Monk

French femininity is reacting against all the sexual charges raging in America:

In the wake of the rampaging sexual harassment scandal in Hollywood, French actress Catherine Deneuve is taking a different tack, saying that men should be “free to hit on” women.

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack...

[Fox News]

* * *

My afternoon nap was interrupted by persistent barking near the window. I was worried about Sammy being out there, and I got up to see what's what. An Eskimo Spitz. About the same size as Bo, too. Though, he had a bit too much brown in his coat for it to be just a little biscuit cream. But still very Eskimo-y. And beautiful enough that one of the women next door was trying to draw him over, but the dog was also still very spitzy and would not be lassoed in.

* * *

This is just a sort of semi-writing day. Though, more like the first writing days. That is, I don't want to work on my Old Journal, and I also want to read my "Grant" book (though, I am reminded that a thousand-page book is hard on the wrist). However, over the past few days, there have been a number of little things that I kind of wanted to write about, but I dropped them as being trivial. The problem with that, of course, is that there is precious little in my life that rises above triviality, and yet I still get this craving to write something. So, having the laptop on, I've decided to run with it this afternoon and maybe make a number of notes.

* * *

My passion for Solitaire has been rekindled. Recall that, after dropping my Dreamland Football League, I took Solitaire back up largely because I wanted to keep the art of playing-cards in my life, and Solitaire was the only way I knew how. Attitudes often follow behavior, and in playing I rediscovered what I loved about the pastime. It helps that I needed a 'little toy' to burn off some marginal restless energy, especially for my reading breaks. Solitaire serves that purpose well. I am keeping it basic, though, just playing Klondike, Spider, and Free Cell. All the other games are really just minor variations of these three, at least with respect to any of the games that I can care for.

* * *

Seth MacFarlane: "Oprah is beyond doubt a magnificent orator. But the idea of a reality show star running against a talk show host is troublingly dystopian. We don’t want to create a world where dedicated public service careers become undesirable and impractical in the face of raw celebrity."

What else are the poor going to do? Bag groceries?

[Twitter]

* * *

Tucker Carlson: "The goal of Democrats is to import more Democratic voters by any means necessary."

James Woods: "Democrats have no platform, no integrity, they are only interested in a self-perpetuating paradigm of existence. They would let America be overrun by hordes of freeloaders just for the votes necessary for survival as a political party."

You guys might do better if you weren't so greedy. The anti-immigration thing works for you, but greed kills you.

[Twitter

* * *

I just finished the last episode of the first season of Showtime's "Californication". I am sorry that I quit the show early in the first season when it first aired. As I recall, I was too upset over the feminist-approved standards. Now that my rape-porn cup overflows on the Internet, and perhaps also thanks to my aging, I no longer need to get my thrills on mainstream shows and movies, though it certainly helps the show to win a higher place in my estimation if they do give it up. And, yes, "Californication" actually does give it up a bit. Apparently Showtime has a thing about bush, but they are not too shy about tits, or at least they let this show go a little wild with the boobs. It helps.

It also could be that I am simply in the mood for TV, because I'm also binge-ing on HBO's "Entourage" - as well as "Cheers"! And there are a number of seasons for all three of these shows. That's a lot of TV. I can definitely use it, because if this is a mood thing with me, it doesn't seems to cover movies. It's a rare movie that wins me over.

I step outside in the early morning, not long out of bed, to check the cats' water dish. Yes, it is solid ice. That still thrills me. It only happens, like, once a year.

* * *

June 12, 1994

Teri and I were battling it out over control of the very air we breathe. It was an ongoing war with occasional truces. It mostly died out eventually, maybe after the big cataclysm between Jack and me in '97. After that, she might have let up on me a little bit.

"Last night she left out a sour solution to grace the air - vinegar, I think - on the expressed belief that it absorbs odors. Personally, I am not so sure that it absorbs odors as much as overwhelm them with its own stench."

I covered up the vinegar solution with a plate, which then caused her to curse. Later, I used an air-freshener "laced with deodorizing baking soda". She then covered that up with what seemed to be bug spray, to which I fired back with my potpourri air-freshener.

I wrote, "It looks to me like we are in store for a climax of one kind or another. The home-life atmosphere seems to be highly unstable, like something has to give - probably me in some way."

o0o

Having written up this old journal entry this morning, I came out of my nap today, the first day of 2018, some twenty-three years after these events, feeling the conviction that a big part of my problem with Teri is that she really was too lame-brained. I know how terribly self-serving that sounds (aside from what that says of the stock I came from), but I don't think I ever thought of it quite like this before. I always thought of her difficulties in terms of her mental illness. I tended to dismiss her ignorance for want of education. Remember, I used to fancy that I might have gotten my intelligence from her, if I had any myself!

The thing is, she was always so cocky and strong-willed. Pop was the simple one, as in Simple Tree; mother was stormy, as in Stormy Dreamer. But she wasn't just mentally ill; she was ... really quite dumb. She always acted like she was holding a pair of aces in her hand, but it was always just a couple of junky low cards. And I kind of wanted to believe her. And it wasn't as though she never displayed a bit of sparkiness. Hmph, maybe I did get my mentality from her, just kicked up another gear or two.

Another thing is, to help complicate matters, she was probably onto something. I googled about vinegar absorbing odors, and it is supposed to work. But is it supposed to smell in its own right, though? Is it possible she did not use the advice correctly? maybe using the wrong kind of vinegar? or mixing it with something she wasn't supposed to? In any case, despite my convictions coming out of my nap, maybe I still don't know how to think about her, about us, about anything.

At least there is enough love there that I do miss her. Still, if I could meet up with only one being, when I die, I would choose Bo. She would choose Jack. That's just the way it is.

Heh, I wonder who Arthudo would pick? I honestly cannot come up with an answer. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't pick Teri. Is it possible that the answer could be me? A good guess would be a woman, and if not his onetime wife, then maybe Kay or Lorie, but they seem too recent and not that deeply involved, but maybe I am wrong about this. Could it be Teri, after all, maybe when she was young, when they were young, in their twenties? All I know is that I like that answer - maybe with Jack and me, when we were young kids, with one family counting as one person. I like that a lot, that this would be Arthudo's happiest scene, but I doubt he'd answer that way. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I still don't know how to think about him, either. You know, being young lovers with Teri is not a bad bet, when she was still a teenager, a sexy white girl, and he was the big man raising her up to a better life. That was most likely the height of his life - not of her life, but certainly his.

[January 1, 2018]

I wasn't feeling so sure about making today a writing day. But it's been a while, especially if you don't count the Snow Day entry. This is probably because I have been feeling more excited about my reading life. I'm down to my last hundred-and-fifty pages of my Webster-Clay-Calhoun book, and I have decided to quench my curiosity about T. S. Eliot. Of course, he is too recondite for me, but he sweeps me away when he does write within my zone of comprehension, and even when he takes off above the clouds, I can still marvel over some of his phrases. Since I no longer feel very intellectually curious in my old age, I figured I should take advantage of my little fascination with Eliot and go ahead and reach beyond myself a little. So, I ordered Peter Ackroyd's biography of the poet. Accordingly, I am a little anxious to finish off the Webster book and hence spend more days reading rather than writing.

And if I don't really feel like writing anyway, is it such a bad thing not to? Once could be cruel and point out less writing from me means less pollution in cyberspace. I am tempted to think that I could reserve my writing days for when I am feeling deeply depressed and down for the count, when I arguably really and truly need to write - using the exercise of writing to revive me and my thinking self (before I end up needing electro-shock therapy). But cyberspace is a big space; otherwise I wouldn't be able to afford to write in it. And, once I get myself into it, writing almost always makes me feel better about myself. Besides, in old age, it might be a good idea to exercise my writing muscles somewhat regularly, as parts of me are dying off everyday. I ought to at least try to keep this writing thing going for as long as I can. (Only my acne is forever young.) Without my writing life, I am too much like a zombie. Without my writing, I am too much like a plant that needs somebody to come around every once in a while to water, and maybe position me in the warming sunlight, if you are so kind.

* * *

Netflix tweeted: "To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?"

* * *

Am I getting more uptight, or is Arthudo getting worse about his loudness - his music, his TV, his phone? Yesterday, being Sunday, a day that he usually claims as a stay-at-home day, he must have been worse than usual. I needed to keep shutting his office door to try to keep from going completely mad. I came to appreciate that I am very lucky that he usually likes to stay in bed till about eleven in the morning and to go out on his afternoon rounds, because if he didn't - if he was an early bird and decided to become almost as much of a homebody as me - then ... I don't know if I could go on.

I know, I always do that, and it's weak, and I wish I was a little tougher than that. I wish I had succeeded in freeing myself from this bad, weakish rhetorical habit by the time I cleared my thirties. In truth, I presumably would find a way go on, finding more workarounds. I always do; I'm still here. Maybe I'd get wireless headphones and always have white noise playing in my ears, which is not nearly as nice as natural quiet, but I'd presumably accept it as better than dying.

In the same way that I need to play with words and books, I guess he needs noise, some noise of the crowd to help him feel like he is living. Natural quiet perhaps begins to feel too much like death to him. His own thoughts certainly cannot carry much of a pulse in them. For him, at his age, the line between life and death might well seem too thin and uncertain in the best of circumstances. I suppose it is silly to hope that he might become more zen.

* * *

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

June 11, 1994

I felt like theorizing about my ... fetish for rapey themes - the whole macho power-sex thing.

"Why am I emotionally enthralled by depictions of women being raped or brutishly used against their will? It was that scene from 'Jezebel's Kiss' and my response to it that finally moved me to consolidate the issue."

This is the movie about the mysterious young woman who comes to a small town, and among her serial ravishers was a cop who date-raped her on a table. The scene is a nothing burger in this day of Internet porn, but back in 1994, when cable-TV was everything, baby, it was about as hot as it got, and it obviously excited me.

I was discoursing through this theme in my Hallway Dialogues. I am surprised to see that Beverly was the starring figure at this time. I would have thought she had already fallen into the bit role of a marginal player, scarcely even worth mentioning, but my mindscape was apparently evolving only very slowly.

I theorized most fancifully, yet all too seriously, that maybe my dominance-fantasies reflect the fact that, by nature, I am a "dominant leader" who is only sociologically kept down and emotionally deformed. It is a little discomfiting to read this twenty-three years later. I imagine that real dominant personalities focus more on attaining real power over men and organizations and even nations, rather than on dominating women and schoolgirls. It's like my brain was literally becoming shit in my idle years at home. I can imagine Dr. G. reading this entry and deciding right then and there not to have anything more to do with me. Whatever potential I might have had had obviously spoiled and gone rotten.

Tried a relatively new movie, "Pocket Listing" featuring Burt Reynolds. The synopsis made me think it might be a throwaway sexy drama, fun enough, promising nudity. I was also curious to see what Burt is doing these days. I know he is not young, but I was lazily thinking that he might still be like "Boogie Nights" Burt. I was way off. He looks like he has the rictus face of a stroke victim and seems to be barely mobile - heavily painted over and propped up in a chair. Googling him, I see that he is 81 years old. "Boogie Nights" was twenty years ago. (For me, the 90s to today still feels like just a busy few months.) Time moves slowly but ever steadily onward. It gets us all, unless early death gets us first. I gave up on the movie, too. As per our era, the nudity was more like feminist-approved nudity rather than machismo-driven nudity.

* * *

Someone tweeted: "Hey, Susan Sarandon, if Hillary was President, she could have vetoed this. Thanks. Thanks a lot."

Sarandon was one of the anti-Hillary people.

Susan Garnett answered, "Sarandon promised us that Tump would bring about the Revolution. Shouldn't she have a bullhorn in her hand right now calling all of us to the streets? Oh, that's right, I forgot, she's spending the month of Christmas in the south of France."

[Twitter]

* * *

Having decided to go back to doggerel (to at least give a little play to journaling the banal life & times of the Monkey-Knight), I fell to the temptations of poetry, and struggle to do my own poor imitation of the artful enterprise. I have been working on one for a few days now. I think I'll put down my progress so far. I am looking to close it up soon.

- - -

Four-thirty in the morning, again
Up but not really up
Trapped in midnight purgatory, thinking
Regretting all the things that've never been

She often said, meaning well,
"It's the things you don't do
that you end up regretting.
So do it, do everything!"

Twenty years on, I'm muttering in the dark
"If only I could have,
Could have done everything."

But she had to see the face sometime
On the other side of her Internet line
And there blew away my sweet dandelion
And my last chance to do anything
And so, too, the end of everything

Now I'm old and never did a damn thing
Yawning my way through another dawn
A little after five o'clock in the morning

* * *

I switched the mattress in my room with the one in the big room. I figure it's at least 33% firmer. I did try to sleep on the floor that one night, but I did not have nearly enough cushion to make that work. I was looking at sleeping bags and mats at Amazon, but I would really like to save the fifty dollars.

* * *

June 10, 1994

Picking up the mail, I see that Arthudo received a catalog from a computer company. "I fantasize over the possibility of getting a complete system with modem, multi-media capacity, everything." It would take another nine years, before we finally got wired up and joined the Internet age. We were a little late, but not too late to do me some good. The Internet, with a thriving blogosphere, doesn't really get rolling for about another five years. I still have a lot of wasting away to do in the analog world as my 90s grind on.

* * *

June 10, 1994

Arthudo has been away for a couple of hours on one of his mysterious weekly excursions. I wonder whether he has found some access to accommodating beautiful young women, or if he is being jerked around for a live show or a hand job.

o0o

Of course, Arthudo wouldn't need the women to be particularly attractive or young. Warm and friendly is fine. But it is quite possible he just liked to go shopping on his own, as he does now, just doing his mundane rounds. I didn't call him simple, as in Simple Tree, without a reason. But he does take care of himself, that's for sure. And why not? He is his own man pursuing his own happiness in a world that is not that much more open to him than to me, and he worked for his little advantages. I just keep on taking and act like he owes me.

* * *

June 10, 1994

Bo remains a source of tension between Teri and me. Arthudo is trying a new microwave popcorn. I knew that Teri would not be able to resist feeding Bo some of the popcorn. I was prepared to be understanding and tolerant. However, it became apparent that she is not able to exercise the least restraint, and I called Bo off, taking him to my room.

o0o

I go on to worry that Teri will sometime bring this to a trial by strength, which I could not win. Would I take to the streets on the issue? I suffer the stress as I sulk in my room.

It is already evident in the early morning that a warming is upon us. We enjoyed about a week of sweet coolness. Even put on the heater a couple of nights. With the warming, Ash prefers to stay outside. Sammy will actually suffer some wintry chill for the thrill of being in the great outdoors.

* * *

Kyle Griffin: "By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them."

Of course, the sharp retort is that this is why we have a Senate, to give states equal representation, but it still illustrates the undemocratic structures in our government. It's tricky, though. More direct democracy is not necessarily something that colored people should want when living in a white majority country that still harbors racist attitudes. This particular fact of the Senate is, however, presumably more problematic for liberals and minorities.

[Twitter]

* * *

June 10, 1994

I wonder whether I will soon have to give up books all together. "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris seems to be very friendly for the popular audience. Yet, I get a headache at times while reading it. It feels to me as if neurons, synapses, dendrites and whatever are dying off right behind my very eyes. My vision itself doesn't seem to take in the mere print on the page. It somehow doesn't feel like too much of an exaggeration to say that I am dying.

o0o

I dwelled too much on my decaying and dying. I know. But I guess I didn't have much else happening with me, and I wasn't up to writing anything more challenging.

* * *

Finally, regarding all the sexual allegations and tut-tutting, I see some discussions that get to the heart of the matter, that men are sexual beasts. I'll snag an excerpt:

Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general. This time the accusations aren’t against some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries, with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality.

Men arrive at this moment of reckoning woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience. Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.

For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself.

He doesn't go as far as I do. He is obviously optimistic that men can be 'civilized'. I go with the old proposition that you cannot legislate morality. At most, you can selectively enforce it.

[Stephen Marche, NYT]

I think I really will have to start sleeping on the floor tonight. The 'give' in my bed is perhaps too much for my back. I was starting to feel fine last night, but sleeping in that bed has brought back my back-problem. I have noticed how the mattress caves down rather deeply for my hip and lower-back area when I lie down on it, particularly when I lie down on my side, which is how I sleep. I can't be letting my back curve like that. I don't imagine it can be good for a healthy back. It must be disastrous for my broken back. I need to keep it straighter.

I still need a little cushioning, of course. Big Blue, my winter blanket, along with the comforter, should be a big help. I could use a little more cushion, but this might be good enough to start out with until I find something else to add to it.

* * *

May 19, 1994

I was writing about my feelings of sickliness, always feeling fundamentally malnourished and weakish and woozy. Dark Spirit (or should it be Daimon?) said, "Yeah, I guess those Centrum vitamin pills aren't doing the trick."

o0o

This reminds me of my old routine of a vitamin-pill-a-day. The closest I could come to spinach. I am surprised that it had gone on that long. This entry is from 1994, and I know I was still into it after we moved here to Downhill Street in '97, maybe even until sometime after Teri died. I suspect it probably hurt more than helped, if it did anything at all. I was still in my twenties, if just barely, and I obviously was still eager to try to be healthy & strong: I believed I still might have a life.

* * *

E. B. White: “I revise a great deal. I know when something is right because bells begin ringing and lights flash.”

[Twitter]

* * *

"Hey, I thought there wasn't suppose to be any Dreamland Football League on writing days."

Yeah, well, it turns out that I need a reason to live on writing days, too.

* * *

Cathy Young: "Does anyone feel like the sexual revolution has finally hit the Reign of Terror stage."

* * *

June 9, 1994

Perhaps it is time to stop trying to be cute. Maybe I can now leave to die my fantasies of a literary or intellectual character. However, rather than stop writing or journalizing, it might be worthwhile to give an honest account of an offensively limited and demoralized life, a realist account that is simple and genuine.

o0o

This actually sounds like a good beginning for a narrative. It's too bad that I was not able to keep the idea in mind and stick to it. A greater focus on detail, specific and concrete, would have been nice - to make a point of actually saying something. It sounds simple, but ... somehow it seems to be beyond my intellectual capability. I seldom break beyond wooly feelings and banal generalities, which cannot really mean anything to anyone, not even to myself when I come back years later to read it again, and it can all seem like so much missed opportunity. In this way, my journaling, or journalizing, ends up being just another empty experience, with but an occasional moment of penetrative clarity that saves this enterprise from being a total waste.

* * *

"Uglier, bloodier, and only more civilized than a cockfight."

0f the Cowboys-Redskins game in 1973

[Joe Zagorski, "The NFL in the 1970s"]

"LOL You're hobbling about like an old man again, I see."

I'm glad you think it's funny.

I threw my back out of whack again. Whew, it really takes away from the quality of life: when you cannot even walk or move without pain.

Though, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I am kind of welcoming it. It can help to make ... final decisions easier - when, among all the other shit, life means living with chronic pain.

"And you were afraid of being melodramatic! We should call you Suicide Monk or something. You really are worse than an emo teenager."

Well ... I admit I have perhaps overdone it over the years. But you really can't deny that the end is nigh. Poor old Arthudo could collapse any day. He cannot go on carrying me on his back forever. So, yeah, it's on my mind. It's kind of foreseeable. It might not be a bad idea to try to be mentally prepared for it.

* * *

Marco Rubio: "America is at risk of becoming class warfare on the left and ethnic nationalism on the right."

* * *

May 15, 1994

I noticed that Princess had "numerous complex knots in her coat", and I set about trying to fix her up. Since she was always with Teri, I must have conveniently considered Princess to be her responsibility. My bad.

* * *

Rebecca Traister: "That’s because this world is stacked in favor of men, yes, in a way that is so widely understood as to be boring, invisible, just life. But more deeply, this will happen because we can see in men — even in the bad ones — talent. We manage to look past their flaws and sexual violations to what value they bring to the world. It is the direct opposite, in many ways, of how we view women, whose successes can still be blithely attributed to the fact that the boss wanted to fuck them."

[The Cut]

* * *

I shouldn't be surprised that Arthudo would give Jill a crack at the car engine, even though she has never managed to fix a car problem yet in over twenty years. She is good at taking things apart, but putting them together - not so much. I remember that is the way her father, Falstaff, 'fixed' our toilet once, too, leaving us with just a hole in the floor. But Arthudo can never overlook a chance at a 'bargain'. And, of course, a whole crew comes along for free munchies. I just wonder if they will be here for the rest of the day - and maybe tomorrow.

* * *

May 15, 1994

"Our skin is breaking out yet again," Ego observes. "Struck blood tonight!"

"It no longer matters, does it?" Dark Spirit comments. "After this many years of sexual deprivation, there can be only a few dying embers of tortured expectation left."

"Yes, but that doesn't mean we are pain-free," Romantic Soul answers.

* * *

Arthudo just dropped a bombshell. Kay is coming tomorrow and will be staying until Saturday. Something about needing a new bed and not being able to get it delivered until Saturday, blah, blah, blah. God ... why not strike me down now!?

"Suicide Monk."

Yeah, I'm just ... I'm not tough enough for life and this world. It feels like I get so little out of it, and it's just more shit and more shit.

Writing day!

Actually, I'm not even sure if I need writing days anymore. Maybe the past couple of writing days have loosened a block for me, made it easier for me to get around that filter that tells me that there is nothing interesting happening and I have nothing to say about it anyway. Maybe I can go back to the old way, when I would just stop and write then and there when something got my attention, like when you are a small kid and everything in the world appears wondrous and full of inviting mystery. But I am sticking with the new routine for now.

Oh, and I almost forgot: I still need the writing day to help me get through the Old Journal. The inclination is strong in me to forget about all that dumb scribbling, but ... having poured my best adulthood into it, I should at least touch upon it - take another look at how the disaster that was my life unfolded itself over the years, like watching in slow motion a twenty-car pile-up of a freeway accident, all the twisting metal and shattered glass and ruined lives.

* * *

After another mass shooting yesterday, at a Texas church, David Frum tweets: "Crazy thought: lifetime gun ban for anyone who raises a hand against a woman or a child." He is kind of a goody-goody dreamer. He would have more luck with a gun ban for all colored people.

* * *

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says he’s cracking down on corruption. But the sweeping arrests of cabinet ministers and senior princes Saturday night looked to many astonished Arab observers like a bold but risky consolidation of power.

-- Washington Post

It looks like a coup. A Trump-supported coup at that. So much happening so fast with such a key Middle East power, it's difficult to say anything. It sounds like there is some intention to liberalize and modernize the country, but what can you realistically hope for from someone who makes this kind of a power-play? And anything Trump supports should be suspicious. Yet, yet, the Saudi regime of old has been such a support-system for Islamist terrorism, one can kind of hope that maybe a big change like this might stomp that out. It's all so wild - too much, too fast. You cannot know what to make of it. You have to see what transpires over the coming months. Now that I think of it, it is kind of that way with Trump, too.

* * *

The hardest thing about 'writing day' is 'no Dreamland Football League'. If I don't push it aside, though, I will spend most of the day playing that. As it is, I wonder if I should leave aside my poetry books and Solitaire-playing as well - focus that much harder on the writing and the Old Journal. Hell, maybe even forget about Twitter and give it all to the Old Journal. I am not prepared to go that far, though.

* * *

Regarding that church shooting, Speaker Ryan, like many, spoke of the need for prayers. Wil Wheaton replied, "The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they'd still be alive, you worthless sack of shit." A Christian rejoined, "They are alive. They're in a place where they don't have to experience ugliness like yours ever again. The shooter...not so much."

* * *

May 12, 1994

The lottery was perhaps too much on our minds in the 1990s, including my own. It was a new thing in Texas and a big deal. If you are poor, maybe it has to capture your imagination. Though, Teri doubtlessly took it too seriously. After one drawing, she said to me, "One person won that 40-million dollars. That's our money!" There was clearly an edge of real anger and frustration in her voice.

Maybe I should be touched by the fact that she said 'our' money. She naturally included me. We were a real family unit. Or, might I be mistaken in this? Is it possible that she was just thinking of Jack and herself? Heh, it's a mistake, lord knows, I've made before.

- - -

See, this is the value of going through these old entries. I'm touched not just by the 'our' but by her whole statement and feeling. Of course, I had forgotten it completely, yet it is worth remembering and re-imagining it. It enriches my sense of our lives, and the experience was saved from the oblivion of forgetfulness by my journal. Even if all my journal is lost tomorrow, I still got to re-live that experience today - so sweet, it hurts. I just want to hug her.

* * *

May 12, 1994

The carpet in the living room had been going from bad to worse. I tried to raise Bo and Princess right, even read books on it. But I failed to see that it was not smart to put the dogs' bathroom-papers on the carpet. The problem actually became rather disgusting.

I tried to do something about it. I treated the carpet with baking soda. I must have read about the idea somewhere. I wrote, "It cannot replace a good carpet shampooing and steaming, but it's an improvement."

- - -

"That doesn't seem like such a great memory."

Heh, it isn't. But it marks that time period of our lives. It was ... a pretty big factor toward the end of our time at Bay Horse, and pretty bad, too. It was the main room of the house, the living room, where we had the big-screen TV, and to have it literally stinking and funky with shit and piss. Pretty disgusting. We just weren't smart enough to handle the situation better. You could say we belonged in the trailer park, or the inner-city projects. But it's who we were - not very bourgeois, I guess.

* * *

Oleaginous Ted Cruz is at the church where that mass-shooting happened. He said, "We don't need politics right now", as he continues to play politics, laying down the Christianity card on behalf of the Grand Old Party and his presidential ambitions.

* * *

May 14, 1994

"Happy birthday, Monkey-Knight! We've managed to tough it out for another year. It wasn't easy," Romantic Soul announces.

"Yeah, happy birthday. Here's to the art of frustration!" Dark Spirit declares.

At this period in my journaling, I was experimenting with some new voices, the different voices of the self. There is also an Ego voice. This experiment, like all the others, did't go anywhere, of course. I can't recall if I had come up with Pi and Daimon yet. It's interesting to see that I am coming up with the same sort of characterizations, as Pi is obviously like Romantic Soul and Daimon is quite the Dark Spirit - sunny and dark, kind of a feminine ideal and a hard masculinity, a yin and yang.

In this entry, I also wrote, "Twenty-nine years old. What will become of the Monkey-Knight?" Twenty-three long years later, I suppose we have an answer: not much, not much at all. I made some pretty good blogging friends for a few years, but that's about it, really, unless you count my relationships with the dogs and cats. But, no, I really don't have anything to brag about, do I?

* * *

Three Old Journal entries in one day. Pretty good. I think I'll cut Writing Day short today as a kind of reward to myself. Besides, I want to get back to the DFL. Staubach's Cowboys are having a tough time against Elway's Broncos.

A writing day? I have been meaning to get back in the habit, or try to, in the happy thought that it stimulates brain cells and enriches one's sense of life, la di da da. But it's not easy, even if you are not trying to score publication or money, nor even Internet-friend comments. I wanted to try at the end of last week, but Grocery Day was the next day, and there would be no time for it. And the next day after that, Saturday, I thought it would be better to get back into my Clay-Webster-Calhoun book. Then there was yesterday, Sunday. Pop's Cowboys were playing, which screws up another day for me, or at least it screwed it up enough for me to rationalize putting off my 'writing day' for yet another day.

Now there is today. I was close to blowing it off again. I'm surprised by how averse I seem to be to it. It's almost as bad as having to clean my shower. Maybe it's aging. It's never been this way before. I am not sure if it is because too many of my brain cells have died off, or if it is because I am too self-aware now and know that I am not a writer and that there isn't any real point in trying to write. Maybe it's both working together.

But, evidently, I do want to try. So, here I am doing the easy 'stream of consciousness' thing. I have the further prop of the Old Journal. I intend to use that for fodder. I don't think we will be starting that great american novel today. I didn't have any firm intentions about the form this would take. I suppose I was thinking that I would just be working up a 'higher intensity' journal entry, which is what I have always done before when in the writing mood.

But maybe I will make Writing Day a Steam of Consciousness Day. In addition to the Old Journal journal entries, maybe I will roll up my Twitter discussions in this enterprise as well and make it all one journal entry. This comes to mind because I want to log into my Twitter feed and get that going. Today promises to be a bigger news day with the Mueller indictments coming down. Yeah, let's do that...

* * *

Here's a provocative tweet on the Weinstein and sex stuff: "Remember when Winona Ryder shoplifted once and it destroyed her career, but men can rape and abuse and still have careers". There is a misogynist relish in that, but it is a bit of an exaggeration. She did go into a hiatus for a few years, but her career seems to have gotten back on track. The men, too, seem to go into a kind of hiatus, and it's not clear if they can get back on track professionally. Also, Ryder was convicted in court. Allegations don't seem to get that far with the men. Cash buys a lot of forgiveness.

[Twitter]

* * *

That was quite a finale for "The Deuce". Did I really see naked dick going in and out of a naked pussy?? That's okay now?

I google and check Twitter for some discussion, maybe even a firestorm of controversy. But it is like nothing. Like it happens all the time on HBO. I also checked to see if the show is greenlighted for a second season, but I cannot find any word on that either.

* * *

Google has put up a cheeseburger emoji, but not without a little playful controversy. The emoji has the cheese below the meat. That's the way I make my cheeseburger, with the lettuce, pickles, tomato on top, with the mustard and ketchup on the bottom bun and on top of the meat. But apparently there is a right way and a wrong way, and guess which way I do it? I didn't see any discussion on why it is superior to put the cheese on top. So, I will stick with my way.

[MSN News]

* * *

Old Journal, part one

My writing day is almost over. It will end with my afternoon snack, somewhere around five or six o'clock. And I have yet to even look at the Old Journal. This fact is a little off-putting, because it was the main reason for my writing day. But going through my Old Journal entries is about as bad as walking on a red-hot bed of coals. Those journal entries were the main enterprise of my best adult years, sort of my career, and in my giddier moods, I looked upon it as the potential launching pad for my literary immortality, and now I understand what a revolting waste all of it is. I might as well have poured gasoline all over my life and lit a match. A real dumpster fire. My only consolation is that there really wasn't much else to do with it.

It's especially tough now, because the next entry that I want to work on is about Jack's new life with live-in girlfriends and how Teri and Arthudo are favoring him. I am tempted to simply skip it. Problem solved! But I cannot let myself cheat like that.

Recall that I am working on a fat little notebook that covers the spring of 1994. I want to complete this notebook before moving on to some other section of the journal.

* * *

Maybe I should get something on all the excitement over the Mueller indictments. Let me grab Jeet Heer's tweets:

I've thought Dems should be cautious about expecting too much from Mueller investigation but Papadopoulos plea is massive news.

With Papadopoulos, we have the outlines of what happened and it's terrible for Trump: quid for quo collusion tied to emails.

This is the biggest scandal in American history. Bigger than Watergate. We're headed for legitimacy crisis.

I don't know if we are there yet. Heer is an elite media guy and brilliant, but he is partisan and rather out there on the left. But the plot is indeed only thickening.

But, assuming that we are reaching a climax, I like this response from one of his followers, 'I am going to be SHOCKED if this ends any other way than blanket pardon, Mueller fired, congress shrugs and says "let's repeal ACA again".' Though, this would qualify as a legitimacy crisis, albeit the one with the worst ending.

[Twitter]

* * *

Old Journal, part two

Looking through the old entries in question, I see that I overestimated their gravity. They do touch upon the new status of Jack with Teri and Arthudo however, and I guess that was enough to make me queasy.

May 8, 1994

Monk is struck by how busy Teri and Arthudo are in trying to do favors for Jack. I said it was as if they felt a "need to cover a deficit with him." But I went on to note that with Jack's social life at H.E.B., he seemed to be becoming much more independent - even kind of grown up, you might say. This would seem to be the answer. They want to be supportive and maintain their link with him. Though, it also might be exaggerated in an effort to try to spur me to look beyond the family hearth for a life of my own.

In another entry from this day, I wrote, "Monk believes that Teri takes pleasure stepping on his ego, and that the many and varied subtle ways in which she does this bespeaks a twisted genius." Unfortunately, I did not give any details, or go through these subtle ways. But such game-playing does smack of her mean little mentality, even if the intention arguably has some worthiness in it, such as trying to motivate me to get off my ass and do something, get a job, make a life for myself.

Of course, she, with Arthudo, could have simply forced me out of the house if they wanted. And who knows what that might have wrought. Maybe I would have done the 'right thing' and got a servile job, or else have put an ending to it all then and there, instead of dragging on through all these years. Who knows?

What seems clear is that I put myself in a vulnerable and humiliating position, and Teri and Arthudo were willing and able to make me feel it. And I chose to cling to my homebound, do-nothing life desperately.

* * *

John Cheever once said, “I don’t work with plots. I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts.”

I am guessing he didn't write stories so much as compelling scenes of troubled and conflicted lives.

"If it's so easy, why don't you do it?"

Whoa, I didn't say it was easy. It probably requires more experience and understanding of human relationships than I have ever acquired or hope to.

All I know is alienation and estrangement, of drowning in air.

"You do have a knack for phrasing."

Yeah, just about everyone notices that. That's what enabled and sustained my writing fantasy, I suppose. It is also what has made me think that poetry might have been my road to literary success, if any road was open to me at all, but that seems to require something more too. I just can't carry a tune. I can't even whistle.

[Twitter]

* * *

Well, my writing day is coming to an end. I enjoyed it. Now watch my laptop break down, forcing me to quit! Until that happens, though, I think I might have a couple of these a week.