Sunday and wide awake, perhaps not in Dreamland per se, but definitely the Lost Apartment. Yesterday was a lovely day, really. I got up around seven and checked the news, put away the dishes, and pottered around in the morning over my coffee. As it turned out, Paul had plans for nearly the entire day from before noon until the mid evening, leaving me to my own devices for the day. I read some, puttered around a bit, wrote some, put some things on while I rearranged and reorganized during the day while he was gone, and kind of enjoyed the peace and quiet of a little alone time. It’s nice periodically to have a day that is entirely mine to do with as I pleased, you know? It would get old very quickly, I suspect, but as I said, it’s nice every once in a while. The thunderstorm also arrived just before one, too–at least that’s when the sky started darkening and I heard thunder in the distance. It was the proverbial New Orleans gully-washer with flash flooding alerts and so forth. Paul wasn’t home, so Sparky wanted to sleep in my lap all afternoon and I was frankly happy to allow him to; it was very cozy with the chilly damp in the air and the sound of rain pouring out of the sky and rushing along the walk to the lower level of the street. I watched the last two episodes of House of the Dragon, which were quite enthralling. It did pick up in episode two, after all, and these episodes I watched yesterday were very gripping and moved very quickly.
I apparently missed the news about Lindsey Graham’s sudden death yesterday, adnd have not read any of the reporting, just seeing some social media posts about it this morning. Awful as he was, there was a little part of my brain that felt sorry for him. I always felt that the mocking of his questionable sexuality bordered on the homophobic and made me uncomfortable, even as I succumbed to the temptation of the low-hanging fruit on occasion. I guess seeing him triggered my empathy because I would always think, whenever I saw him, how easily his “path” (we don’t know anything for certain, everything is speculation and cruel gossip rooted in the homophobic ideation that you can always tell. Um, tell Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter’s fans back in the day, or Rob Halford. Hell, they didn’t think Freddie Mercury of QUEEN was, so yeah, no you can’t) could have been mine. I often wonder how I, born gay into a rural Southern family steeped in that dominant Southern culture, may have turned out had we not left Alabama when I was two, which is where my place of empathy for Graham comes from–and now that he’s dead and cannot cause any harm to non-white non-straights anymore, I can shake my head with sadness about his wasted life. Even if everyone is reading him wrong and he was just not “masculine” enough1, that’s actually even sadder. He was a horrible person and his congressional voting record and public white supremacy mean the sympathy is more along the lines of a wasted life who could have spent his entire career doing things for his constituents rather than being a MAGA mouthpiece.
He certainly was a Harkonnen beta, and that is unforgivable.
With McConnell also dead (despite the pretense and this whole Weekend at Bernie’s bullshit they’ve been pulling with his brain-dead corpse–if he didn’t die before they took him out of his home, they sure were not in a hurry for someone found unresponsive in their home. These things come in threes–dare we to hope? As someone I admire greatly once wrote–dare we have the audacity of hope? This could be the best American summer in quite a while. Although in this shitty timeline, Anne Widdecombe probably counted as the other vile politician death in this glorious triumvirate.
Seriously, live your life so the world isn’t better off when you’ve died.
I slept late this morning and feel good and rested this morning, if a bit hungry. I do have to order some things for delivery and I’ll have to stop on my way home from the office tomorrow to pick up a few things. Today I am hoping to read and write and do some picking up around here. Paul slept on the couch last night (he said it’s easier sometimes for his knee when it hurts) so I can’t catch up on the news, so I will have no choice other than to read and write this morning. We watched a documentary last night on Netflix, Breakdown: 1975, which was a pivotal year culturally–this focused on politics and films, and that in wake of government distrust that permeated the country after all the scandals, how films became more cynical rather than optimistic and good didn’t always win in the end–and the good guy himself was not entirely a good guy either, unless he was an innocent pulled into something beyond both his knowledge and control, like Marathon Man. My Cynical 70s Film Festival that I did during the shutdown really emphasized how gritty and realistic the decade’s “serious” films by the auteur directors that rose in the 1970s were…and how Spielberg and Lucas changed the industry into the summer blockbuster mess it’s been ever since.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. My book is calling to me, and I need to read some other things for research purposes before I dig back into my own book and short stories and essays. Hope you have a lovely Sunday however you choose to spend it, Constant Reader, and I will see you again bright and early at six am again tomorrow!
- This would make a marvelous introduction to one of my essays about masculinity, wouldn’t it? ↩︎
Queer and Loathing in America 