First Post of January...

 

I missed a commemoration of my late friend, but finished up my Sex and The City rewatch this weekend.  Which might seem like an unfortunate snapshot of my headspace as we enter this new year, if I’d started out with any hope whatever—I would have had little enough if Harris won—your country shoving you aside for enough years does kind of mean that you disappoint Journey and “stop believing’ “but I guess I needed some fantasy to get me through the last few weeks.(And it’s hard to be a woman this age with a lot of stuff that you “couldn’t help but wonder” and not have Carrie with you in your heart, sometimes, however tarnished the rescue-fantasy ending now seems or because your own lady-posse may love you but they’re not exactly…yours to command. Or, you know, all ladies.)

I wanted to do it one last time—even with the acknowledgement that it’s sort of like giving your brain a lot of pretty pixy-Stix, in case Comstockery truly does have the floor in this country and I’m not quite tech-savvy enough to get it from Canada or Germany or wherever pre-Handmaids will get our hands on naughty shit (a strong possibility since I have not started streaming HBO yet.) I wanted to pretend that I could watch JD Vance throb with pain, and maybe something else he could lie about for his next book, as I contemplate Samantha Jones coming so operatically and wonder for the eighth or tenth time:

Whether a: That’s some bullshit that hardly ever happens—no offense to Kim Cattrall who almost makes me believe it. 2. I’m kind of a quiet comer, either by nature or because I never can stop thinking that people shouldn’t know what I, or on super-rare occasions—think Ling-Ling the panda—we might be doing. Or 3.  Nobody has really rocked my socks yet.  Or D: All of these. (All of us Scantron babies know that when you’re really confused, D is a decent bet.  Right?)

I feel shy about posting that, but in the spirit of making resistance naughty this time, I’m going to, and not just because I don’t have a kid to point to and be all “No fair…she’s going to have fewer rights than me—that’s some *bull*shit.” Even though, yes, it is, but that’s not my experience. I’m not exactly at peace with my experience, either, but word-power is like other power: Use it or lose it. At least, I’m not Melania, or Usha, or with any of the male podcasters who thought that Cardi and Megan were lying because they never felt one before, if you get my drift. Which brings me back to my very quotable friend, gone these ten years already—although if we could just go “ollie, ollie, oxen free,” or something they say in Jamaica and get her back, this would have been a decent decade to skip, being that it sucked and all, but the finality is the hardest part.   Anyway, she had frequent droughts and reminded us to always feel good about the awful folks we never slept with.

 

A Brief Hop Through the Plot Bunny Hutch...

 while I can't write the rock-band story, it added color to "Wedded Twist", I think.

We unloaded the van under a bright blue and cloudless sky. It surprised me to have driven out of the clouds, as if Neil and Brian had to hitch up oxen instead of turning their ignitions. Maybe Neil had been right to bring his fancy shades. It always surprised me how quickly the weather could change.  Maybe there was a lesson in that for some people, but I tended to end up in the same shadow all the time anyway. Dag, I told myself, if I opened that door, maybe I’d never get it closed again, which is why I only halfway stitched myself together before turning my attention fully to charming Dr. Rosen. If I kept the words flowing, people tended not to notice when I wasn’t saying anything at all.  I wasn’t sure if that was a point for my skills, or against Rosen’s. It was ancient history, now, I supposed, but my urge to ramble appeared evergreen.  In a sense, my tongue leaped greedily on Neil’s black-and-white “Spousal Delusion “tour shirt.

“Wow, you saw that! Totally peanut-butter-and-jealous.” I borrowed that from him; he shrugged fake-modestly. I felt like he wasn’t helping his straight street cred with it, but it was a kick.

“Ana’s last show at the Cow Palace.” Again, he kind of acted as if he built the venue or brought the band into being instead of paying Ticketbastard for some second-string organ. She was in the hospital for six months after that.” Still less scary than Taylor to me. Nobody human bounced back that fucking fast…peanut-butter-and-jealous. But that one would go with me to my grave, or, urn, or whatever-the-hell, I promised myself.
Sometimes it was hard to deal with how ironic that band’s name wasn’t, though I didn’t think it was literally true, no matter how much Ana and her bandmates had heaved innuendo at David Letterman and Stephen Colbert and made me low-grade worship them in all my desert-cripple keener’s obscurity. “It’s really too bad, you know,” Because after that, they made Lauryn Hill look punctual, and the bassist had a born-again phase…we were all just chewing over a memory, at this point.  Better Neil’s than mine, though.

“

An Outsider's Look at "A Man From The Inside,"

 

1.       Just how much TV needs to be made to convince boomer fixtures like Ted Danson and Kelsey Grammer, they’ve still got it? (Even if I thought they did, which, not exactly. I’ve seen a lot of Cheers for not really liking it, though, and it doesn’t really hold up once you’re old enough that hearing the word “horny” doesn’t make you feel naughty.) It’s not really about them, so much as the sense from the industry that there are, tops, maybe 100 people that America still wants to look at. It’s frustrating, even when you didn’t really have the hope of being one of them or seeing yourself in one of them…who’s better out there that we’re not seeing to give him this?

2.      Even at his best, Danson isn’t exactly one of those chameleon actors like David Straithairn or Toni Collette. I mean, to me, he’s just “Kind Of” guy. Kind of attractive, got decent timing, doesn’t make you feel things that are too intense for you to get your full eight hours…which, okay, I’m too much of a sitcom junkie not to occasionally understand this appeal (or watch Danson crab on “Becker” repeats) but maybe he’s too famous to pull off some other character who’s grief-stricken and adorably befuddled. I’m not sure if it’s Danson or the writing, but somebody is reaching *so hard* for adorable that  instead of my feeling touched, I’m more irritated.

3.      Is there assisted-living out there that’s really that free and fun? I kind of hope so, but I don’t really believe it (Or think maybe to get that kind of respect and attention, you’d have to be richer than God.  Which, I’m sorry, is an issue for someone like me watching this.  Let’s not trivialize exploiting elders to make everything madcap, all right? I mean, I wish it could be fun for everybody, but I doubt it. Also, they are never short-staffed?  I call bullshit.)

4.      I know this thing has a good heart in the right place (sincerely loving the NorCal locations) and maybe it’s some contrarian-bitch instinct that makes me resent this show so much. But I don’t feel as bad about that, even if it’s true.   America’s general instincts…aren’t making me feel all that great, right now. Also, as any troll might tell you, nothing like a bit of disgust to make a lady’s keyboard start tapping, much as I wish love did the same.

5.      A doctor that tells you to be positive, that you have a lot to live for? Another fantasy element.

6.      Corporate ownership and consolidation in medical facilities is a real issue—the answer isn’t staff going into their pockets for salt shakers.