So, in cleaning my room the other day, I found my old journals from high school and beyond. I decided I’d read through them one last time and then burn them, because believe me, there’s nothing in there that needs to be left to posterity.
Last night I was reading the last one, the one that ended sometime in 1994, and there’s a lot of crap in there, but there were a few decent bits of writing that interested, at least, me. Since I have nothing else to babble about, here’s a blast from the past for y’all.
July 25, 1994.
Not much going on here. I finished the latest John Grisham book, which probably should have been shortened by about 200 pages. But I liked the ending. It, basically, was about this lawyer’s last-ditch efforts to save a man on Death Row, who by the way was his grandfather. It’s funny: I consider myself to be an intense liberal, but when it comes to the Death Penalty, I’m all for it. I think Charles Manson should die, as well as his flunkies who performed the murders, and I think Jeffrey Dahmer should die, and basically anyone who, with malice aforethought (if that’s the term) killed someone. In fact, I think people who are legally insane should still be sentenced to death, because what are we going to do? Medicate them and send them out on the streets to stop taking their medication and go psycho again? If I were Jeffrey Dahmer, I’d want to die. In fact, I’d kill myself.
If I were ever sentenced to life in prison (and this is harmless speculation, because I’d never do anything to get myself that kind of sentence, unless it was kill Linda Gray [I do not know why I wanted Linda Gray dead.]), I would, one way or the other, kill myself. I can’t believe people can even make it through a couple of years, let alone decades, in prison. I’m given to introspection, but even I don’t want to know myself that well.
I finished reading Dave Barry’s latest book. The guy cracks me up, although I don’t think his books are the kind you should concentrate on reading all at one time, because the utter silliness of some of his stuff tends to overwhelm you. It’s the kind of book you should leave next to your bed and read one chapter at night, to make you laugh before you drift off to sleep. The thing that kills me, though, is that he’s as good at writing serious stuff as funny.
One of the last columns in the book dealt with the time his son was hit by a car, and how from the time your child is born, you’re overwhelmed with love for him or her. And it’s true. Sometimes when I look at Danielle – and she’s only five – I think, who are you? Where did you learn this and this? I’m your mother, and I’m supposed to know you, but there are times, kid, when you take me so much by surprise that it scares me. I don’t ever want to make Dani feel worthless. I don’t ever want to make her feel like her sense of worth in my eyes is tied to her appearance or how she performs. I want her to feel unconditional love from me, always. I want her never to feel less-than.
July 27, 1994.
I just finished reading Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore [Gary Gilmore’s brother; you may remember the book/ movie about Gary Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song], which I bought because I read an excerpt in Rolling Stone, and a couple of really good reviews. When I finished The Chamber, I was still staunchly in favor of the death penalty. Now I’m not so sure. I’m the same age Mikal Gilmore was when they executed his brother Gary, and I just can’t imagine it. His book touched me in a way very few books ever have, and by the time I finished reading it, I was in tears. I’m even tearing up just thinking about it. It’s so sad.
Mikal seems to hold so much guilt over the whole thing, like the responsibility lies in his lap. I hate it that even though he couldn’t have stopped what happened, he still suffers for it every day. He believes ghosts haunt his bloodline, and that the Gilmore bloodline stops, and that’s how it should be. I wonder if everything he does and feels will always be overshadowed by the fact that Gary Gilmore is his brother. He said that people wrote to him and walked up to him and told him he should have been killed along with Gary. Forget about the sins of the fathers… what about the sins of the brothers?
According to Mikal, Gary felt there were several points in his life when his headlong rush toward self-destruction could have been stopped if only someone had tried a little harder to help him. But could anyone really have stopped him? What if he’d been loved, been adored, been cherished the way Mikal was by his father? And the most horrible aspect about the whole thing, I found out at the end of the book is, Gary ended up earning his father’s enmity for someone else’s sin. How many future Gary Gilmores are being formed right now, under our noses?
Sometimes I feel like I have not suffered enough in my life. I’ve been in the hospital several times for several different reasons, but overall, I feel as though my life has been strikingly lucky. I have siblings and parents who are all still alive. Nothing horrible has happened to them, the only grandparent I’ve shared some semblance of closeness with is still alive, and my nephews, niece, and child all live with no life-threats. I worried when [my brother’s first ex-wife] became pregnant again, my thinking being that with every grandchild brought into the family, the chances of something horrible happening to one of them increases.
I sometimes get this sense of foreboding. Like, because my life has had no real suffering, it’s still in the future. When I hear about children dying of Leukemia, I feel almost a sense of recognition. I have almost a knowledge that Danielle will be stricken with Leukemia, and it scares the shit out of me. Every time she starts to look pale and gets sick I think, this is it. This is the time they run a hundred tests and tell me she’s got it. This is when I start to lose her. But the truth is, I’m already losing her. She’s growing up and away with every breath, and I wonder if I’m numbing myself against the pain of losing her to the world by worrying about her death by a disease taking her life. Something I heard on TV a few weeks ago hit a chord with me:
“It sounds like you covet the struggle.”
Do I? Am I wishing for a struggle to come along and strengthen my weaknesses? God, that sounds horrible.
I want to climb into my wayback machine and pat myself on the head and tell me to shut UP, Robyn, GOD.
I find my complete lack of understanding about mental illness kind of funny. Like I thought that Jeffrey Dahmer was totally normal, with just this weird urge to kill and eat men, and if I were just – like – sitting at my desk one day and I was overpowered with the urge to kill and eat people, I’d just kill myself instead. God! So simple! Like, duh! Kill ’em all! Load up Death Row and charge up Ol’ Sparky and let’s get the bad guys gone!
Good lord.
I don’t remember a whole lot about Shot in the Heart, but reading my journal entry about it makes me want to re-read it. That whole thing about Gary Gilmore feeling like his rush toward self-destruction could have been stopped if someone had tried harder pisses me off. What a goddamn useless load of guilt to lay on someone else. I have no fucking patience for people who blame everyone around them for everything that goes wrong and take no responsibility at all for the shitty road their life has gone down.
I might just have personal issues with whiny little bitches who can’t bother to shoulder the responsibility for their own actions, though.
I don’t, for the record, covet the struggle anymore. I don’t think I really ever did. I do still have that sense of foreboding, though. It’s a low buzz in the back of my brain; I’m waiting for the second shoe to drop, and I suspect that I believe at some level if I expect the shoe to drop, it never really will.
HG’s improving little by little. He actually let Fred pick him up a couple of times last night and hold him before jumping down and running off. He hadn’t done that before (unless you forcibly grabbed him and picked him up, and even then he just went still and frozen in terror), so that’s a step. When we went up to visit at bedtime, I picked him up for a minute and he didn’t fight me. He hasn’t purred for us yet, but hopefully that’s not too far away.
This morning when I took his morning snack in to him I sat down with him, and he let me pet him. He wasn’t crazy about it, but he put up with it.
I wasn’t able to spend much time with him yesterday because I had an appointment and then ran errands and then the refrigerator repairman showed up and then Fred’s parents were here and then we went out to dinner and then it was TV time. Today, I’ve got plenty of time, so I’m going to go up and hang out with him a lot and maybe he’ll warm up to me and flop over and let me rub his belly and promise to be my BFF for always.
A girl can dream, no?
CHOMP.
Such a sweet boy.
Poser.
Foxfire Firefox tabs open: 9.
Gmail, Google Reader (those two are always open), Bitchypoo WordPress edit page, Sideswipe Mixer Blade, this picture of Newt, Chickens in the Road, Facebook Scrabulous, Sparklit poll results from 2002, Hulu.
Newt has a slurrrp.
Previously
2007: At least the floors are clean.
2006: Fred was no help, because he was standing there laughing his ass off.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: Nothing, by the way, pisses me off more than the crap that gets installed with the program you really want – Office 2000, Iām looking at you and your crappy Outlook friend.
2002: Mother Nature is getting ON MY NERVES.
2001: No entry.
2000: So if rainy days and Mondays always got me down, I guess Iād have been suicidal today.
I had an idea for all of your extra tomatoes. It is something that a farmer does up here in NW GA. We take this small backroad into our neighborhood past a home that sits on I imagine what Crooked Acres to be. For the past two summers, the owner has parked a 5X10′ (approx) open covered wagon on the edge of the road. It is filled with tomatoes. He has bolted down a lockable mailbox as well as a small scale and has even included plastic bags. Above the stand is a small handwritten sign “TOMATOES $1.25/LB”.
It is completely on the honor system and from what I can tell most people pay. My wife says they are the best tomatoes she has ever had. I don’t eat them unless they are in ketchup or in a sauce.
Anyway, it is a way he gets rid of his surplus and being that Fred likes to build things, I thought of you when I read a comment about your maters.
I agree that people have to take responsibility for their actions – but you do have to admit that the way people are treated has a profound effect on how they live their lives. It becomes everyone’s personal burden to take what we are given and pull together a happy productive life – but some people have fairly sizeable headstart (those that are loved and cared for) and some people really do start out in life behind a giant barrier. Can you imagine not having parents – or having parents that use drugs right in front of you? Or how about knowing that your parents don’t love you – and being right? Those people have to find a way to fit in without the benefit of being taught how to do it.
My mother-in-law used to be convinced that Firefox is actually called Foxfire. We would remind her every time she said it wrong, “It’s actually Firefox, mom” and she would be surprised every time. “Really? I thought it was Foxfire….”
Eventually, we stopped saying anything.
Then, one day, she said it wrong, and it just happened to be perfect timing for her to notice all on her own that it’s actually called Firefox.
…she berated us for having let her say it wrong all these years!!!
lol. You saying Foxfire made me think of that ^_^
“I have no fucking patience for people who blame everyone around them for everything that goes wrong and take no responsibility at all for the shitty road their life has gone down.” – I couldn’t agree more. I could list so many “text book cases” of things in my life that I could use as excuses if I wanted to but that would be a total copout. Or I could say this happened/didn’t happen to me so why aren’t I this/that way if that’s the way a person always turns out? It’s just ridiculous.
HG looks like he’s begging for a belly rub in that 2nd photo. Such a cutey.
Thanks for sharing the journal entries Robyn. I enjoyed them. Thanks for sharing that past with us!
Flagger: I’ll have to keep that in mind – it sounds like something Fred would love to do!
Hannah: Oh, absolutely! I just currently have a chip on my shoulder at the moment, I think. It seemed pretty clear (from what I remember of the book) that the older Gilmore boys were beaten regularly and Mikal was kind of the golden child. It’s kind of interesting how children from the same house and family can grow up so differently – Mikal and Gary had the same parents, but not the same parenting.
Kelli: Ha! I didn’t notice that, and I even proofread today! š
This writing/blogging thing has only recently struck me so I don’t have anything old to refer back to, and now I kind of regret it. As you say, there is probably no need to keep them around, but I think it is interesting to follow the evolution of our thoughts and experiences. I also think it is funny that you want to go back and smack yourself in the head š Shoot, I am sure all of us in our 40s and beyond would love to do that to our 20-30 something selves!!
Thanks for sharing those.
Oh, I am also a Firefox addict with nothing less than 10 tabs open at any given time. Tabbed browsing is crack for us ADD internet surfers.
7/94… wow. My son was 3 weeks old; I was getting ready to go back to work [I had to]. My [paranoid schizophrenic] brother was about to make his.. lessee, third, or fourth? suicide attempt. After that attempt, my then-husband would make the remark that instead of taking him to the hospital, my parents should have just let him bleed to death and “saved everyone the trouble.”
That whole thing about Gary Gilmore feeling like his rush toward self-destruction could have been stopped if someone had tried harder pisses me off. What a goddamn useless load of guilt to lay on someone else.
And, at what point does “you need to try harder” finally become “you’ve done more than you could reasonably have been expected to do; the reason it’s not working is *not* because you’re not trying hard enough, but because the would-be recipient of your efforts isn’t ABLE to accept what you are trying to offer”? A conversation I’ve tried to have with my mother more times than I can count.
And apparently everything about this entry is destined to make me think about my brother, because what Hannah said, about what you said, made me think of a song that always makes me think about him:
We’ve all seen the man at the liquor store beggin’ for your change
The hair on his face is dirty, dreadlocked and full of mange
He ask the man for what he can spare with shame in his eyes
“Get a job, you fuckin’ slob,” ‘s all he replies
…You know where it ends
Yo, it usually depends on where you start
On the tomatoes, my grandmother and grandfather went to the annual family reunion in Texas every year. They took their Winnebago, filled with bushels of tomatoes for everyone! The family there were proud to have them since they never got the rain we did to produce such beauties!
I beg to disagree on those two journal entries. Spud will look at those one day and know how much her Mama loved her. I found it very touching.
I have this mental quirk where I always feel like you can’t have everything. For example, if you have a loving husband and healthy kids but issues with money; then you win the lottery or you get an inheritance and you don’t have issues with money anymore, then possibly something will happen to your marriage or your kids health or your health? Weird, I know and probably pretty stupid too. I just know that when things are going good in my life, which they are most of the time, I always have this sense of gloom and doom, like I’m waiting for the shoe to drop!
Thanks for sharing the old journal entries. They were an interesting introspection. I think HG has to be the cutest kitty on the planet with that last pic of him.
I love that you are sharing your open tabs! How neat is that. I saw that Sideswipe blade in Real Simple this month and I think I have to have it. Do you (or any of your readers) know of anyone with one and if it is really all its cracked up to be? I just made the bigtime and finally got the fancy schmancy Kitchenaid from Santa and do not like how you cannot stick the spatula in there at all lest it get ripped from your hand. I had a nice Sunbeam one and I think I still like it better in some regards, but it wasn’t heavy duty enough to do 2 batches of cookie dough, which the Kitchenaid scoffs at and stirs it like the pro that it should.
You should totally read that Shot In The Heart book again. One of my favorite books. Gary Gilmore really did get a LOT of tough breaks… it wasn’t that people “didn’t try hard enough,” it was that the shit kept on coming for him, all through his life. Just when he’d start to get back on his feet again, some new blow would come along and leave him without a lot of choices. Plus, the tie-ins with the whole Mormon “blood atonement” thing are just fascinating. Not saying he wasn’t responsible at all… just saying, it’s a very fascinating and complicated story.
I read the Gary Gilmore story years ago – just by an odd coincidence, his childhood home (the one on the book cover) is located very close to where I live and I drive by the house all the time. They have removed the stairs on the porch so that the house wouldn’t be as recongnizable – I guess when the book came out they had a lot of people coming by to look at the house.
Keep those journals – I kept some of mine and burned some – wish I would have kept them all now.
God, I love reading you…..just stop opening the damn tabs ;), because, of course, I now want a Sideswipe for my KitchenAid (when they start making my sized one)and when they invent the “Bottomswipe” (yum) for the center patch of the bowl that never seems to get fully mixed, I’ll want one too…..arrgh, will the consumption never end?!?!? Totally kidding, of course; I find it too fascinating to have a glimpse into what piques a persons interest and am so glad to be turned on to CITR. H.G., who I call Herbert George (after H.G. Wells), because you must “give that baby a name that means something, ya hear”, is so poppably cute esp. when nomming on a stick, that I just melted right out of my chair when I saw his latest pictures! BTW, now that I’m homeschooling my son until fourth grade starts, he’s started calling me Miss Momma and I get such a kick out of being called after a kick-ass momma cat!
Regarding what Hannah, said……these are the people I see in my practice. The not loved ones, the children of blatant drug abusing parents, the ones who were sexually/physically abused…..
Some are wired to take responsibility for themselves, and it’s relatively easy to counsel them. They need some coping skills, some re-assurance that their moral compass is pointed in the right direction (despite having no role models), and some peer support. Then we send them out into the big bad world, and am astonished that they are into the personal responsibility thing.
Then there are those that are just hopelessly broken. No matter how much support, how many resources, how much funding, therapy, medicine, encouragement, job prospects, education, yada yada yada, it seems they will never be productive members of society.
So, I’m convinced some of us are wired to “get it”, and others not. And with true clinical mental illness like schizophrenia, I’m with you. Who would want to live like that? But alas, I am not in charge of another’s definition of “quality of life.” So, I try my best to help them manage what they can. Know this. If I were in that state of mind, you’d have permission to bring out the Smith and Wesson!
I may be late, but here’s my question: Are you know reading Baby Proof? Thoughts? Is it going to piss me off when the wife finally relents and has a baby to please her husband/ex? This situation mirrors my life closely, except that so far my husband hasn’t given any ultimatum. I never ever ever want kids. Never have.
Er, know = now.