What kind of string are they talking about?
Jute?
Hemp?
Cotton?
Nylon?
They never say. Nobody ever says. What’s going on here? I have a right to know.
Budapest String Quartet
10 Tuesday Dec 2019
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Today’s Early Morning Ramble
09 Monday Dec 2019
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I have been up for awhile. I found some cartoons to watch on YouTube. I looked online for therapists. I don’t know who to trust. I have unresolved grief issues around the death of ex-wife #2, (absence of) sex issues with current wife, issues around sexual abuse when I was a teenager, and basic despair. I would have to talk with…..children, or at least so it seems to me.
Grief sucks. Repressed grief sucks even worse. The therapists all suggests that talking to them will make things better. That means I have to trust them. I don’t know if I will.
Christmas Knitting Porn
08 Sunday Dec 2019
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These Christmas stockings were knitted by my paternal grandmother’s sister, my Great Aunt Margie. I believe she lived in Cadillac,Michigan, Grandma’s hometown. This dear lady, whom I never knew, knitted stockings for us children,my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. She passed away in 1954 so my younger brother, and 3 of my cousins had stockings knitted by Daddy’s sister, Aunt Midge. My sister has the stockings of my parents and my late brother, in addition to her own. I am loaning mine out to her since we won’t hang stockings this year. (We won’t go there for right now.)
Awake, Grief Present
07 Saturday Dec 2019
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4:00 AM. I am awake. Nothing new about that. I am watching a video of a narrow gauge train in Wales. Quaint and quite lovely. The Brits earn tbeir “Q” alliteration without much effort on tbeir part.
There is sadness within me. I feel tbe loss of my brother and ex-wife most actuely around this time of year when they both died, one year apart. I am not over her death. We were alcoholic, abusive to each othet, and had different views on many things. Yet I loved her. This is what comes into my head right now.
Maybe her dislike of me at the end mirrored my own sense of low self-worth. I dunno. She was there to validate my self-hatred.
Nobody ever said I was emotionally healthy.
Bedtime, After I Digress
07 Saturday Dec 2019
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She won’t mind if I go upstairs, take my melatonin, brush my teeth, and go to bed. But her show is on, or one of them anyway.
I will suggest we watch a sitcom DVD, maybe I Love Lucy, as a break from Seinfeld. Even I tire of them. Lucy has more physical comedy, which is hard to follow when I am not actually watching, but the music can’t be beat. Sometimes I long for the Fifties, which is to say I long for my childhood, with my brothers and my sister, my parents and the cast of grandparents, aunts and uncles, who made guest appearances in the family drama.
When I consider the post WW Two morphed into Cold War world we lived in, we knew that tension was part of things, The peripheral conflicts made themselves known, like the time Hungarian refugees moved into an apartment next to us after the Hungarian Revolt.
We were living in an apartment while Dad had a house built for us. It must have been 1959. The refugees moved into the adjacent apartment. There was a son, they called “Shiny”, his real name was Alexander. There was a mother and Shiny’s two sisters. The father had tuberculosis and was away getting treatment. He was a hairdresser.
We made friends with the kids. The mother smoked. Mother made friends with her. We liked them. Eventually we moved and they moved. They were Catholic, my first exposure to Catholics. Catholics were different.
But the Fifties, despite the refugees and the Civil Rights movement that gripped The South, was about progress and new stuff. GE’s motto was Progress is our most important Product* When I watch Lucy, it brings back the wonderful progressive world of jet aircraft, Sputnik, interstate highways, color TV, polio vaccines.
I guess I could say more. All I really want to do though is go to bed.
*{I could do a whole rant on GE, from Mr Magoo to tbeir spokesman, a former movie actor named Ronald Reagan).}
Self Care
06 Friday Dec 2019
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Today I emailed the Nocturnal Adoration lady and told her I could not do the 4:00 AM Holy Hour. I need the rest. I also cancelled out of the book study group. Same reason. That means casserole idea is on hold. Well the AA Christmas Dinner at the Clubhouse is Sunday. I can prepare it for that.
Pushing myself comes easy. Cancelling out, especially Church stuff is hard. I vacuumed the downstairs carpet. That will be all the work i will do today.
Right now, I’m waiting for J to get home. I told her to order a pizza and bring it home. Looking forward to seeing her.
Recipes And Recovery
06 Friday Dec 2019
Posted in alcoholism, cooking, Uncategorized
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Our Church book group meets Saturday. We have lunch afterwards, I thought about turning the chicken cacciatore I made the other day into a casserole. I might need to add more mushrooms a package of thawed frozen spinach, more pasta, cover w cheese and bake in the oven til the cheese is melted.
But I keep wondering If I have enough (over a quart size container). Everybody is bringing something and there are Italians in the mix of participants, so I’m betting somebody else can cook. (Gratuitous ethnic stereotype!) Well, I have now declared there is plenty. So I won’t worry.
Somebody at the AA meeting today celebrated five years of sobriety, This is significant for me because five years ago, 5 December 2014, is the day my brother died, the same day this guy got sober. My brother was not alcoholic, but he died too young (65). Maybe Charlie, my brother, has Neal’s back, or so I like to think.
Life is hard enough without people making trouble for no good reason at all. There is magic in keeping your mouth shut. Be gentle with each other and yourself.
Up
05 Thursday Dec 2019
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I’m up and I ask myself why
My eyes are filled with tears that will not flow.
There is love that I long for
There is love, visible, tangible, solid yet I yearn still.
Who will entwine with me, naked and warm, through the night, defying dawn?
4. XII. 2019
05 Thursday Dec 2019
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The poem I wrote this morning, The Question In My Head, was on my mind today, as was its question “Do you love me?”
I shared the question at AA at noon. And as I left the meeting, people I did not know told me they loved me. Quite an experience.
I guess I let people know I was vulnerable. And in need.
The Question In My Head
04 Wednesday Dec 2019
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The question repeats itself, over and over,
arises, apparently, at random.
Who asks it? Am I the inquirer?
If so to whom do I ask it?
Or does someone, who has no face, ask it of me?
Do you love me?
Dispatches From Dystopia 