Tag: Tiger King

Behind Closed Doors

Well, somehow we survived again until Friday. Sometimes survival is the best thing you can actually hope for, you know? Day in, day out, try to keep your head up and try to keep going forward, focusing on task after task until the sun goes down and you can somehow try to get to sleep again, to get up in the morning and get going again

I had to leave work early yesterday because I started feeling not well. It hit me suddenly after ten in the morning; nauseous and a really bad headache and my joints and muscles were so tired they were aching. Naturally, my first thought was oh fuck I’ve got it don’t I and then my second thought was, maybe not. I let my supervisors know, got in the car, and headed home.

 I was exhausted, dehydrated, and having a sinus/allergy thing going on as well. After I got home I napped, off and on, for most of the afternoon. (Bear in mind that I never nap, and I not only was I  literally  in and out of naps from about eleven to six pm, I never nap. Ever. I always envy people who can nap–Paul can nap for like ten minutes and be completely revived; napping always just makes me tired, and always makes it harder for me to go to sleep at night. But yesterday there was no problem whatsoever with that; I sat down in the chair, got my copy of The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier out of my backpack, opened it up to the page I had left off on, and Scooter climbed into my lap. I started reading and within a few sentences had dozed off–and continued to doze off and wake up for like six or seven hours. This morning I feel much better–rested, not tired, nothing achy–but I decided that it would be best for me to not go to work and work from home instead. Paul and I both think we had the COVID-19 virus already; we were both fairly sick for about four or five days after the time change; we both thought it was part and parcel of the time change plus the start of sinus/allergy season. Now, we’re not so sure that’s what was wrong with us; and the symptoms we had–with the exception of t the shortness of breath, we pretty much had the symptoms as described–but I read a piece on the Mayo Clinic’s website that pretty much explained that it’s also possible to get an upper respiratory infection (congestion, sinuses, post nasal drip, wet cough) before it moves into the lungs, where the breathing issues come into play and the cough becomes dry. We never reached the lung portion–and it would make sense because I couldn’t understand why the combination of DayQuil and Claritin-D didn’t get rid of the post-nasal drip.

I’m also not 100% positive that you can’t get re-infected, either. So probably best that I stay at home today and do data entry and perhaps work on cleaning out my work emails, which are even more out of control than my personal ones.

 Between naps yesterday I finished reading du Maurier’s “The Archduchess” and started reading the next story in her collection The Breaking Point, which is called “The Menace,” and then we finished watching Tiger King. 

“The Archduchess” is an odd departure from Daphne du Maurier’s usual style and themes. I’m actually kind of curious how she decided to write this story and where it came from; it’s about a fictional small European country named Ronda, and in the story she traces the fall of the royal family of the country and how easy it is for manipulative people with something to gain (in this story, two greedy and ambitious men) can turn public opinion with lies, half-truths, and rumors to stir up a complacent population against their government and the governing system that has been in place for centuries. Ronda was a unique country with some unique properties–spring water that works as a kind of sedative, the royal family holds a secret formula that gives them eternal youth–and while it was an interesting read, again, it’s so weird and so unlike anything else of du Maurier’s I’ve ever read. The dark cynicism was there, of course, and the bleak outlook–the point of the story is how easy it is to convince people to go against their own interests in the name of progress, which may not be progress at all–but it was more of a dark fairy tale or fable than a short story. (Remember, fairy tales in their original form are much darker than the Disney adaptations we are all more familiar with) “The Menace” is also a bit different than the usual du Maurier fare; it’s about an actor, a star, but I’m only a page or so into the story so I don’t know what is going to happen or where the story is going to go.

As for Tiger King…well, it’s a viral smash on Netflix, and everyone seems to be talking about it, which is why we started watching it in the first place. It certainly isn’t something ordinary; and who knew the world of exotic animals was so crazy and competitive and could turn so dark? The real victims in this series are the animals. I don’t know whether Carole Baskin murdered her second husband or not (I am leaning towards “probably”), and I am also not convinced that Joe Exotic conspired to kill  her or was set up–I can see how it could go either way, but everyone involved is a shady person so it’s also entirely possible that both are true. The show certainly held my interest enough to keep watching to see where it would go next, but ultimately I felt bad for the animals. I joked on Facebook that I didn’t want to watch it because I was afraid I’d have “family reunion PTSD and flashbacks”, but having watched now, and remembering things I’ve seen posted on line and comments and so forth, there’s also an element to the show of “pointing and laughing at the uneducated redneck morons”. I’m not entirely sure there was a way of filming this without that coming into play, but it was also shocking to see the poverty and conditions in which some of these people lived. It was also an interesting look at how people can start out with good intentions (I want to save the tigers!) and slowly but surely that becomes subsumed within the person’s ego–it was certainly the case with all of them, including Carole Baskin. Maybe she was portrayed and edited to look like a hypocrite, I don’t know; but she came across very poorly.

Apparently she isn’t happy about how she was portrayed. I’d have been really surprised, actually, if she was happy with how she looked in the show.

And now here it is, quarter to three in the afternoon. I started feeling poorly right after I typed the above sentence, and went back to bed–I’ve now returned to my desk hours later, and my coffee cup, half full,  is still right there to my left. I started shivering as soon I got back in bed–shivering so hard the bed was shaking and it woke up Paul–so I moved downstairs with my blankets and curled up in my easy chair and slept again, on and off, for several hours, dosing myself with DayQuil and Claritin-D. I still don’t feel great, but I do feel better than I did, and I’m not really sure what’s going on with me. Is this a relapse, an initial infection, or something else entirely? I think I am going to have go into quarantine for sure, and see about getting tested at the office on Monday. I didn’t want to  have to go into COVID-19 exile completely, but if that is what this is…I can’t really take any chances on it. I just hope I don’t get Paul sick with whatever this is.

And on that note, now that I sort of am feeling human again, I think I’m going to try to get something done.

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The Dance

Someone told me once, long ago, that life was a dance. You could either stand in a corner or off to the side and watch; you could find a partner and go out on the dance floor and participate, or…you could go out on the dance floor by yourself and celebrate your life. I spent the first thirty-three years of my life on the side, watching and envying the people out on the dance floor. At thirty-three was when I decided I’d dance with myself if I had to–and within a year I wasn’t alone out there, and haven’t been since.

The dancing metaphor has come in handy more than once–my lengthy essay in Love Bourbon Street  was titled “I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet”–and while I don’t actually go out dancing anymore–the noise! the people! the late nights!–I still think of myself as out on the dance floor of life, under the glittering, sparkling disco ball while the bass is thumping and some diva is holding a note for what seems like five minutes.

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day, all things considered–although I suppose a very strong case could be made for days being judged currently on a scale of degrees of bad would perhaps be the easiest way to do it–but I got through, as did we all, and that’s another day in the dustbin of history. I am currently in this bizarre space of being  in the midst of something–as is everyone, again to varying degrees of bad–that is so vast and overwhelming that it cannot be considered in its entirety, for that path is the darkest one and must be avoided at all costs so I have to keep it at as much arm’s length as I can in order to cope with what my little piece of its reality is.

As much as I tamp down on it, it bubbles up periodically and runs wild for a horrifying moment or two, before I can get the lid forced back on and held down with all my strength until it subsides again.

And then I get on with it, as one does.

I started reading another du Maurier short story yesterday, “The Archduchess,” which is interesting and different and quite unlike anything of hers I’ve ever read before–always part of the delight of reading her work for the first time–and so I read on warily, wondering what she has in store for me the reader. I also managed to burp up about 500 or so words on my short story “Condos For Sale or Rent,” my quarantine noir story that has come literally from nowhere and is currently demanding my attention, and its urgency is impossible to resist or ignore–despite having any number of other stories and various projects requiring, yet not receiving, said attention–and while I am generally fairly good at harnessing my creativity and making it do what I want it to do (with varying degrees of success, but it generally winds up doing what I want in some way), now I just don’t have either the will or the energy to wrestle my creativity into where it should be. Anyway, I like the voice and I like that it’s set in the NOW. It’s an isolation/quarantine story, yes, and it has some potential, quite frankly. But we’ll see where it goes and how it turns out–but for now, I am having some serious fun with it.

And isn’t that what matters?

We finished watching Season 3 of Ozark last night, which means tonight we are most likely going to either continue with the insanity of Tiger King or move on to something else; I am thinking either Locke and Key on Netflix, or perhaps His Dark Materials on HBO; or something else entirely. There is a lot of really great stuff out there, and so that makes it even harder to decide what to watch. Or I could just read some more. I have to finish reading the du Maurier story, and I would also like to start the reread of Ammie Come Home, which is, naturally, one of my favorite books of all time.

And on that note, tis time to get back to the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, Constant Reader.

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Hey Good Lookin’

Hey there, Sunday morning, how’s about you doin’?

Well, we’re still here, aren’t we? That’s something to be grateful for, I suppose; I don’t know what horrors today might still have in store for me, or what fresh new ones await on the morrow, but for now–I am okay, we’re all okay, and it’s always okay to take a step back away when you need to because it can be so overwhelming.

Yesterday was lovely. I slept in, I read some emails, I did laundry and cleaned the kitchen. I organized the stuff on the cabinets on the stove-side (downtown in New Orleans) of the kitchen; I had a protein shake for lunch and peanut butter toast for breakfast. I worked on the laundry room shelves, and reorganized the bathroom vanity. I read Daphne du Maurier’s “Ganymede,” which was both creepy and charming at the same time–which only makes it creepier, doesn’t it? I made a shopping list for the next time I go to Costco. I made progress on getting organized, despite the on-going irritations with my computer which finally resulted in it doing a deep crash, but now it seems to be working just beautifully. I didn’t lose anything but time, and well–the one thing to come out of the dramatic shift and change in my work schedule is eight hour days, five days a week–and despite getting up early and having to go to bed early as a result–I find myself with more free time than I had before. There’s no sports to watch on television; this weekend I would have been running around getting exhausted (but having a great time doing it) at TWFest/S&S. That’s correct; that is what would have been the normal madness of life I associate with this time of year–part of the reason, I suspect, I feel so unmoored most of the time; this is anything but a normal time–and I also know, from past experience,  that normal is going to be different from now on. There’s no going back to December 2019, when we were all looking forward to the end of an annus horribilis; we had no idea what horrors our eldritch reality had waiting in store for us in 2020.

An innocent, more carefree and hopeful time. Hard to believe it’s only been three months since Christmas.

But yesterday I stayed away from the news and scrolled past it on the rare occasions I ventured into the Internet yesterday; it made for a much more relaxed day, and I even refused to worry about how many bad things might be happening while I wasn’t paying attention–and then realized with luck, some of the stuff that probably shot by in our daily dystopian news reality, the stuff I’ll never go back and get caught up on, hopefully won’t be necessary. The only news I want to hear at this point is that this whole situation has miraculously resolved itself and everything is back to normal, and if that were the news, I’ll find out soon enough, right?

Right.

But it was lovely to feel like it was my life again, and a normal Saturday. I could feel the tension slowly easing itself out of my shoulder blades as the day passed and I grew more and more relaxed, as the ease of repetition and mindless work put me into a more zen-like state, where my mind could release itself from its bonds and be creative; think creatively and solve problems and get organized; and of course the memories from AFTER Katrina, of going to the gym to develop a routine for every day and sticking to that; setting a routine of things to do to keep me occupied, my mind focused elsewhere than what the reality was outside my front door. None of this is possible now, of course; but I am going to start stretching every morning so at least I am doing something to take care of my body. But I am trying to adapt and change to a new system, a new normal, a new reality; and finding time to write–which I am going to do today–goes a very long way to reestablishing a new reality for me.

We finished watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and I already miss it. It’s quite an excellent show; and as I mentioned already, Kiernan Shipka is perfectly cast as Sabrina (I also kept thinking, as I watched, what a good Nancy Drew she would make); in fact, everyone is pretty much perfectly cast, and the high production quality of the show is something to see indeed. After we finished Sabrina, we started with the third season of Ozark, and if you haven’t been watching that show, you need to start from the beginning and go to binge-heaven. Cleverly written, beautifully directed and filmed, and remarkably cast–Julia Garner as Ruth is a particular stand-out–Ozark is one of the best shows of the last few years. And then we moved on to Tiger King, the docu-series everyone is talking about, and wow–what an interesting show. The funny thing is I had always wanted to write a book built around the Big Cat Rescue organization run by Carole Baskin; I had a base idea formed around it, and when Paul and I stayed at the Saddlebrook Tennis Resort north of Tampa a few years ago (probably more than a few years ago; I think it was 2012? 2013? Time holds little to no meaning to me anymore) I had considered contacting them to do some research while we were there. The name of the book was going to be The Stripes of the Tiger and I actually came across my file with notes a few days ago when I was organizing and filing in the kitchen. (I often have ideas that hold my interest for a little while and then I see another new, shiny object and move on)

“Ganymede” was a chilling and charming story, as I mentioned earlier–and I can see why it’s compared to “Death in Venice’; there are definitely similarities under the surface of the stories; an older tourist comes to Venice on holiday, becomes obsessed with a much younger, extremely beautiful teenager, and the end result of both stories is death. The Mann story, of course, ends with the death of the tourist from a cholera outbreak; the du Maurier ends very differently. Naturally, I prefer the du Maurier story, which is dark and twisted, and I’ll say it if no one else wants to make the comparison: “Ganymede” also has a lot in common with Lolita. I’ll have more to say about “Ganymede,” but I think I’ll save that for a dedicated post.

And on that note, I am heading back into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

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