If you go to breenibooks.com a review of Stricken by me is available for 10 December. I have decided not to do reviewing as it takes away from my own writing, my own life, if it be said. Time is very precious to me. However, if something really good is proffered and it is no more than 250 pages I will review it. In any case the aforesaid review gives you a sample of how I go about reviewing. (Contact me if you have a book of interest.) The book was about loss in all its varieties and if anything, by the time we all come to die, we have become quasi-experts on death and dying. 1960, 1999 are indelible milestones in my own experience with loss of the most grotesque kind, one by cancer, the other through a horrific car crash. Of course, closure is for those Americans who suck on the nipple of MYSpace, YouTube, and Twitter. Closure, my ass. Loss is an open-ended ache until you die yourself.
For the past year I have been involved in costly litigation, trying to sell a house in this moribund market, unintended construction costs to repair an electrical problem of some magnitude in the house, the usual harassing shit of living life, the grotesqueries of neighbors who are trailer trash and all the rest while I try to use this mind of mine to find a clear, well-lighted place to attain some respite, some space to respire freely so that I can manage all this looming, impending and nagging crud! I work hard on falling back on those values and memories that fortify me for adversity and often it works but it is draining and often tiresome to be so defended in order to walk ahead. I compare my worries and anxieties, often really difficult ones, to the image of Rochelle lying dead on a gurney. It is this flashback remembrance that holds me steady as I face human dreck, folly and the inanimate world.
Within this passive-aggressive personality is embedded a high-strung, anxious person who uses control to defend against the pressures of everyday life. Control doesn’t work, for it is a temporary measure, like a dam against Katrina. (Re: Ordinary People. . . “Control is a bitch.”) Inevitability destroys control. The secondary defense, I imagine-think-believe, is to fight back, more in self-defense than out opf character-driven intention. The inner, quaking fear which I have never experienced, but a fear nevertheless, is that I may shatter, but shatter I do not during impossible moments of stress, such as losing one’s mother, losing one’s wife. I do not will this resiliency; it simply exudes, like a rich sweat after a workout. I am stronger than I think, and I am weaker than I think, might say it all.
Like lint in a dryer’s filter, we gather debris as we course through life. Divorces, deaths, major mistakes and minor catastrophes, so by the time we are my age or nearing our journey’s end, we can turn back and see this human comet trail of absolute junk. And then it is over. As I ponder this aimless wool-gathering, I wonder if i can see what it is as opposed to find meaning in it. I’d rather see than understand. When I have seen I have grown or deconditioned myself. At times meaning is a slugfest while seeing is to spin a Venetian glass. Adieu.
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