MOM

How to destroy a young woman's life?

It's really not so hard.

Be born to her

She was only 19. I understand that she was good in school. She made it all the way through high school. Maybe was in The National Honor Society.  Unlike my dad who dropped out and joined the navy. 

How these two got together I'll never know. And even though they went on to inexplicably, have another kid 6 years later, it seemed like they had no shared interests. 

She just seemed so tightened up, a non drinker and ready to go to church, while he seemed relatively wild. He was kinda more attractive, with black wavy hair, fit from working out in the past, ("I need to get back to the Y." he said for years.), and kind rough in his navy tattoos.

He looked like Dean Martin, a popular entertainer back then. 

In fact they split in their early 40s, after I was already long gone. My dad later told me that she had a long affair with another married man. She died with that man, John, in a two engine airplane accident. It was not an enormous or challenging trip, they were flying from The Bahamas to Fort Lauderdale.  

She was 45. I had just turned 26.

She would be in her 90s if alive today and likely would be since both her sisters are alive. One is 97. (She told me, at least a decade ago, that I am in her will. I think that is a stupid thing to do to people who don't have much money. Isn't it natural to want and wait? Pretty sure she will outlive me. I really would like to pass this money along to the women I have hurt. She's the "rich" aunt.)

Anyway, back 72 years ago there probably wasn't a lot of abortion going on in Ohio, these two kids got married and I was extruded in the normal way. 

It's probably because I came out A Bad Boy, but the thing is I don't have any feeling of warmth, love, connection, special connection, unconditional love, undying support, or any of these other I-Love-Mommy stuff that I have heard others rattle on endlessly about all my life. 

So this was primary in the set up of my life and caused a lot of problems later.

Personal issues

 Thanks for reading my little blog here.

I’m going to change things up now. I haven’t really been writing reviews anyway. I ended up starting a youtube channel about the books I read.

This is going to drastically change to being very personal.
I think I’m getting ready to die, FINALLY!
It will be a relief. Over the past 2 years I have been a very sad broken hearted man.
It’s not something that has been done TO me. Well, maybe it was just life doing its thing and I was never ever equipped for it.

I just want to set the record straight as much as I can, even though the woman most concerned has not indicated that she wants to hear any longer.

I have been a life long THC addict and that has made things hard for me. Whatever with that, but it has made things hard for the people who were trying to be close to me.
I really regret that and feel all that more now that I am sober, old, and alone.
The THC thing was compelled by a lifelong emotional issues.
I just happened to be a teen with these emotional conditions when pot became  a cool helpful thing. Non-addicting, It was quite addicting to me, always has been.

(Funny think getting off coffee really helped.) 

I just wish I hadn’t trashed my connection with T so finally.
She was the sweetest person to me. I mess here, her touches.
I have been thinking a lot about her apartment of Long Island.
She was so kind to take me in and I should have relaxed into it. There was a lot of positives about that place.
I miss beautiful Saffie the can.
It made me nervous that her dad was like 12 years younger than I am.
I hope he is still around too. He really tried with me.
Ahamed and lonely.

Anyway being sober and on my own I think I understand some things better than I did 2 years ago.

I replay scenes that I would like to go back to and repair.

I would attached a photo of Saffie but it makes me sad to look though the photos of that period.

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

 Here is my rather critical take on the book:

Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop

 Shari Lewis biography by Nat Segaloff and Mallory Lewis

4 Short Muriel Spark novels

 The Driver's Seat:

The Girls of Slender Means

The Only Problem

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

To Die Beautiful by Buzzy Jackson

 Everyone is very thin, many have starved to death. 

The people are in rags, clothing that has been patched and patched again.

Hope, life, laughter is only a memory from BEFORE.

People who still have bicycles have affixed wooded tires to the rims. All the rubber has gone to them and their war.

Wood? Most of it has been burned.
The beautiful old elms that lined the streets are long gone, and still there is not enough fuel to do anything but freeze through the winter.


Many people from BEFORE who would be seen on the streets or in the businesses they owned have been rounded up and taken away. Some of them are still around, somewhere hidden, locked away for years in rooms, attics, and basements with widows blacked out. Prisoned, never seeing the sun, but safe from capture by the foreign soldiers in the street.

No this is not a dystopian sci-fi scene of an imagined future.
This is the 1940s during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands as described in To Die Beautiful a new historical novel by Buzzy Jackson.

This very moving first person narrative is about Hannie Schaft who was a member of The Resistance all though the occupation. Hannie Schaft was a real person, a young law student, at least before the occupying Nazis demanded students sign a loyalty oath to Hitler’s Third Reich. By first volunteering for a cooperative support organization, until that was ravaged and shut down by the Nazi’s, she became connected and part of the underground resistance.

Buzzy Jackson has given voice to Hannie Schaft and though her character a gripping story of Hannie and her comrades in their fight against the Nazi’s and their fascist collaborators.
Jackson has succeeded in presenting a work that reads like a “page turner” adventure novel. This is historian Buzzy Jackson’s first novel. She has triumphed in fiction with it.

We go with Hannie and her comrades, Jan, until he is captured, and then Truus and Freddie two young sisters and resistance veterans as they travel by bicycle to their planed out missions to kill Nazis and their fascist collaborators. These collaborators help the occupying German soldiers by ratting out their Jewish and resistance countryman.

Buzzy Jackson constructs tense suspenseful scenes as Hannie, Jan, and Freddie approach the enemy. The Germans and collaborators have food, they aren’t starving like everyone else, but have a surprise comeuppance when a young woman sticks a pistol in their fat bellies and escape on the bicycles. 

We know through the prologue that Hannie is eventually captured and imprisoned. But that doesn’t prepare us for the details of what goes on in prison at the hands of her Nazi captors. Buzzy Jackson in the ending chapters does not shy away from showing us this horror. 
 
In an afterword at the end of the book she shares how the novel was constructed including the consulting the memoir Truus Menger-Oversteegen (1923-2016) who is a major character in the book, another very young woman and hero of the resistance.

Yet this adventure, this novel is about something that is all too real, something that actually happened and sadly still constantly happening in multiple countries all over the world.

A thoughtful reader in a powerful very military country might even ask, “Is my country doing this to innocent people somewhere NOW? How can I resist? How can I stop this?     
 

The Big Laugh by John O'Hara

 This was my first O'Hara novel. I just finished reading it today.

I’ll likely read another soon.

I really liked it. He strips away the glitter shell of Hollywood to reveal the hollow reality within.

The novel is dialogue heavy with a kind of lack of commentary about what the characters are thinking, but ultimately that is fine. It kinda reads like a text screenplay. The dialogue is very good,

I bought it for $3 at the cheaper book outside rack at The Strand NYC. Good investment.

The movie business is an odd cultural/business/entertainment mashup. Without stating it directly, even back 60 years ago O’Hara sets up the question: Why are these people, this business, so honored and their “entertainment” products given so much attention. Why are the “stars” so revered and the products, more or less all produced to make money, demanding of so much attention? Even now 120 years after the new technological wonder of moving pictures, it is somewhat troubling that this industry is so powerful and central in the minds and hearts of so many of us.
Is it part of the tragedy of centralization of big business, viral capitalism? Or just all in fun and don’t we love our “stars”. I kind of hate that moving image so easily became the dominant method of storytelling. I still love the novel over cinema/TV, hence I read this one and I’m on to the next one.