Attacking the mess

 
It's hard knowing where to start.  It's been suggested that I make a list of everything that needs to be done.  That's a very sensible suggestion.  But what works better is giving myself deadlines.  So today I'm going to put up a garage sale advert and get some bright pink signage to put of Saturday morning.  What that means is that all the books books and art I don't want will need to be decided and staged by Saturday morning.  Yay!  Deadlines.  Can't live without 'em.

Where Winston and I are sleeping now.

Mess in  old "office room"

Picture 3:  Coffee Table art and movie ooks to be sold or given away

 

Film books packed upstairs.  Theatre books waiting.  All boxes go to garage on Friday.  Boxes that don't sell go on Monday to Teen Challenge or Goodwill.

What I need to do to prepare for the "Estate Sale" on Saturday is the following:

1. Package the remaining theatre books into boxes for the "Mystery Movie/Theatre Book Box Sale.
   
2.  Move all the coffee table books I don't want (most of them) upstairs and stage them in one of the bedrooms
3. Move all the art I no longer want upstairs to self-same bedroom.
4.  Put adverts on Facebook and Next Door
5. Purchase neon pink cardstock for signage.
6. Clean out garage to restage a couple dozen boxes of books.  Move those boxes into the garage without wrecking dodgy L5  ("Lift with your knees, Huck.")
   
7. Beg a friend or two to help out so I can take pee breaks. 
8. Friday:  go to bank and get $100 in mixed change. 
9. Print Signage
   
10.  Saturday morning:  put up signage.

 

 

TGtBatU Part Five: The Ugly

Clint Eastwood (left) and Eli Wallach in TGtBatU

The last post showed I am paying attention (kinda) to the outside world.  But now we're back in self-absorbed narcissistic griefland with cinema references.

In the movie TGtBatU, of course, ugly is played by Eli Wallach.  When I saw the movie the first time I hated it (I didn't understand the weirdness of spaghetti westerns) except for Eli Wallach.  I've usually preferred sidekicks to heroes.  

So ugly is now my sidekick.

Ugly crying.  

Apple Photo Booth from this morning

At restaurants, at the dentist, at the chiropractor, while getting a massage.  "No m'am, the food is great,  but I have a dead husband in my soup."

Ugly emotion management.  

The last year of Will's life pushed me beyond my ability to manage my emotions and my grief at his passing has made me crazier still.  I've thrown money at clerks after yelling at them.  I've become terrified of other people's anger.  That's an ancient thing in my brain -- my earliest memories of people being angry with me included physicalized threats of death.  Over many years and helpful feedback from grade school and high school teachers, I learned how to act brave.  (And of course Deborah Kerr's (and Marni Nixon's) song from The King and I was helpful.)

Ugly anxieties

Everyone is pretending to like me so they feel better about themselves.

I'm a terrible person and no one will ever love me if they know who I really am.

No one will ever hold me and tell me that tomorrow will be better.

I have no importance.

I have no meaning.

I don't know if I'm a boy or a girl.  (Should I whack off the boobs so my shirts fit better?)

Does gender even matter if I'm never going to have sex again?

How did I get all these tattoos? (Really, I had a morning when this was driving me nutz).

The world is going to end and I'll be alone to face the Mad Max time.

My friends want to help but they have their own lives and will get angry with me if I ask for help.

Do any of my thoughts have any basis in reality?

 Last week I was in a situation with an old friend toward whom I bore a lot of anger because of an interaction about which I now know we have two different memories, it turns out.  But since he had asked me over, I thought I could manage my anger.  This was a mistake.  I should have said, "We need a mediated discussion about what happened between us."  But I didn't.  Instead I went over and after a very friendly visit and a beer I let slip a passive aggressive comment (passive aggressive because, just as when I was a child, I'm terrified right now of confrontations).  My friend went from 0 to 60 in physicalized rage - yelling, face angry, voice full of "you did this."  I became terrified and ran out of his yard.  I don't know if I will ever feel safe with my friend again.

This is like what happened in November when another friend I relied on dropped me because a hint of my authentic self came out.

So how do I trust the world?  How do I trust my ability to care for people?  How do I know anything is as it seems?  (This, of course, goes back to the family tragedy.)

Here's the deal.  I learned this lesson in childhood:  when my primary caregivers said, "I love you just the way you are" what they meant was, "just as long as how you are fits with what I want you to be."  I've often been told to "be yourself" or "live authentically" by people who then punished me in some way for doing just that.  (This happened a couple of years ago with a friend who was a life coach.  Or a life coach who said she was my friend.)  Of course I am not alone in receiving such messages, and like many clients of therapists, it's taken me much of a lifetime to work my way through the mixed messaging.

So I don't "really" believe in my Twilight Zone image of everybody faking.  Nor do I think I'm a terrible person, mostly.  And I have experienced some powerful healing since September 4, 2020.  In the before times, last Wednesday's experience would have lead to cutting and suicidal ideations.  But I seem to have been "cured" of both urges in the past year and a half, thanks to God and Sarah Peterson.

But still, I'm a mess with no patience, occasional rage surges, and a deep sense that nothing I do will ever matter much to me again. 

"Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality."

TGtBtU, Part Tray: The BAD

"War, huh, good God, y'all, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothin'!"

-- Edwin Star

"Four Horseman of the Apocalypse" by Viktor Vasnetsov

 But wait, there's more!

 

 

 

 

I'm a boomer, so I know how to duck and cover when fingers hit the red buttons.   Just sayin'.  

 

 

Now if I can just get past all the household disruption to my desk. 

 

TGtBatU, Part Deux: 3 More Good Things!

 I shall mention these wonderful occurances only briefly, but I must say two of them were responsible for my having a good week between March 5 and March 10.

1.  Yay!  I'd advertised approximately 4000 of Will's books (the poetry collection and the literature library) and the bookcases they sat on as a library.  No one in the books community answered the advert but I got bites from two young Mennonite women in Madras who saw the ad on Facebook.  They arrived on a Saturday with fellow church member, her three children (with one on the way) and her husband.  The husband had borrowed a long horse trailer and after about three hours packing, during which the kids helped, they drove away, leaving my library room (and future bedroom) with 8 extra inches on each wall.

The horse trailer and children without tech devices

Getting a good start.

Where Will used to sit in front of the poetry library

2.  I had dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in 40 years and had long thought was dead from AIDS. (You remember AIDS -- the plague before COVID?)  Through sheer synchronicity (and, of course, in my theology, synchronicity is another name for messages from the Divine), Mark had seen Will's obituary in the Idaho State Journal where it was printed beside his father's death notice.  But Mark doesn't live in Pocatello.  He just happened to be there for his dad's funeral and a family member had commented on the "wild obituary" and Mark said, "Hey, I knew this guy!"  It was wonderful to "catch-up" with Mark and be reminded that he had taken an independent readings course in the Gay Novel from Will about the time I went to Salt Lake City.  More about the meaning of this meeting later.  Suffice to say, I had a delightful evening with Mark and the Portland friend with whom he traveled down to beautiful Bend.

3.  Last and certainly not least of the good things was my friend Julie inviting me out to dinner on St. Patrick's day with her and her spouse in their new digs at The Alexander, a bright and shiny senior-living facility. It's quite the fancy place!  We had the St. Patrick's Day special of corned beef and cabbage and stayed past the hour when they wanted to clean up the restaurant.  There were two other ladies there, friends of Julie's of longer acquaintance, at least one of whom was also a widow.  No one who knew Julie and I separately would have imagined that we would become beloved friends but here we are.  Maybe I'll write more about that later as well.  

I've also been listened to by my wonderful therapist and a few other friends during the past couple of weeks.  All that is to the good.

Next up:  the Bad

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Part I

Headlining with a movie reference.  A movie with one of the most recognizable themes of all time, that amazing whistley Ennio Marricone piece with it's voices and galloping strings.  I found that I was able to make a good day on Wednesday with the proper music. Not Ennio's piece, but a lot of old New Wave music on SiriusXM First Wave.  As William Congreve said, "Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast." 

So since I last wrote I've had a lot of experiences that link to this post's title.  Good days, bad days.  I want to start with a truly lovely evening.

Last night I went out with my friend Stacey.  We began with a good dinner at Zydeco.  (I wound up taking half of my jambalaya back to the hotel where I am eating it for lunch as I write this post!  Along with a nice dark beer of course.)  

She then took me to see a fast and furious live comedy called Shakespeare in Hollywood. A friend of hers was in it and it was opening night. The play is Ken Ludwig's satire/farce/comedy/Shakespearian tribute set in 1934 Hollywood during the filming of Max Rinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The local actors had utterly honed their performances.  This is not always the case with community theatre.  Comedy is much harder than drama and farce is the hardest genre in the world to perform well. The cast succeeded mightily.  There were a lot of Shakespearean quotes, of course, a magical plot point, great japes and jests, and fun costumes.

Unlike my friend and perhaps half the audience, I've been well acquainted with the cast of characters from early Hollywood since my own distant youth.  I grew up watching black and white movies on television (because that's what was available) and fell in love with the Magic of the SILVER SCREEN.  And of course, when a student falls in love, the object is studied.  In middle school I subscribed to a cheaply printed, flyer-like magazine for trivia fans about Classic Hollywood (circa 1966).  I bought copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland with its focus on the Universal catalogue.  In high school I watched Fractured Flickers every Monday night after dance class.  I learned about the 5 Majors (Warners, RKO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, 20th Century Fox) and their history as a freshman in college (in a class taught by my dead best friend).  And for the past year I've heard Dick Powell's voice at least once a week as I listen to Hank's Gumshoe Radio and hear him as Richard Diamond, Private Detective.  

As for my familiarity with the Bard, not only have I "taught" MSND in my Philosophy of Love and Sex Class, in the interest of full disclosure ("When have you ever had any other kind of disclosure?"), I note here that I played Helena in high school.  The self same high school where Olivia de Havilland  pursued the arts just before the Warner Brothers grabbed her to play Hermia in Max Rinehardt's Midsummer Night's Dream. And I do mean "just before."  She was the same age I was when I seduced Will. 

This may explain my initial irritation with one aspect of the script.  I wondered why the male characters in

the play had their "real life" names:  Will Hays, Jack Warner, Dick Powell, etc., but of the (only) three women characters, the two actresses were given fictional names.  Jean Muir, who played Helena, is called Lydia Lansing and Olivia De Havilland, who played Hermia, is called Olivia Darnell (this last name stolen from Linda Darnell?).  Why?  

Quick google later:

"Ludwig was going to name the main female character Olivia de Havilland, but didn't out of concern some part of the play might offend her. "The main female character is not named Olivia de Havilland, but she sure resembles her a lot."

And I'm going to hypothesize that the hypothesized mistress of Jack Warner (and I loved the actor playing that part -- Tom Kelly -- best in show, imho) was renamed to avoid tarring Ms. Muir, who was dead by 2004, with the adulterous brush.  (Fifteen years after her portrayal of Helena, Jean Muir became the first actor to be fired and blacklisted for having been a communist.)

So spending the evening with my friend was one of the good things that happened.  

So was my Wednesday discovery that I can be happier and get more done if I STEP    AWAY     SLOWLY  from the fucking television and tell Alexa to play some Billy Idol:  "It's a nice day for a white widow...."

"It's a nice day to START AGAI- ain.  Yeaow!"

 

Bemusement

What photos do I keep?

What photos do I throw away?

I have to make this decision as I am going through boxes during the great cleaning process.  With some photos it's clear:  I'm keeping all the portraits of him.  But what about all those pictures he took during the brief time he used a camera?  What about the photo albums I put together for him after my retirement, when I collected all the pictures, developed at Costco, and put them together for him to look at with the caregivers?

And what about pictures like this?  I pulled this one out of an album about Russia.  It's an image of me walking through an Imperial Russian garden.  Almost all of his pictures are of landscape, flowers, and buildings but there's an occasional picture of his wife.  I look at this image and see how far away he is standing, how I'm alone in the picture (no folks around me) and how I am walking away.  I wonder about what he was thinking when he took this picture, if anything.  He was ever a mystery to me, his mind one that worked so differently from mine.  All I know is that he loved me and wanted to care for me.

Unfortunately, for much of our time together, I felt like he loved me "in spite" of who I was instead of because of who I was.  I wonder how my feelings about him and my weak understanding of him will change over time.  I have found that I've already been forgetting what a humongous pain in the ass he could be, with his Eeyore-like negativity and his yelling at the servants.  How many times did I feel horrified, annoyed, or embarrassed by his angry outbursts, outbursts the effects of which had disappeared for him while they were still roiling me.  

Instead, I have been remembering times like this -- when we traveled together as the best companions and friends.  The Will who chose joy and pleasure over irritation.  The person who seemed able to simply experience the material world like a big kitty without having to churn everything into meaning, like his wife.

That is the Will I miss every day. 

March at Home

I'm now back in my office again this morning, looking at the gray river (it's very low).

Moving forward steps:  

1.  I've place want-ads for the 9 shelves of the literature library.  If I can't sell it, some poor non-profit is going to get a shitload of books.  Are there first editions among the books?  Maybe.  Who knows.  The more I think about it, the more I just want to get rid of all of it. 

2.  The new roof from DaBella is going on next week.

3.  The windows are being formally measured next week and then in a couple of months will be replaced.

4.  Eric at Neil Kelly and I made plans for the 3 stage work on the kitchen (painting and drawers, then sink and countertop, then floor).  Eric's mom, by the way, is a transplant from Ukraine and so he was pretty stressed about the war when me met yesterday.  Yes, I talk about real stuff with contractors.

5.  Just this morning I chose the hardwood floor refinisher.

6. I've been meeting with bathroom remodelers this week.

7.  I've called an electrician about all the electrical stuff that needs to be checked out (there's weird wiring in the house.  That is way in the future. 

8.  More calls to College Hunks Hauling Junk to get stuff picked up and put together.

My job?

Packing, cleaning, moving stuff around.  I'm still pulling my clothes out of a giant box downstairs so I need to find some temporary clothes storage AND get rid of a few things.