Better Than Dead

Random quote of the day:

“During the last years the suggestion has come to me from various quarters that I should do something akin to an autobiography. I have been unable to conceive of my doing anything of the sort. I know too many autobiographies, with their self-deceptions and downright lies, and I know too much about the impossibility of self-portrayal, to want to venture on any such attempt.”

—Carl Jung, letter to Aniela Jaffé, quoted in the Introduction to Memories, Dreams, Reflections

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

30 Oct
Get out your hankies. The 20 year old toddler:  http://yhoo.it/16mrLa8 

31 Oct
SHAME: We got home from the doctor late and I’m so exhausted I’m sitting in the house with the lights out hiding from the trick or treating kids. I usually love having them but it’s been a very stressful few weeks.

1 Nov
The Sears robot is still calling to say I need to reschedule the repair appointment for the dishwasher. I’ve called the Repair Desk several times. After complaining again to them that I don’t need repair I got yet another call from the repair scheduling robot and a tweet from SearsCares. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that SearsCares breaks down to Sear Scares. It’s been my experience with them lately.

2 Nov
Compassion fatigue.

3 Nov
The Amazon Prime goodie bag went into the dumpster along with a box of other clutter. The need to purge the Room of Doom is strong.

3 Nov
Having posted about my virtuous purging of junk I then opened a box of crap I ordered from American Science & Surplus:  http://www.sciplus.com/   They’re sort of a depository for unwanted but interesting junk. Kind of like my house. Left hand, right hand.

6 Nov
Color outside the lines, but read between them.

6 Nov
I shall rename myself The Great Phlegmingo. I’d really like to stop coughing now, weeks after getting the cold.

11 Nov
Another epic starring Bird, this time whistling Blue Danube and imitating my mother and I coughing:  http://bit.ly/1buZWwd 

11 Nov
Every once in awhile, after not reading one of your novels for a long time, you surprise yourself with how much you like it. Mostly it’s cringing, though.

16 Nov
Why do people adopt children only to abuse them or “give them back” when things get challenging? It sickens me.

17 Nov
The only thing worse than watching jury orientation online is watching it at the court house.

17 Nov
Sears now claims they never got the plumbing invoices I sent October 29. I think sarcasm is in order, don’t you?

18 Nov
I postponed jury duty because my legs are not up to the hilly walking conditions in downtown L.A.

18 Nov
In other science news: You are what you eat may not be just another outmoded hippy slogan: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/18/244526773/gut-bacteria-might-guide-the-workings-of-our-minds …

19 Nov
You know what I don’t need? Someone who doesn’t know a thing about the day to day of my life giving me advice about what I “should” do.

19 Nov
I stayed home from work today because my knee was in such bad shape I needed to sit with ice on it for as many hours as I could stand. It’s somewhat better.

20 Nov
Some days Mom is victorious over the microwave. Other days it is beyond her and I get these phone calls asking me to diagnose over the phone. On those days, I wish to be shot in the head. But not really, Universe! I’ve got too much to do.

20 Nov
I just bought a mystery solely because the detective is named Pamela Thompson.

21 Nov
Well, I’ve had my Christmas miracle. My mother apologized to me.

21 Nov
The only thing certain in this world are death, taxes, and Kardashians.

22 Nov
Dear PJ: you cannot hide the similes by using “as if” instead of “like.” We can still see them.

23 Nov
Apparently I needed to be punished more. My knee was just starting to get better and I fell at Ralphs and wrenched it worse.

26 Nov
Mom went back in the hospital this morning. She either has an infection or a persistent virus. Either way she’s spending the night for tests and evaluation. Thanksgiving seems cursed as something happens every year. But she seemed better tonight.  I hope that direction continues. (She came home November 27 and has been strong and doing well since.)

28 Nov
Hope y’all had a great Thanksgiving. Ours was great. Carl cooked the entire meal and brought it over. Delish–and a wonderful surprise. I have the best friends in the world.

29 Nov
Mom remembers her dad going for supplies by horse and buckboard wagon to Watson UT when she was a kid. It’s now a ghost town.

30 Nov
My fantasy of buying a small smart TV lasted all of 24 hours before I got real. Too much other important stuff to spend the money on and we don’t need fripperies. Got caught up in Black Friday madness without even shopping. But sometimes being a responsible grown up sucks. 🙂

2 Dec
The guy in the Pinocchio suit stares into the abyss of his existence and despairs. Disneyland, 1961: pic.twitter.com/yPVGRvSkH0

2 Dec
This article encapsulates the caregiver situation quite well: http://bit.ly/1avcAck

The loneliness of the long distance carer. May I just add, **** you Amy F. Grant and Katie F. Couric, and anyone else who talks about the “privilege” without understanding the facts of working class people having to deal with this.

4 Dec
RIP Willis Ware, brilliant engineer and lovely, lovely man.

5 Dec
The resolution to a plot point that has been hanging unsolved for years finally came to me in the shower this morning. Unfortunately, I was in the shower, couldn’t write it down, and I was so busy after the shower I forgot, and now I can’t remember what it was or even which novel.

5 Dec
Adorably awesome! Lea Salonga and Darren Criss sang A Whole New World together at a bar: http://bit.ly/1kfEmiB

6 Dec
RIP Irreplaceable Nelson Mandela.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/nelson-mandela-becomes-first-politician-to-be-miss,34755/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=Default:1:Default …

6 Dec
I put on an episode of Finding Bigfoot last night. Mom fell asleep just after it started and woke just as it finished.

Mom: What happened?
Me: They didn’t find him.
Mom: Oh, okay then.

8 Dec
I keep buying books I haven’t got time to read.

8 Dec
And after two years of living as if this is a temporary situation it’s finally setting in that this is probably a long haul. I’m okay with that, but it’s a necessary shift in perspective that may allow me to handle things better.

8 Dec
“It’s not the Calvary coming to save us, ” said the sportscaster. Which is a whole different save than Kobe returning to the Lakers.

8 Dec
I read so slowly these days that I can go from comfort read to comfort read. No more waiting for release days. *sigh*

9 Dec
People and ghosts in rooms talking. *sigh*

11 Dec
Hurray for heated mattress pads!! My poor mom has been freezing, but she’s snug now. 🙂

11 Dec
Is the big reveal ever worth playing the reader? Does that answer ever have a yes? Why is there air?

12 Dec
Baby Pygmy Marmosets pic.twitter.com/eODml0ov3H

And now for something completely different… The Marmoset Song: http://youtu.be/4oiLfTnrC40 

12 Dec
When Mom gets really down she threatens to stop dialysis and I have to josh her out of it. Today would be one of those days.

13 Dec
I love it when people driving Smart cars make a really big dick traffic maneuvers. I originally said “really idiotic traffic maneuvers” but VRS decided to go with big dick and I left it that way.

13 Dec
Dear Sir: Most sentences should not be a paragraph long. Less is more. A tortured use of punctuation does not remedy this problem.

15 Dec
RIP to the great Peter O’ Toole.

16 Dec
Sears finally kept their promise. They’ve sent me a check to cover my plumbing costs for the Abominable Dishwasher Incident. Thanks, Sears.

What to do with aged photos when you’re cleaning out an old person’s home and none of the faces are familiar?

There’s a market for them in flea markets and online, of course. Probably other places as well, but that’s what I’m familiar with. I admit to being conflicted by the idea. There are buckets of photos my mother has held onto for years, ranging from the 1920s to near-present.  A lot of them are from World War II when my mother worked as a riveter at Douglas Aircraft. Periodically we go through some of them so she can tell me who the people are and I can pencil it in on the back, but some of the faces are beyond even her at this point. And even if I know their names…they have no context for me. They’re just names.

Eventually, someone will have to deal with these—if not me, then whoever cleans out my place when I’m gone. It seems disrespectful to sell them, yet that’s probably less disrespectful than consigning them to the trash. Which happens. A coworker told me of that very thing occurring when her friend cleaned out her parents’ home. I explained about the market for old photos and she was amazed.

“If only my friend had known!”

If only.

If only other people’s memories could be held as sacred as our own. But that’s the nature of time and change. We hold what we have inside our hearts and when our hearts fade, so do the memories.  As the African proverb says, “Every time an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.”

Random quote of the day:

“The heart’s memory is stronger than death: the mind’s memory is not.”

—Steven Forrest, Yesterday’s Sky

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Things grow in memory, in the dark; they shrink, lose their power, in reality.”

—Patricia A. McKillip, Solstice Wood

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Random quote of the day:

“Friends depart, and memory takes them
To her caverns, pure and deep.”

—Thomas Haynes Bayly, “Teach Me To Forget,” Songs and Ballads, Grave and Gay, published posthumously, 1844

You can read the entire poem behind the cut.

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

(more…)

Random quote of the day:

“When people die they leave behind tiny deposits, like dust or ash, littering the lives of those who have to carry on. Impossible to wipe a house clean. Memories dwelled in cobweb places behind wardrobes and between cupboards; they hid behind radiators; they lurked on shelves; like slivers of shattered glass, they waited for their moment to lodge deep in any vulnerable expanse of passing skin.”

—Graham Joyce, Requiem

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

 

“By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.”

—Colette, Mes Apprentissages, tr. Helen Beauclerk

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

In February 1945—or maybe it was 1942. The newspapers disagree. In February, 1945, reports the AP wire service of January 21, 1975, a man who appeared to be in his forties was found floating in a life raft in the North Atlantic. He had head and internal injuries and was paralyzed from the waist down, unable to speak, though he’d nod yes or shake his head no sometimes when asked questions. For all anyone could tell, he was completely unable to remember who he was or how he got in that raft. He carried no identification, but there was a card in his pocket with the name Charles Jamieson on it, and the birth date of April, 1898. So that was the name they listed on his hospital records.

Stars and Stripes of March 30, 1957, reports that an ambulance brought him to the U.S. Public Health Hospital in Boston on February 10, 1942, then sped off, never to be traced. Several government agencies carried on searches to identify him without any luck, and it was speculated that he’d been on board a merchant ship torpedoed by a Nazi sub.

And yet the name Charles Jamieson did not appear on any crew records of any ship sunk during that time.

In March of 1957 Mrs. Frances Hamilton, then of Long Beach, CA but born in England, claimed that Charles was her long-lost brother, James Hamilton, a British merchantman, whom she hadn’t seen since 1921. However, not even the British consul believed her, reporting that she produced no “concrete proof” that Charles was her brother, and furthermore, that she herself seemed rather confused. She told rambling and incoherent stories about her brother James, and although a “tearful reunion” took place between Mrs. Hamilton (who had taken back her maiden name after a divorce) and Charles, he didn’t respond to her in any way except for the same peaceful smile he gave to anyone who talked to him.

The link was dismissed as wishful fantasy on Mrs. Hamilton’s part.

Charles lived on at the U.S. Public Health Hospital for nearly 30 years. A sweet-natured man, no one ever knew how much he comprehended of his situation and his environment. He liked candy, liked to be wheeled around the hospital—and had plenty of willing volunteers to take him. Occasionally, he played checkers and responded to music on the radio. Everyone who passed him in the halls stopped to speak, to benefit from his sweet smile and peaceful nature. “He was—you could almost say—loved by every member of the staff,” said George Hedquist, assistant director of the hospital, “almost as if he were a mascot or a member of the family.”

The man who became know as Charles Jamieson had clearly lived through horrors, but he brought none of them with him on that bitter journey across the Atlantic and into the safe harbor of the U.S. Public Health Hospital of Boston, Mass. Nothing there, no, no, nothing there to think on, nothing there. . .

“Charles Jamieson” died in January of 1975, still unknown, having never spoken a word in all those years. The Transcript of January 23, 1975 reports that 100 people attended the funeral of sweet, mysterious Mr. X.

I’ve had a forced clean up campaign going—boxes and boxes of junk out in the garage that have sat there for five years, since I moved into this house.  I went from a large one bedroom with a great deal of storage space to two rooms and what space I could steal from the main part of the house.  I quickly ran out of storage and those boxes sat there, waiting to be purged, daunting me, mocking me.  I don’t have the luxury of letting sleeping dogs lie anymore.  We need room for medical supplies.

Some boxes are easy to go through, composed of knickknacks and paddywacks and papers and whatnots.  Disposing of the stuff isn’t easy, but as I’m having to do this in a hurry, I’m purging some things and cramming the rest into any available space or on top of already-standing stuff in the house.  It’s a horrid mess and will have to be gone through again and purged some more, but…that’s another trauma, somewhere down the line.  I’ve got four xerox boxes of books in the back of my car waiting to be donated somewhere.  There will be more.

Other boxes aren’t as easy to go through.  When my moving date grew closer, I was just shoving things into boxes, mostly paperwork and god-knows, with the thought, “I’ll sort these later.”  A pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later situation, and payment has come due.  These boxes have to be gone through relatively slowly, sometimes paper by paper, to see which can be safely recycled, which should be kept, and which should be shredded.  Often, out of an entire xerox-sized box full of paper, I’ll keep a stack maybe a half-inch high.  You know that saying, “You have to write a million words of **** before you begin to write the good stuff”?  Apparently, I thought you also had to print it out.  Most of that exists on my hard drive so can be recycled (but what a waste of paper!).

Mostly, the sorting is tedious, but sometimes I land upon something that’s been lost for five years, or something that speaks to me from another time, almost another life.   Sometimes I run across things that only exists in longhand, that I’d completely forgotten about.  Many are quite cringeworthy, but some are not bad, and even the ideas behind some of the cringey stuff still sparks my imagination.  “I could work with this,” I say to myself, and lay these aside for another day’s consideration.

Sometimes, as I said, they almost seem to belong to another life.  Like that horrible bout of chronic insomnia I went through for about three months back in the late 90s.  It was entirely due to some medication I was taking because once I went off it, I returned to my usual cycle of sleep.  I have always been a talented sleeper.  It’s a sensual pleasure I revel in, so it  was quite a foreign to be up at all hours and unable  to nod off.  What reminded me of this episode was a piece of notebook paper with a hand-scrawled poem on it.  Not a great poem, but a great spark of memory:

Insomnia

Things dropping like things do
through the links in the chains of midnight
held fast but slipping away
by the link of the chains of midnight

drinking hot milk laced with vanilla
as I sit on the edge of my bed
so I can drink my rest
deep, deep, deep—
but only these chains bind me here
long past midnight

I used to sleep like a champion
now it takes so little to chase it
and I howl in my chains
like a dog in the night
cold and so alone, chained
to a stake in the yard

There was an actual dog who lived across the alley and a few doors down from my apartment.  Sometimes the two of us would howl in unison, each in our lonely, sleepless vigils.  It was odd to think of all that again.

It’s not that I’d forgotten this period in my life, but I really don’t think of it often.  It was an aberration, so unlike my usual experience.  I do get the occasional bout of sleepless, but not like that.  I hope to never have another period like that.  It’s a life I’d much rather not relive.