June, whizzed by like a semi. I wanted to post the beginning of July
and it's all been a whirl so far also. So...I've decided to get off
the merry-go-round of social media. I'm taking a sabbatical. I'm just
going to read real books on …? Maybe once a day watch major news
for a short time. I'm going to spend more time writing.
The Pulse nightclub phenomenon was in June.The religious ideology,
extremist Sharia, so many factions. It's all tribal. And the thing
about homosexuality “killing souls”. Religiosity. The thing about
killing out of love, they believe they're doing them a favor and
sending them to their God. Some so-called Christian pastors do the
same thing, feel the same way. I've noticed my Christian friends
(minus two) said nothing on Facebook about the Orlando shootings. Not
a word about how horrible , how sad, how unfair. They really don't
care to talk about it? Maybe I missed something. Being gay is the new
Jew in Germany. They have an “agenda”, they want to seduce
children, they want to make it so Christians have to give them a
marriage license and bake them a cake for their wedding. What's up
with that cake anyway? I'm sure Germans didn't want to give a
marriage license to a Jew & a German. I'm sure they didn't bake
cakes for their weddings. Really. I live in the Bible Belt, but I
don't want to believe in something just because it's emotionally
safe, or makes thinking about living and dying comforting. I want to
believe in something because intellect and reasoning tells me it's
true and I want to build on it. I'm not sure exactly how to do that
yet other than documenting my own life. I hope I can learn. I think I
am.
Another line of poetry...
The
weight of my own bones is my resistance.
This
came about while I was doing my stretching exercises for my atrophied
muscles. I was thinking about using hand weights, but I realize my
muscles feel stretched to the max already, somewhat like a rubber
band, but I don't want the snap. I'm maintaining what muscle I do
have and trying to keep them awake as long as possible.
I finished reading “The Mandarin's” by Simone DeBeauvoir.
I wondered what the name meant as there was no reference in the book,
so I looked it up. It's pretty long for a novel, around 500 pages.
The story centers on Paris after WWII, and how writers lived and
worked. One of the tedious parts is where the main protagonist,
Henri, begins acting out of character. I had to persevere through the
part where he gives his life to a somewhat evasive floozy. He even
goes so far protecting her as to lie for a German collaborator who
exposed two Jewish women in hiding and caused them to be interned at
a camp for two years. Otherwise, I admired his passion for trying to
decide for himself how to do his work, (political writing for his
paper) without outside coercion and financing. There were several
relationship stories and the characters supported a party called the
SRL that was just right of the Communist Party and just left of the
Conservative Gaulist's. After the war, vigilante's murdered people
who had collaborated with the German's during the occupation. One of
the women characters I liked, (loved her thought processes) was a
psychiatrist who took one summer in New York City for a conference
and met a writer from Chicago (a real part of Simone's life) and they
started an affair that lasted three summers, one on the Mississippi
River and one traveling South America. She would return to her life
in Paris the rest of the year. The third summer their relationship
dissolved. Her much older husband Robert lived and breathed
socialistic politics through his writing. At one point he said, “You
learn something new or something is revealed and you have to
rearrange everything you think. …”. And there's plenty more
interesting hooks, open relationships, travels to Portugal where
there is a religious fascist government, and the resulting poverty, a
woman who gave up her self for a man and goes slowly mad, and a trio
of writers on an idyll bike ride through the country side one summer
that inspires a play.
Books I have collected for reading this summer are:
“A Dangerous Liason” Biography of DeBeauvoir and Sartre, by
Carole Seymour-Jones (so I won't romanticize DeBeauvoir too much)
“The Age of American Unreason”, non-fiction by Susan Jacoby
(freethinking)
“The Keillor Reader” put together by Garrison Keillor, creator of
the Prairie Home Companion (for fun and writing lessons).
I may read them all or just parts and will probably come across
something else in the process.
So, for all my Disability friends and writers, Happy Summer and Happy
Writing!
