No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
There are others in our politics who think it’s a fairly routine matter to threaten those with whom they disagree with death. Most people would oppose that point of view. But still, there are some communities of people (hopefully small) who think it’s a fine idea that death threats are made.
I was looking for something to pass the time before dinner and “Love Me Or Leave Me” was just starting on TCM. Sure, I thought. Why not? The biographical musical came out in 1955 when I was just 12, on the cusp of adolescence. I’m still trying to sort out the effluvia of thoughts and feelings while watching it.
Three months after Andy’s departure, the unthinkable happened—unthinkable to a naïve twenty-one-year-old college student, anyway. Andy ended our four-year relationship with an icy cold “Dear Jane.” A shortish, not-so-sweet, correspondence espousing upon how he had never really loved me. Ouch! Experiencing Europe had changed him. Allowed him to find himself…
Blah, blah, blah… blah, blah.
Once in the middle of a work meeting, I had a panic attack. I did not know then what it was or what incited it. I felt lightheaded, and something about the four walls of the room felt so constricting that it made me dizzy and out of breath. My panic attacks began after my father had died.
A drunkard is not very good at repaying a debt, but very good at accruing more. Since we began, we have only owed more and more.
A few years ago, my dad came to visit me while I was living in France. On a night out, we went to the arthouse theater in Montpellier to watch a Chinese movie that had just come out. The movie takes place in Shanxi province, a few hundred kilometers west of Beijing, and when it started, I found I couldn’t understand any of the dialogue. All the words were spoken in the wrong tone, with the wrong stress, and yet they had a maddening similarity to Mandarin that made comprehensibility seem just out of reach. It was as though I’d had a stroke, and a portion of my mind’s speech center had been injured.