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, I’m 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 I’d have been suicidal today.