well...I'm down here in Mesa and it's cooling off. Me and the dogs have been holding the fort all day. I got here last night. I've been reading 'Charming Billy' by Alice O'Connell. Her picture is in the back of the book. She looks like an old neighbor of mine from my childhood. It's a good story. I spent most of my day reading it. I could identify with the Irish Catholic factor in the story line because that's what my family was although my mother was Lutheran growing up. She converted to Catholicism when she married my dad.
My daughter is about to give birth to her first child. She and her husband are naming the baby 'Harrison' but her husband says they won't call the boy 'Harry' but they'll call him 'Harris' so we'll see how it flies. He's going to be tiny and red and want to sleep 24/7 right at first. They'll be all dedicated to the new parent mode which is to be in total awe of their new child until he finally sinks in that he's no longer a lump in his mother's tummy. He's finally arrived. She does look rather distended now, these are the last few days before he comes into the world. I'm sleeping in the guest bedroom where the laptop and desk are located. That's why I'm posting, because there's time and resource to do so. I had just the most wonderful day getting down here. My neighbor was going to Port Angeles so I rode in with her and caught the bus at Tarciscio's in Sequim. We did a little shopping. I didn't buy much because I was already packed to the gills but I did get the book that I've been reading and some yarn for little Harris's afghan which I should continue to plug away at in hops that it gets done before he arrives. I don't know about that one...I've been working on that thing since I found out he was coming and I haven't gotten that far on it. Plus I have to study for EMT because we're due to take the exam in another month..yikes
I was thinking that the blogging thing, the recipes for successful blogging, might begin like the Julia Child adventure in cooking up her recipes and then writing about them. That was a good approach to the sharing of information. There's also the day by day observing, trending it's called...like observing that Russell Crowe is up the street in Vancouver BC being in a movie about Superman. He's the dad in that one. I wonder if he'll come down the straits in a fishing boat one of these days. Going out to Port Renfro would be a good trip for him.
I was going to comment further on the O'connell book, charming billy. I found it to be very eloquent in its descriptive style, a passage about the main character's mother and father, the girl telling the story, and the love between her parents, so good. She talks about the resilence of a happy marriage, not always in bliss but always in loyalty and steadfastness, wherein the couple realizes towards the ends of their lives that this is what it has been for them, a devotion to one another that encompasses their lives together, makes it what it has been to both of them, a constancy and a source of their daily happiness, what makes them what they are, a resolution to that end. It's very well told, this story, but it has the shortcoming of being a description of a lifelong depression in alcoholism. It made me understand a little better how to avoid that condition: never dwell too long on your disappointments but focus on the things that you have loved and be happy whenever you can. Surely we all have our upheavals but to over and over again drown our sorrows in the lake of alcohol, well that part is told well, you can do it, you can suffer, but should you? and should you let those others that are of that belief: in sorrow and despair, disappoint you as well. Even though the story is about Catholicism, in a sense, it doesn't give a terribly strong picture of the parish priest, which may not account for the attitudes of the characters as much as it makes me wonder why we don't tell that better, explain the mysticism of catholicism..why it works for me and for others. we're born into it certainly, but along the way it takes hold of us and we're routinely reconverted by our daily lives to that blind faith in what we believe: that Christ is in the communion host, and he's there with us throughout the week until we replenish him again on Sunday at communion. so we're not really blind as much as we're on autopilot, letting our free will be guided by that light inside us. I kind of wanted to see O'connell talk to this but she didn't really, other than to take some of the trappings of the faith: the smell of incense, the church clothes, the monsignor urging the parishioner to believe her widowhood was intended for her. accepting the death of a loved one is never an easy thing to do but if you just take it day by day, it becomes tolerable over time
in the case of billy, the charmer, he was in love with a girl one summer and planned to marry her, talked of her constantly, but she went home to Ireland and married someone else. his family told him she died. this gave him the opportunity to become an alcoholic, to delude himself that she had broken his heart when every day, he rebroke himself and not his faith and not his familya nd friends could put him back together, though they did make the effort to see he didn't fall apart too quickly. more than anything the book speaks to the absolute lack of any kind of psychiatric therapy, there's no mention of it, other than the Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a group therapy kind of organization that works for some and not for others. People I know who belong to it are like Billy, they'd still have a drink if they weren't totally convinced that they shouldn't. A therapist might have gotten to the bottom of Billy's issues, that the girl had died, he thought, gave him the opportunity to grieve and so he did. He recognized that the love he felt for this girl was the best thing that ever happened to him and nothing that ever happened after that time would be as good. He didn't find in his daily life, although the author described these further moments well, the same joy he had found in the company of that girl. I've known people like that. It's like the light has been shut off inside them and they can't let go of their disappointments. That was Billy. It was frustrating to read how he kept going back to the bottle without ever again being as happy in his life as he had been with the first girl he ever loved. He drowned in his disappointmentsead of realizing that was what his life was, fulfilled. Some of us are like that, we always know our life is joy, a taste of heaven before we get there, others do not. I think maybe in a post nuclear age, like we're evolving towards, we'll all be 'fulfilled'. We won't be worried about global aggression, we'll have bigger things on our plate, like new planets to colonize. All of us will be thinking in those terms, we'll be bred to it. Maybe the sixties movement was the big wakeup call in that direction. Maybe. Maybe we were all meant to be able to laugh heartily and readily. Maybe we're not cloned after all. hehe...perhaps O'connell's book is about the ability to just gestate and be yourself. The struggle for it..
I suppose it is a moral tale of how not to find happiness in your life. For me, I've never been content to sit still and let life unfold. Not worrying about conformity, if I might be unhappy for a time. Truthfully, I glanced out the bus window on the way to the airport and there was someone I saw outside whom I recognized. A person that made me very unhappy once upon a time. Now he looked like a kind of a pilgrim on his way to wherever he was going and I didn't care about seeing him one bit. I knew he was still alive, still riding a Harley, still wearing a beard but he wasn't anything to do with me anymore. That was a good thing. I felt nothing seeing him, not even anger, or disappointment, nothing. A chapter from the past. That was all. How better Billy could have felt upon meeting up with his Eva, had he had that ability. He wouldn't have drown himself.
There was also the wife that pulled him out of the gutter whenever he fell down in it. She was as flat and colorless as beige walls, as responsive. There must have been some intimacy between them, her and Billy, but you don't hear that, read it. You don't see how she was a good wife to him, if, in fact, she was at all. She was the sponge that absorbed all his disappointment. They apparently lived on it, his disappointment, for the rest of his life until he died in production of it.
How can we be so negative and have so much potential at the same time. A man who carried a book of Yeats along wherever he went, a real admirer of poetry. Someone to shed a little light for the rest of us on why that would be a good thing. A person who could describe the wing of an angel as it lifts off to heaven. Well, I guess I've gone on enough about Billy so I'd better let it go. There's more interesting things afoot now, like actually having a blog. hehe...what to write about...how not to clone a depressed alcoholic perhaps, and how to gestate the best of humankind..possibly...there could be some thought in that...well..it's morning again, I've discovered how to charge the computer so it functions, the hot tub is available..my lips are chapped from sleeping with my mouth open, I've been very tired from all the excitement...there's a baby coming..adieu mon amis..
My daughter is about to give birth to her first child. She and her husband are naming the baby 'Harrison' but her husband says they won't call the boy 'Harry' but they'll call him 'Harris' so we'll see how it flies. He's going to be tiny and red and want to sleep 24/7 right at first. They'll be all dedicated to the new parent mode which is to be in total awe of their new child until he finally sinks in that he's no longer a lump in his mother's tummy. He's finally arrived. She does look rather distended now, these are the last few days before he comes into the world. I'm sleeping in the guest bedroom where the laptop and desk are located. That's why I'm posting, because there's time and resource to do so. I had just the most wonderful day getting down here. My neighbor was going to Port Angeles so I rode in with her and caught the bus at Tarciscio's in Sequim. We did a little shopping. I didn't buy much because I was already packed to the gills but I did get the book that I've been reading and some yarn for little Harris's afghan which I should continue to plug away at in hops that it gets done before he arrives. I don't know about that one...I've been working on that thing since I found out he was coming and I haven't gotten that far on it. Plus I have to study for EMT because we're due to take the exam in another month..yikes
I was thinking that the blogging thing, the recipes for successful blogging, might begin like the Julia Child adventure in cooking up her recipes and then writing about them. That was a good approach to the sharing of information. There's also the day by day observing, trending it's called...like observing that Russell Crowe is up the street in Vancouver BC being in a movie about Superman. He's the dad in that one. I wonder if he'll come down the straits in a fishing boat one of these days. Going out to Port Renfro would be a good trip for him.
I was going to comment further on the O'connell book, charming billy. I found it to be very eloquent in its descriptive style, a passage about the main character's mother and father, the girl telling the story, and the love between her parents, so good. She talks about the resilence of a happy marriage, not always in bliss but always in loyalty and steadfastness, wherein the couple realizes towards the ends of their lives that this is what it has been for them, a devotion to one another that encompasses their lives together, makes it what it has been to both of them, a constancy and a source of their daily happiness, what makes them what they are, a resolution to that end. It's very well told, this story, but it has the shortcoming of being a description of a lifelong depression in alcoholism. It made me understand a little better how to avoid that condition: never dwell too long on your disappointments but focus on the things that you have loved and be happy whenever you can. Surely we all have our upheavals but to over and over again drown our sorrows in the lake of alcohol, well that part is told well, you can do it, you can suffer, but should you? and should you let those others that are of that belief: in sorrow and despair, disappoint you as well. Even though the story is about Catholicism, in a sense, it doesn't give a terribly strong picture of the parish priest, which may not account for the attitudes of the characters as much as it makes me wonder why we don't tell that better, explain the mysticism of catholicism..why it works for me and for others. we're born into it certainly, but along the way it takes hold of us and we're routinely reconverted by our daily lives to that blind faith in what we believe: that Christ is in the communion host, and he's there with us throughout the week until we replenish him again on Sunday at communion. so we're not really blind as much as we're on autopilot, letting our free will be guided by that light inside us. I kind of wanted to see O'connell talk to this but she didn't really, other than to take some of the trappings of the faith: the smell of incense, the church clothes, the monsignor urging the parishioner to believe her widowhood was intended for her. accepting the death of a loved one is never an easy thing to do but if you just take it day by day, it becomes tolerable over time
in the case of billy, the charmer, he was in love with a girl one summer and planned to marry her, talked of her constantly, but she went home to Ireland and married someone else. his family told him she died. this gave him the opportunity to become an alcoholic, to delude himself that she had broken his heart when every day, he rebroke himself and not his faith and not his familya nd friends could put him back together, though they did make the effort to see he didn't fall apart too quickly. more than anything the book speaks to the absolute lack of any kind of psychiatric therapy, there's no mention of it, other than the Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a group therapy kind of organization that works for some and not for others. People I know who belong to it are like Billy, they'd still have a drink if they weren't totally convinced that they shouldn't. A therapist might have gotten to the bottom of Billy's issues, that the girl had died, he thought, gave him the opportunity to grieve and so he did. He recognized that the love he felt for this girl was the best thing that ever happened to him and nothing that ever happened after that time would be as good. He didn't find in his daily life, although the author described these further moments well, the same joy he had found in the company of that girl. I've known people like that. It's like the light has been shut off inside them and they can't let go of their disappointments. That was Billy. It was frustrating to read how he kept going back to the bottle without ever again being as happy in his life as he had been with the first girl he ever loved. He drowned in his disappointmentsead of realizing that was what his life was, fulfilled. Some of us are like that, we always know our life is joy, a taste of heaven before we get there, others do not. I think maybe in a post nuclear age, like we're evolving towards, we'll all be 'fulfilled'. We won't be worried about global aggression, we'll have bigger things on our plate, like new planets to colonize. All of us will be thinking in those terms, we'll be bred to it. Maybe the sixties movement was the big wakeup call in that direction. Maybe. Maybe we were all meant to be able to laugh heartily and readily. Maybe we're not cloned after all. hehe...perhaps O'connell's book is about the ability to just gestate and be yourself. The struggle for it..
I suppose it is a moral tale of how not to find happiness in your life. For me, I've never been content to sit still and let life unfold. Not worrying about conformity, if I might be unhappy for a time. Truthfully, I glanced out the bus window on the way to the airport and there was someone I saw outside whom I recognized. A person that made me very unhappy once upon a time. Now he looked like a kind of a pilgrim on his way to wherever he was going and I didn't care about seeing him one bit. I knew he was still alive, still riding a Harley, still wearing a beard but he wasn't anything to do with me anymore. That was a good thing. I felt nothing seeing him, not even anger, or disappointment, nothing. A chapter from the past. That was all. How better Billy could have felt upon meeting up with his Eva, had he had that ability. He wouldn't have drown himself.
There was also the wife that pulled him out of the gutter whenever he fell down in it. She was as flat and colorless as beige walls, as responsive. There must have been some intimacy between them, her and Billy, but you don't hear that, read it. You don't see how she was a good wife to him, if, in fact, she was at all. She was the sponge that absorbed all his disappointment. They apparently lived on it, his disappointment, for the rest of his life until he died in production of it.
How can we be so negative and have so much potential at the same time. A man who carried a book of Yeats along wherever he went, a real admirer of poetry. Someone to shed a little light for the rest of us on why that would be a good thing. A person who could describe the wing of an angel as it lifts off to heaven. Well, I guess I've gone on enough about Billy so I'd better let it go. There's more interesting things afoot now, like actually having a blog. hehe...what to write about...how not to clone a depressed alcoholic perhaps, and how to gestate the best of humankind..possibly...there could be some thought in that...well..it's morning again, I've discovered how to charge the computer so it functions, the hot tub is available..my lips are chapped from sleeping with my mouth open, I've been very tired from all the excitement...there's a baby coming..adieu mon amis..
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