joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe, cynical and unconquered lord of the housetops.
Persons of commonplace ideas -- unimaginative worthy burghers who are satisfied with the daily round of things and who subscribe to the popular credo of sentimental values -- will always be dog-lovers. To them nothing will ever be more important than themselves and their own primitive feelings, and they will never cease to esteem and glorify the fellow-animal who best typifies these. Such persons are submerged in the vortex of Oriental idealism and abasement which ruined classic civilisation in the Dark Ages, and live in a bleak world of abstract sentimental values wherein the mawkish illusions of meekness, gentleness, brotherhood, and whining humility are magnified into supreme virtues, and a whole false ethic and philosophy erected on the timid reactions of the flexor system of muscles. This heritage, ironically foisted on us when Roman politics raised the faith of a whipped and broken people to supremacy in the later empire, has naturally kept a strong hold over the weak and sentimentally thoughtless; and perhaps reached its culmination in the insipid nineteenth century, when people were wont to praise dogs "because they are so human" (as if humanity were any valid standard of merit!), and honest Edwin Landseer painted hundreds of smug Fidoes and Carlos and Rovers with all the anthropoid triviality, pettiness, and "cuteness" of eminent Victorians.
But amidst this chaos of intellectual and emotional groveling a few free souls have always stood out for the old civilised realities which mediaevalism eclipsed -- the stern classic loyalty to truth, strength, and beauty given a clear mind and uncowed spirit to the full-living Western Aryan confronted by Nature's majesty, loveliness, and aloofness. This is the virile aesthetic and ethic of the extensor muscles -- the bold, buoyant, assertive beliefs and preferences of proud, dominant, unbroken and unterrified conquerors, hunters, and warriors -- and it has small use for the shams and whimperings of the brotherly, affection-slobbering peacemaker and cringer and sentimentalist. Beauty and sufficiency -- twin qualities of the cosmos itself -- are the gods of this unshackled and pagan type; to the worshipper of such eternal things the supreme virtue will not be found in lowliness, attachment, obedience, and emotional messiness. This sort of worshipper will look for that which best embodies the loveliness of the stars and the worlds and the forests and the seas and the sunsets, and which best acts out the blandness, lordliness, accuracy, self-sufficiency, cruelty, independence, and contemptuous and capricious impersonality of the all governing Nature. Beauty -- coolness -- aloofness -- philosophic repose -- self-sufficiency -- untamed mastery -- where else can we find these things incarnated with even half the perfection and completeness that mark their incarnation in the peerless and softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and obtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity?
That dogs are dear to the unimaginative peasant-burgher whilst cats appeal to the sensitive poet-aristocrat-philosopher will be clear in a moment when we reflect on the matter of biological association. Practical plebeian folk judge a thing only by its immediate touch, taste, and smell; while more delicate types form their estimates from the linked images and ideas which the object calls up in their minds. Now when dogs and cats are considered, the stolid churl sees only the two animals before him, and bases his favour on their relative capacity to pander to his sloppy, uniformed ideas of ethics and friendship and flattering subservience. On the other hand the gentleman and thinker sees each in all its natural affiliations, and cannot fail to notice that in the great symmetries of organic life dogs fall in with slovenly wolves and foxes and jackals and coyotes and dingoes and painted hyaenas, whilst cats walk proudly with the jungle's lords, and own the haughty lion, the sinuous leopard, the regal tiger, and the shapely panther and jaguar as their kin. Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind emotion, inferiority, servile attachment, and gregariousness -- the attributes of commonplace, stupidly passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively underdeveloped men. Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality -- the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men. The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.
We may, indeed, judge the tone and bias of a civilisation by its relative attitude toward dogs and cats. The proud Egypt wherein Pharaoh was Pharaoh and pyramids rose in beauty at the wish of him who dreamed them bowed down to the cat, and temples were built to its goddess at Bubastis. In imperial Rome the graceful leopard adorned most homes of quality, lounging in insolent beauty in the atrium with golden collar and chain; while after the age of the Antonines the actual cat was imported from Egypt and cherished as a rare and costly luxury. So much for the dominant and enlightened peoples. When, however, we come to the groveling Middle Ages with their superstitions and ecstasies and monasticisms and maunderings over saints and their relics, we find the cool and impersonal loveliness of the felidae in very low esteem; and behold a sorry spectacle of hatred and cruelty shown toward the beautiful little creature whose mousing virtues alone gained it sufferance amongst the ignorant churls who resented its self-respecting coolness and feared its cryptical and elusive independence as something akin to the dark powers of witchcraft. These boorish slaves of eastern darkness could not tolerate what did not serve their own cheap emotions and flimsy purposes. They wished a dog to fawn and hunt and fetch and carry, and had no use for the cat's gift of eternal disinterested beauty to feed the spirit. One can imagine how they must have resented Pussy's magnificent reposefulness, unhurriedness, relaxation, and scorn for trivial human aims and concernments. Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense. Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to those primitive emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience; whilst the cat reigns among those more contemplative and imaginative spirits who ask of the universe only the objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried and impersonal order and sufficiency. The dog gives, but the cat is.
Simple folk always overstress the ethical element in life, and it is quite natural that they should extend it to the realm of their pets. Accordingly, we hear many inane dicta in favour of dogs on the ground that they are faithful, whilst cats are treacherous. Now just what does this really mean? Where are the points of reference? Certainly, the dog has so little imagination and individuality that it knows no motives but its master's; but what sophisticated mind can descry a positive virtue in this stupid abnegation of its birthright? Discrimination must surely award the palm to the superior cat, which has too much natural dignity to accept any scheme of things but its own, and which consequently cares not one whit what any clumsy human thinks or wishes or expects of it. It is not treacherous, because it has never acknowledged any allegiance to anything outside its own leisurely wishes; and treachery basically implies a departure from some covenant explicitly recognised. The cat is a realist, and no hypocrite. He takes what pleases him when he wants it, and gives no promises. He never leads you to expect more from him than he gives, and if you choose to be stupidly Victorian enough to mistake his purrs and rubbings of self-satisfaction for marks of transient affection toward you, that is no fault of his. He would not for a moment have you believe that he wants more of you than food and warmth and shelter and amusement -- and he is certainly justified in criticising your aesthetic and imaginative development if you fail to find his grace, beauty, and cheerful decorative influence an aboundingly sufficient repayment for all you give him. The cat-lover need not be amazed at another's love for dogs -- indeed, he may also possess this quality himself; for dogs are often very comely, and as lovable in a condescending way as a faithful old servant or tenant in the eyes of a master -- but he cannot help feeling astonished at those who do not share his love for cats. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it. We call ourselves a dog's "master" -- but who ever dared call himself the "master" of a cat? We own a dog -- he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat -- he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such a one more agreeable and interesting. A trace, I think, of this great truth regarding the higher dignity of the cat has crept into folklore in the use of the names "cat" and "dog" as terms of opprobrium. Whilst "cat" has never been applied to any sort of offender more than the mildly spiteful and innocuously sly female gossip and commentator, the words "dog" and "cur" have always been linked with vileness, dishonor, and degradation of the gravest type. In the crystallisation of this nomenclature there has undoubtedly been present in the popular mind some dim, half-unconscious realisation that there are depths of slinking, whining, fawning, and servile ignobility which no kith of the lion and the leopard could ever attain. The cat may fall low, but he is always unbroken. He is, like the Nordic among men, one of those who govern their own lives or die.
We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile up in favour of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic significance in all the cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat excels so brilliantly that all comparisons collapse. Some dogs, it is true, have beauty in a very ample degree; but even the highest level of canine beauty falls far below the feline average. The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic -- nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae. Puss is a Doric temple -- an Ionic colonnade -- in the utter classicism of its structural and decorative harmonies. And this is just as true kinetically as statically, for art has no parallel for the bewitching grace of the cat's slightest motion. The sheer, perfect aestheticism of kitty's lazy stretchings, industrious face-washings, playful rollings, and little involuntary shiftings in sleep is something as keen and vital as the best pastoral poetry or genre painting; whilst the unerring accuracy of his leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited way but it is his capacity for leisure and repose which makes the cat preeminent. Mr. Carl Van Vechten, in "Peter Whiffle," holds up the timeless restfulness of the cat as a model for life's philosophy, and Prof. William Lyon Phelps has very effectively captured the secret of felinity when he says that the cat does not merely lie down, but "pours his body out on the floor like a glass of water". What other creature has thus merged the aestheticism of mechanics and hydraulics? Contrast this with the inept panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling, scratching, and general clumsiness of the average dog with his false and wasted motions. And in the details of neatness the fastidious cat is of course immeasurably ahead. We always love to touch a cat, but only the insensitive can uniformly welcome the frantic and humid nuzzlings and pawings of a dusty and perhaps not inodorous canine which leaps and fusses and writhes about in awkward feverishness for no particular reason save that blind nerve-centres have been spurred by certain meaningless stimuli. There is a wearying excess of bad manners in all this doggish fury -- well-bred people don't paw and maul one, and surely enough we invariably find the cat gentle and reserved in his advances, and delicate even when he glides gracefully into your lap with cultivated purrs, or leaps whimsical on the table where you are writing to play with your pen in modulated, seriocomic pats. I do not wonder that Mahomet, that sheik of perfect manners, loved cats for their urbanity and disliked dogs for their boorishness; or that cats are the favorites in the polite Latin countries whilst dogs take the lead in heavy, practical, and beer-drinking Central Europe. Watch a cat eat, and then watch a dog. The one is held in check by an inherent and inescapable daintiness, and lends a kind of grace to one of the most ungraceful of all processes. The dog, on the other hand, is wholly repulsive in his bestial and insatiate greediness; living up to his forest kinship of "wolfing" most openly and unashamedly. Returning to beauty of line -- is it not significant that while many normal breeds of dogs are conspicuously and admittedly ugly, no healthy and well-developed feline of any species whatsoever is other than beautiful? There are, of course, many ugly cats; but these are always individual cases of mongrelism, malnutrition, deformity, or injury. No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful -- a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like. Of course, it may be said that no aesthetic standard is other than relative -- but we always work with such standards as we empirically have, and in comparing cats and dogs under the Western European aesthetic we cannot be unfair to either. If any undiscovered tribe in Tibet finds Airedales beautiful and Persian cats ugly, we will not dispute them on their own territory -- but just now we are dealing with ourselves and our territory, and here the verdict would not admit of much doubt even from the most ardent kynophile. Such an one usually passes the problem off in an epigrammatic paradox, and says that "Snookums is so homely, he's pretty!" This is the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily "cute" which we see likewise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the "Billikin" or "Krazy Kat" order found in the "dens" and "cosy corners" of the would-be-sophisticated yokelry.
In the matter of intelligence we find the caninites making amusing claims -- amusing because they so naively measure what they conceive to be an animal's intelligence by its degree of subservience to the human will. A dog will retrieve, a cat will not; therefore (sic!) the dog is the more intelligent. Dogs can be more elaborately trained for the circus and vaudeville acts than cats, therefore (O Zeus, O Royal Mount!) they are cerebrally superior. Now of course this is all the sheerest nonsense. We would not call a weak-spirited man more intelligent than an independent citizen because we can make him vote as we wish whereas we can't influence the independent citizen, yet countless persons apply an exactly parallel argument in appraising the grey matter of dogs and cats. Competition in servility is something to which no self-respecting Thomas or Tabitha ever stooped, and it is plain that any really effective estimate of canine and feline intelligence must proceed from a careful observation of dogs and cats in a detached state -- uninfluenced by human beings -- as they formulate certain objectives of their own and use their own mental equipment in achieving them. When we do this, we arrive at a very wholesome respect for our purring hearthside friend who makes so little display about his wishes and business methods; for in every conception and calculation he shows a steel-cold and deliberate union of intellect, will, and sense of proportion which puts utterly to shame the emotional sloppings-over and docilely acquired artificial tricks of the "clever" and "faithful" pointer or sheep-dog. Watch a cat decide to move through a door, and see how patiently he waits for his opportunity, never losing sight of his purpose even when he finds it expedient to feign other interests in the interim. Watch him in the thick of the chase, and compare his calculating patience and quiet study of his terrain with the noisy floundering and pawing of his canine rival. It is not often that he returns empty-handed. He knows what he wants, and means to get it in the most effective way, even at the sacrifice of time -- which he philosophically recognises as unimportant in the aimless cosmos. There is no turning him aside or distracting his attention -- and we know that among humans this is the quality of mental tenacity, this ability to carry a single thread through complex distractions, is considered a pretty good sign of intellectual vigour and maturity. Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble, cats and philosophers stick to their point. In resourcefulness, too, the cat attests his superiority. Dogs can be well trained to do a single thing, but psychologists tell us that these responses to an automatic memory instilled from outside are of little worth as indices of real intelligence. To judge the abstract development of a brain, confront it with new and unfamiliar conditions and see how well its own strength enables it to achieve its object by sheer reasoning without blazed trails. Here the cats can silently devise a dozen mysterious and successful alternatives whilst poor Fido is barking in bewilderment and wondering what it is all about. Granted that Rover the retriever may make a greater bid for popular sentimental regard by going into the burning house and saving the baby in traditional cinema fashion, it remains a fact that whiskered and purring Nig is a higher-grade biological organism -- something physiologically and psychologically nearer a man because of his very freedom from man's orders, and as such entitled to a higher respect from those who judge by purely philosophic and aesthetic standards. We can respect a cat as we cannot respect a dog, no matter which personally appeals the more to our mere doting fancy; and if we be aesthetes and analysts rather than commonplace-lovers and emotionalists, the scales must inevitably turn completely in kitty's favour.
It may be added, moreover, that even the aloof and sufficient cat is by no means devoid of sentimental appeal. Once we get rid of the uncivilised ethical bias -- the "treacherous" and "horrid bird-catcher" prejudice -- we find in the "harmless cat" the very apex of happy domestic symbolism; whilst small kittens become objects to adore, idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls and anapaests, iambics and trochaics. I, in my own senescent mellowness, confess to an inordinate and wholly unphilosophic predilection for tiny coal-black kittens with large yellow eyes, and could no more pass one without petting him than Dr. Johnson could pass a sidewalk post without striking it. There is, likewise, in many cats quite analogous to the reciprocal fondness so loudly extolled in dogs, human beings, horses, and the like. Cats come to associate certain persons with acts continuously contributing to their pleasure, and acquire for them a recognition and attachment which manifests itself in pleasant excitement at their approach -- whether or not bearing food and drink -- and a certain pensiveness at their protracted absence. A cat with whom I was on intimate terms reached the point of accepting food from no hand but one, and would actually go hungry rather than touch the least morsel from a kindly neighbour source. He also had distinct affections amongst the other cats of that idyllic household; voluntarily offering food to one of his whiskered friends, whilst disputing most savagely the least glance which his coal-black rival "Snowball" would bestow upon his plate. If it be argued that these feline fondnesses are essentially "selfish" and "practical" in their ultimate composition, let us inquire in return how many human fondnesses, apart from those springing directly upon primitive brute instinct, have any other basis. After the returning board has brought in the grand total of zero we shall be better able to refrain from ingenuous censure of the "selfish" cat.
The superior imaginative inner life of the cat, resulting in superior self-possession, is well known. A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone. Only after such a glimpse of unaffected tail-chasing grace and unstudied purring can one fully understand the charm of those lines which Coleridge wrote with reference to the human rather than the feline young -- page eleven
".... a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself."
But whole volumes could be written on the playing of cats, since the varieties and aesthetic aspects of such sportiveness are infinite. Be it sufficient to say that in such pastimes cats have exhibited traits and actions which psychologists authentically declare to be motivated by genuine humour and whimsicality in its purest sense; so that the task of "making a cat laugh" may not be so impossible a thing even outside the borders of Cheshire. In short, a dog is an incomplete thing. Like an inferior man, he needs emotional stimuli from outside, and must set something artificial up as a god and motive. The cat, however, is perfect in himself. Like the human philosopher, he is a self-sufficient entity and microcosm. He is a real and integrated being because he thinks and feels himself to be such, whereas the dog can conceive of himself only in relation to something else. Whip a dog and he licks your hand - frauth! The beast has no idea of himself except as an inferior part of an organism whereof you are the superior part -- he would no more think of striking back at you than you would think of pounding your own head when it punishes you with a headache. But whip a cat and watch it glare and move backward hissing in outraged dignity and self-respect! One more blow, and it strikes you in return; for it is a gentleman and your equal, and will accept no infringement on its personality and body of privileges. It is only in your house anyway because it wishes to be, or perhaps even as a condescending favour to yourself. It is the house, not you, it likes; for philosophers realise that human beings are at best only minor adjuncts to scenery. Go one step too far, and it leaves you altogether. You have mistaken your relationship to it and imagined you are its master, and no real cat can tolerate that breach of good manners. Henceforward it will seek companions of greater discrimination and clearer perspective. Let anaemic persons who believe in "turning the other cheek" console themselves with cringing dogs -- for the robust pagan with the blood of Nordic twilights in his veins there is no beast like the cat; intrepid steed of Freya, who can boldly look even Thor and Odin full in the face and stare with great round eyes of undimmed yellow or green.
In these observations I believe I have outlined with some fullness the diverse reasons why, in my opinion and in the smartly timed title-phrase of Mr. Van Doren, "gentlemen prefer cats." The reply of Mr. Terhune in a subsequent issue of the Tribune appears to me beside the point; insomuch as it is less a refutation of facts than a mere personal affirmation of the author's membership in that conventional "very human" majority who take affection and companionship seriously, enjoy being important to something alive, hate a "parasite" on mere ethical ground without consulting the right of beauty to exist for its own sake, and therefore love man's noblest and most faithful friend, the perennial dog. I suppose Mr. Terhune loves horses and babies also, for the three go conventionally together in the great hundred-per-center's credo as highly essential likings for every good and lovable he-man of the Arrow Collar and Harold Bell Wright hero school, even though the automobile and Margaret Sanger have done much to reduce the last two items.
Dogs, then, are peasants and the pets of peasants, cats are gentlemen and the pets of gentlemen. The dog is for him who places crude feeling and outgrown ethic and humanocentricity above austere and disinterested beauty; who just loves "folks and folksiness" and doesn't mind sloppy clumsiness if only something will truly care for him. (Tableau of dog across master's grave -- cf. Lanseer, "The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner.") The guy who isn't much for highbrow stuff, but is always on the square and don't (sic) often find the Saddypost or the N.Y. World too deep for him; who hadn't much use for Valentino, but thinks Doug Fairbanks is just about right for an evening's entertainment. Wholesome -- constructive -- non-morbid -- civic-minded -- domestic -- (I forgot to mention the radio) normal -- that's the sort of go-getter that ought to go in for dogs.
The cat is for the aristocrat -- whether by birth or inclinations or both - who admires his fellow-aristocrats. He is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe, and who worships that beauty in all its forms without regard for the sentimental and ethical illusions of the moment. For the man who knows the hollowness of feeling and the emptiness of human objects and aspirations, and who therefore clings solely to what is real -- as beauty is real because it pretends to a significance beyond the emotion which it excites and is. For the man who feels sufficient in the cosmos, and asks no scruples of conventional prejudice, but loves repose and strength and freedom and luxury and sufficiency and contemplation; who as a strong fearless soul wishes something to respect instead of something to lick his face and accept his alternate blows and strokings; who seeks a proud and beautiful equal in the peerage of individualism rather than a cowed and cringing satellite in the hierarchy of fear, subservience, and devolution. The cat is not for the brisk, self-important little worker with a mission, but for the enlightened dreaming poet who knows that the world contains nothing really worth doing. The dilettante -- the connoisseur -- the decadent, if you will, though in a healthier age than this there were things for such men to do, so that they were the planners and leader of those glorious pagan times. The cat is for him who does things not for empty duty but for power, pleasure, splendour, romance, and glamour -- for the harpist who sings alone in the night of old battles, or the warrior who goes out to fight such battles for beauty, glory, fame and the splendour of a land athwart which no shadow of weakness falls. For him who will be lulled by no sops of prose and usefulness, but demands for his comfort the ease and beauty and ascendancy and cultivation which make effort worth while. For the man who knows that play, not work, and leisure, not bustle, are the great things of life; and that the round of striving merely in order to strive some more is a bitter irony of which the civilised soul accepts as little as it can.
Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners -- what more can civilisation require? We have them all in the divine monarch who lounges gloriously on his silken cushion before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake -- pride and harmony and coordination -- spirit, restfulness and completeness -- all here are present, and need but a sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full measure. What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast? The star of the cat, I think, is just now in the ascendant, as we emerge little by little from the dreams of ethics and conformity which clouded the nineteenth century and raised the grubbing and unlovely dog to the pinnacle of sentimental regard. Whether a renaissance of power and beauty will restore our Western civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for any hand to check, none may yet say, but in the present moment of cynical world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty.
And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given its due among groping mortals -- the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious, the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art -- the type of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry -- the bland, grave, compliant, and patrician cat.
The defense rests.
Oh, they hung Saddam Hussein. Whoopee! |
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| Getting somewhere |
[Dec. 30th, 2006|08:01 am] |
Jennifer brought dinner over last night. Italian. Fantastic!
Afterwards I popped some Creedence in my cd-player and we made our little love-nest in front of the fire. We made out like crazy... during "Heard It Through The Grape-Vine" I went down on her and rocked her world, we rubbed our respective reproductive organs against each-other during the instrumental riff that goes on forever towards the end of that song and had some kinda mind-blowing mutual orgasm. I know she did, and I think I did too... but I did not ejaculate much. Can men orgasm without ejaculating?
We rested a bit then had a crazy-deep conversation. She wanted to know if I get weirded out by menstruation (answer is no). It worried her that I might. Then we discussed faith and subjective beliefs. She told me how in her mid teens she felt the desire to be a nun and had hoped even after college to get a masters in theology. Her mom strongly disapproved of any such thing, however. I told her that if she did feel like she had a calling not to let me stand in her way; but she said that she was quite content with living a secular life with me. I told her of my fondness for Kierkegaard, "fear and trembling," "by virtue of the absurd," etc.
My cat Lumpy has really warmed up to Jennifer, too... literally, in fact. While we were lying under the blankets in front of the fire Lumpy wandered over and spent quite a bit of time lying across both our chests. The Lumpster also displayed his mousing ability as he batted around one of his little fur mice and chased the remote-control mouse Jen bought for him.
Yesterday p.m. @ work #2 & I went out in the patrol boat to tow in a guy whose 40' trawler had broken down several miles out. I was trading texts with Jen the whole time giving her a play-by-play. I'll post the texts here at some point, as I always do.
Dad and I have lunched at the 'spoon yesterday and the day before. He's down 'cause his best friend just died from prostate cancer. I asked Dad if I could borrow brother J.'s Exploder until I can get this leaky-injector thing fixed on my Heap. The garage can't take the Heap 'till next Weds. I asked Jen if she could pick me up there after I drop it off. She said yes. She asked me if I'd like to take a ride with her on Sunday as she needs to go to the state capitol where the storage locker for our reenacting club is located. Yes and yes! Jen's mom is having yet another party tonight... and I think a New Year's Eve party tomorrow as well. Goes without saying that I am going to both.
Assuming my Heap does not burst into flames when I drive it down to the garage next week, life is pretty good. |
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| No money, no car, no condom |
[Dec. 29th, 2006|08:00 am] |
I s'pose I ought to add Michelle's latest. She called my cell yesterday and wanted to borrow money. I turned her down flat. Those days are over! First she said that she had quit her job stripping and was going to get a job as a waitress... then she switched her story and said that she was just taking a break from dancing as she had strained a muscle in her neck and would return to the stage once she was all healed up. Whatever. No matter how you slice it she is totally broke... but did manage to get her loser ex-junky ex-boyfriend to pay her rent for the month. Her behemoth Suburban is evidently kaput. Transmission. She is also giving the boy-toy Ray an ultimatum- either to marry her or they are not having anymore sex. Michelle says she is tired of taking the plan-B pill "all the time," and if she's gunna get pregnant, she wants to be married. Why they can't use protection instead of the withdrawal method is beyond me.
No money, no car, no condom... Jen and I were playing this funky "Valley of the Pharaohs" boardgame on Weds. It's got an archaeology/adventure/roleplaying theme, driven by dice-rolls, "resource cards" and some cute little replica Turkish coins. At one point while we were playing I ran out of coins and cards and had no choice but to keep spinning the ominous "wheel of fate." Most of what comes up on the wheel is not good... but as I was out of everything the only thing I could do on my turns was to keep spinning it. That, unfortunately, is the situation in life Michelle is in- no other option but to keep risking her health and the precious little which is left of her sanity in the hope that sooner or later she is going to get lucky and somehow fall into the lap of fortune. This method did not work too well for me in the game... I lost and still had nothing to my name. |
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| Leaky Fuel Injector |
[Dec. 29th, 2006|07:43 am] |
Lately that darn Jeep has added another symptom in that it has become just a little hard to start. Last week that intermittent fuel odor reared its ugly head, but all the fuel lines/connections looked good (problem with gas is that it evaporates so damn fast that you can't see it puddle up until it is too late). The few extra starting-cranks made me a suspect something to do with the fuel part of the ignition process. I focused on the injectors and lo and behold the first one in was all grimy and, when I wiped off said grime and held it to my nose it stank of gasoline.
I'm tempted to just get me an o-ring kit and bleed the system/pop the fuel rail off and then see if the new rings do the job... but if it ain't just o-rings then I'm going to need to have the injectors themselves serviced/replaced... which I'd be more comfortable having a professional do. Actually, I'd be more comfortable having a pro do anything with my fuel system. You don't get a second chance when driving if something pops loose and a gas fire occurs.
I've been doing some checking on Jeep-owners boards on the 'net and I think I'd actually like to get new injectors. If the old ones are fouled and nasty it can drain the engine's power and hurt fuel economy.
I'm going to call my favorite garage and see about making an appointment to take her in. There's this squeaky/-scratchy sound when it is in gear at idle or low RPM's, from what I have read that could be a loose flywheel. Should get that looked at, too.
Life's still good with Jen. Went to her house for leftovers last night and afterward we ended up on our usual spot on the couch until 23:30, cuddling, talking, making out, feeling each-other up and her, as usual, rising my thigh to orgasm.
One thing I have forgotten to append here is a letter Jennifer gave me, written on 19th century-stationery and enclosed in that writing-box she gave me:
Dearest,
I do hope you can read this as my penmanship leaves much to be desired. So much so that I actually had to think about how to form my letters. Fear not though, I will practice ardently and with any luck I shall one day become proficiant in the art.
Fortunately for both of us my love for you is nothing like my handwriting and needs no practice only constant and perpetual nurturing which is always at the foremost of thoughts. You are never far from my mind, or most especially my heart, which, my darling, you hold so aptly. Never forget that you are more precious to me than of anything I have either known or will known.
You amaze me, all of you. Your intellect, your tender passion for so many things. I respect you, I charish you, I love you, I never want to be without you. Promise me my love, that you will never find yourself questioning my feelings as I can assur that they will never change.
Enjoy your gift my love as it holds special meaning in my heart and as I suppose it will for you as well.
To the only man who holds my heart, Merry Christmas my dearest,
Yours in affection,
Jennifer |
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| Readings in Metaphysics |
[Dec. 28th, 2006|04:32 pm] |
I've been kicking around on the web with readings on various metaphysical subjects. I came across some of Clarence Darrow's writings on agnosticism which were most helpful. Religion in general and Christianity in particular make no kind of sense.
I guess that Christmas mass shook me up somewhat. The whole thing seems kinda sad. I can understand the poor and ignorant clinging to the hope of salvation and a better life after this... but Jennifer and her parents are well-educated intelligent people. Jennifer has on several occasions given reference to how she identifies with the "traditions" of Catholicism, and while watching a documentary on t.v. about the flagellating monks of the Middle Ages her mother remarked "I wonder if what we do today will be considered bizarre by people a thousand years from now?" That is where my pity comes in. It seems these people, in their feverish observation of the outward rituals of the faith choose to make up for their lack of belief in the dogma that supposedly justifies the rituals.
This is directly where Kierkegaard clicks with me. He more than anyone fumed at the content bourgoisie who mindlessly follow the routine of church-rituals without embracing the true nature of faith. This really steams me about Catholicism. How many catholics worldwide just go through the motions of the rituals without actually embracing the faith, just paying lip-service as the homilies are read? I'm sure the pope and all those nuns and (the non-pedophile) priests are nice people, but it rankles that all of them should be sustained and that funky Vatican palace maintained on the backs of all these people who either from fear of damnation or just blind following of tradition keep kicking money over to God's earthly representatives.
Pisses me off. This pro-forma maintenance of the outward rituals of religion while lacking the literal belief in them is as anathema to me as was the discovery that so much of education has little to do with the actual knowledge of the subject at hand.
I'm going to have to discuss this at some length with Jennifer... after all, she has made some negative comments about pagans. Although perhaps her Catholic derision of pagans is akin to her espousal of the Republican party and disdain towards Democrats. And that's what bugs me... where's the either/or here? |
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| Holidaze |
[Dec. 28th, 2006|06:45 am] |
Well, I made the attempt of texting updates to this Journal as the Christmas holiday proceeded, but I shall now endeavor to flesh-out the earlier posts.
After work on the 23rd I picked Jen up at her place and took her to my folks' where she had dinner with them and my two brothers. They (my brothers) were in fine form, as boisterous and zany as ever. Brother J. even embalmed Jen and I under a blanket whilst we were seated on a loveseat. The only negative of the evening was that my Jeep was intermittently emitting a gasoline-odor. I did not get home until after midnight as when I took Jen back to her place we ended up making-out on the couch. When I did get home, however, I inspected all my fuel lines and consulted my maintenance manuals and formed the impression that the problem lies in either an earlier over-filling of my fuel tank on my part and/or the need of service to the charcoal-filter in the exhaust-vapor-recovery (EVR) system.
On the 24th I wrapped presents and headed over for Jen's a little after 14:00. She gave me a present for my cat- a really cool remote-control electric mouse (which freaked out Jen's mom when she came into the room and saw it scurrying around), and we made-out a bit on the couch before heading up to the city where I met a crowd of Jennifer's maternal relatives. They are all Italian, Catholic and staunchly Republican and not afraid to express their leanings. I kept my free-thinkery to myself, even when Jennifer's dad took the one young male in the family who does not vote to task for failing to uphold his societal obligations, especially as glorious Republicanism needs all the votes it can get. I felt like a coward sitting there, biting my tongue, but knew it was not a battle I could win or even lose gracefully.
If I felt out-of-place there, I was well and truly out of my element when we whisked back and I found myself in a Catholic church where Jen and her mom were to perform in a choir concert preceding the midnight mass. We got there early so the ladies could join the choir and do vocal-exercises & c., but Jen's dad and I were corralled by the choral director and sent to hand out programs in the vestibule (I STILL prefer the term "narthex," darn it). So, I'm standing there in the cold (my shabby canvas work-coat I had eagerly left on a pew to reserve a spot for Jen's dad and I), making small talk with Jennifer's father and looking on in incredulity as the faithful gather, sprinkling themselves with holy water from the fonts located by the doors and crossing themselves. Jen's dad and I handed out programs and lamely tried to answer the questions that came at us regarding the service. Fortunately, I had half-jokingly worn the tie I rec'd at the party at the parent's place a week before with my blue cotton work shirt, so I looked at least somewhat respectable.
We finally ended up back in the church, taking our pew up at the front, just behind the choir. Great. The concert went well, cutsey little carols and such, with a few sing-along parts I muttered through. Then the mass began. First mass I ever attended and a high mass, too. Much waving of censors and wafting of incense... benedictions and readings, prayers and responses, stand up, sing, sit down, stand, sing, sit, stand, kneel, sing. The homily, spoken by a Filipino priest with an imprecise mastery of English, was a gloomy observation on what the innkeeper in Bethlehem symbolized and how all of us need to beware the callousness that caused him to drive the holy family into the manger. I was totally lost in all this and Jen's dad, whom I have guessed was not a regular attendee at services, did not seem to be on much surer ground than I. I had to fight to maintain my place when the massed assembly (including Jen's dad) went up to take communion. Fortunately, Jen has never gotten around to receiving confirmation, which was comforting, as she and I were about the only folks left in the pews. Oh well, as I frequently told myself, Christ, if he was born at all, was most likely born in the Spring and December 25 is just the Church's taking over of the pagan Roman Saturnalia festivities. Still, I felt totally out-of-place and literally shook and trembled during the standing prayers.
We finally got out of there around 01:30. I kissed Jen goodbye and she and her parents left the church in their car and I drove home (fortunately only a few blocks away) in mine.
On the 25th I hauled my carcass out of bed, drove to my folks' and filled Mom, Dad and brother J. on my Mass experience. Dad was making waffles but was low on syrup, so I took mom's car and drove all over town looking for a store that was open. That done, I drove home and found everyone had already eaten. Nice of them to wait for me. We exchanged our few gifts, G. reacting positively to the Principia Discordia, Dad happy to get "The War of The Worlds," Mom speechless with the popcorn maker, and J. amused at the note I had printed out telling him I was still waiting for the "Status Anxiety" dvd. I received some goofy cat-toys, the collector's edition of "Forbidden Planet," and, from J., a dvd of Christopher Walken's "Continental" sketch from Saturday Night Live. Oddly, brother J. received no presents besides my sad placeholder, while brother G. gave no presents. It was now after 1300, so I drove down to Jen's and we exchanged gifts. She gave me an antique writing box (with a letter from her inside) and an old printing-plate of the mansion where we attended that dance. I gave her a copy of that Look of the Old West book and the Descartes mug. I had intended to give her mother the two Civil War in Depth books, but her husband had already given her vol. II. Fortunately, vol. I, printed about 10 years ago, is a more difficult thing to find... but I had and Jen's father had not. During the course of the afternoon more relatives showed up, including one of mom's sisters and a sister and brother of the Jen's father, plus various and sundry spouses and children. Jen's father also dragged his Alzheimer'ed step-father over. Poor guy was totally spaced-out. It was an okay evening. I tried to keep up a witty banter. At one point this odd fellow who is Jen's uncle by marriage, started a conversation about the mistakes all young people make. Jen defiantly announced that she had never made a decision that she regretted, a statement that was upheld by the rest of the assembly present... until I light-heartedly chimed in that she may yet have regrets if she continues to see me.
When it came time to open presents I made out like a thief. All sorts of little knick-knacks in my stocking, including a set of plastic toy "Civil War dudes" (as I call 'em). The big-ticket items here were a Egypt-themed board game and three first edition volumes of Bancroft.
After the party broke-up Jen and I ended up in our accustomed spot on the couch and necked a little, but we were both exhausted so I soon headed for home.
Next morning I picked Jen up around 11:00 and took her to an expensive lunch at the beef & reef restaurant that looks out over the water near my work. Then we went back to my place and ended up naked on the floor before the fireplace where we made-out, chatted and watched a Civil War ballroom dancing video. At one point my cat joined us, and sat on the blankets we were covered with. It rained most of the afternoon and after we through our clothes on and got dinner at a Mexican place nearby. After we ate I drove her back to her folks' where she, her parents and I played Bingo and ate desert. Jen and I ended up back on the couch and Jen fell asleep in my arms. After we both awoke I left again.
Yesterday jen came to my place around 10:30 and we made-out while the wind blew savagely until a little after noon when, on Jen's suggestion, we headed to the grocery store and got some pre-made sandwiches for lunch. Back home we ate before ending up naked on the floor again.
About 16:30 we dressed again and Jen headed for home in her car while I went to pick up my parents in mine as several weeks ago that evening had been chosen for our two sets of parents to "finally" meet. I drove my folks to that of Jen's, and a delightful evening ensued with the mother's clucking away over their wonderful children while Jen and I blushed and the fathers sat largely silent and ignored. We finally broke it up around 22:30. I dropped the folks off at their place and headed home, where I once again popped my hood and checked my fuel lines as that gas odor continues to make itself known from time-to-time and it seems to be taking more cranks than normal to start it (which makes perfect sense if it is an EVR issue, as those vapors are supposed to be fed back into the carburetor to aide the ignition process). No leaks.
Michelle tried texting and calling me a couple of times yesterday. She's pissed at me for ignoring her and in a huff because she has "never done that" to me. Uh... there have been months at a time where she has not returned my calls and several incidences of her telling me that we can't meet in public as she is afraid her current beau will see her with me.
Over the last few days Jen and I have traded a slew of text messages.
S122206/1118 Miss you
R122206/1121 You have no idea how much i'm thinking about you right now. I love you so deeply.
S122206/1504 Only a few more hours until I leave work. I can hardly wait to see you
R122206/1513 I'll come at six. Shall we do something for dinner love? Missing you.
S122206/1518 Let's do. We can go someplace in B(geographic reference deleted) if you'd like
R122206/1602 Ok that sounds great
S122206/1603 See you then my love
R122306/0928 Good morning. I love you.
S122306/0932 Good morning to you as well. I still adore you
R122306/0933 Likewise dearest
S122306/1301 Thinking of you, my love
R122306/1302 I miss you
S122306/1306 Are you still up to visiting my family tonight?
R122306/1306 Yes
S122306/1309 Great, I'll pick you up around 6 then
R122306/1310 Until then my darling
R122406/0916 Good morning. Merry christmas eve. I love you.
S122406/0920 A merry Christmas eve to you as well my darling
R122406/1340 Miss you
S122406/1342 I miss you too. I'll be heading over soon, okay?
R122406/1343 Perfect
S122406/1344 See you soon my love
R122406/1345 I love you. See you soon.
S122406/1419 I am on my way, darling
R122506/0818 I bet your still asleep. I just got up. Merry christmas. I love you, i can't Wait to see you my darling,
S122506/0821 Merry Christmas
S122506/0821 I'm not fully awake, but was just thinking of you my love
R122506/0823 You were my first thought this morning.
S122506/0824 I love you
R122506/0824 As always
R122506/0826 I love you so deeply, passionetly.
S122506/0829 And I you. I'd like to say you were my first thought of the day... but I don't know when I ever stopped thinking of you
R122506/0831 And i you, every day, every minute,
S122506/0834 You are so wonderful! I just adore you
R122506/0835 I love you my darling,
S122506/0838 And I love you in precisely equal measure, my dear
R122506/0841 Its a draw my dearest
S122506/0842 Good
R122506/0845 Very well.
S122506/0847 I'll see you in a few hours my beloved
R122506/0850 I cant wait to share the day with you.
S122506/0853 I can hardly wait to see you either
R122506/0855 Counting the hours
S122506/0856 I love you so
R122506/0858 See you when you get here my love.
S122506/1325 I'm on my way over, my darling
R122506/1329 Wonderful
R122606/0859 Good morning my love.
S122606/0902 And to you my wonderful darling
R122606/0904 I can't wait to see you today
S122606/0906 When shall I come over?
R122606/0912 I'm going to jump in the shower now. How about around 10:30 or 11?
S122606/0914 11 works for me, I'll see you then my darling
R122606/0915 Until then
R122706/0853 Good morning my darling, I love you.
S122706/0855 I love you also on this good yet windy morning
R122706/0856 Windy indeed
S122706/0858 Lumpy says that he misses you
R122706/0859 Tell lumpy i miss him too
S122706/0902 You want to get together later?
R122706/0904 Yes. What would be a good time for you?
S122706/0908 I need about an hour to get fully awake, cleaned up and ready to go
R122706/0911 Ok. Are you coming here, or shall i come to you my dearest?
S122706/0913 Would you mind coming here?
R122706/0917 Not at all, why should i mind, and with all you do. Ill be over around 10;3o
S122706/0919 Great! I shall see you then, my wonderful darling
R122806/0845 Good morning my love. I missed not seeing you at midnight. Have a good day. Thinking of you as always.
S122806/0850 Good morning my love, I also miss you & hope the day goes well for you.
R122806/0851 I love you
S122806/0852 I love you the same
R122806/0854 You want to come over for some leftovers?
S122806/0858 Sure. I can be there by 6. Does that leave enough time before choir practice?
R122806/0902 Sounds great. Got an e-mail and we have a week off. See you tonight love.
S122806/0905 Good to know. I will see you tonight. Until then, my love
Our face-to-face conversations have been great, too. Catholicism seems to be more a matter of tradition with Jen than anything else. She is a rationalist and knows that some things which are scientifically self-evident are also at odds with Church doctrine, in which case she chooses science over dogma. She is definitely pro-life, but condones contraception. Jennifer is not quite sure if and when she'd like to have children either and, that if she does, natural birth is out as she does not want to have her vagina stretched all to heck and torn... which not only would hurt tremendously but impair her subsequent enjoyment of sex. Speaking of which, she is amenable to letting me take her virginity (we have done everything else but). I still have not achieved climax with her... despite her most strenuous efforts in that direction.
What a woman! |
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| Posted using TxtLJ |
[Dec. 27th, 2006|12:35 am] |
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Back from Jen's again. Spent most of the day w/ her |
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