I’ve had enough champagne to offer something that’ll make the post below sensible.
Executive summary: While I fully support and encourage and hope for success in the efforts of those who do or think they will find fulfillment and/or happiness in long-term and/or romantic relationships, I personally do not see a reason to pursue or wish for such a thing for myself.
(Remainder redacted @ 11:30PM for reasons of embarrassedness.)
The six persons comprising the prior two generations of my family have experienced, cumulatively, at least twelve divorces. Granted, four of those divorces come from counting the divorces between two couples doubly, so an honest review could lower that number to at least ten. Still.
That number is complicated by the fact that one of the three couples under consideration were parted not by divorce but by death, specifically by a death in which the husband was shot dead in a dispute over a lover other than his wife. It’s almost certain that their coupling would have ended in divorce, bumping up the baseline by at least one and likely more as he, in what appears to be a family tradition, would probably have gone on to one or more failed marriages of his own.
Further, as far as I know, the gunned-down grandfather was the only of the deceased persons under consideration to have died in wedlock. My paternal grandmother may or may not be dead and may or may not be currently married or have been married at the time of her passing; she’s had no contact with me or my parents since I was (I think) seven years old.
While I am aware of no divorces prior to my grandparents’ generation, I do know that my paternal grandfather was sired by a fellow other than the man to whom his mother was wed, introducing into my lineage genetic material that makes a lie of my surname. My maternal grandfather was the product of a couple who remained married until death parted them, but it seems clear that they were never exactly what you’d call happy together or even fond of one another (a story about a pan of boiling water thrown over a dinner table bubbles up in memory, but I’m fuzzy on details to the point that I’m not sure who threw water at whom).
I know nothing of my paternal grandmother’s heritage, but reports indicate my maternal grandmother’s parents were dour and sour enough that one cannot imagine their marriage having been a pleasant or pleasing one. If nothing else, the bitchiness and backstabbingness of their offspring points toward a less than nurturing home. (I have a vague notion that my grandmother, soon before her death, expressed to my mother her childhood desire to burn down the family barn around her parents’ heads, but I may be mistaken.)
Speaking of fire, it’s probably relevant that one of my grandfather’s second marriage ended other than in a whimper, the house he’d recently given over to his ex burning down with rather convenient timing.
It’s probably also relevant that my own parents’ marriage persisted at least two decades past its sell-by date. Delicacy prevents this deponent from sharing more details on that matter.
Let’s see, what else? There’s the story of my maternal grandfather being so insistent not only on getting away from my grandmother himself but also that his daughter be spared her presence that he kidnapped my baby mother, sneaking her out through a bathroom window and driving her the many miles between Detroit, MI, and Cherokee, AL, sustaining the wee bairn on watered-down condensed milk.
That’s probably enough. You may soon see what all this is relevant to, but it’s going to take some fortitude on my part not to do the writing but to deal with what may be a likely response from some of my friends.
It is currently, at noon on New Year’s Eve, a very warm 60 degrees F. Projections have the high temp for Monday being 75F. This just ain’t right.
What with their unattainedness and eternal unattainability. Le moan, le sigh.
A select gathering of Apache Squadsters spent the afternoon tossing football and frisbee and flying a kite. On 30 December. In T-shirts.
This is outlandish even for Alabama, I think.
Is it a sign of our declining times, our ending age, that epiphanies come so cheap and often?
Anyway, I came across a piece, “Literary Fiction for People Who Hate Literary Fiction”, that seems solid enough in its own aims of introducing some lit-fic to persons insistent that only genre fiction contains the imagination and drama they require. The opening paragraph, though, made me spin off and up and come to a partial solution to something that’s been bugging me for quite some time:
There is a stereotype of literary fiction shared by both science fiction readers and non-science fiction readers: that academically-sanctioned, “serious” contemporary fiction is all about dull middle-class people having affairs, and that the writers of this fiction do such things as use a couple hundred pages to describe events that could quite easily be described in a paragraph. This stereotype is not entirely inaccurate — such books do exist. But just as it is unfair to condemn all SF as clunkily-written space operas for people who are hiding from puberty, so it is unfair to dismiss all literary fiction as unimaginative hogwash for people who yearn to be seen as sensitive.
As a person who sometimes, to his lasting shame, comes perilously close to “condemn[ing] all SF as clunkily-written space operas” but who at the same time realizes such a characterization would be intellectually dishonest and factually unsupportable, I realized I had encountered my opposite number on the other side of the fence, and that he was a good guy. (A good guy who, intriguingly, shares my given name and the surname of my paternal grandmother’s first husband, which in a work of fiction I would find just too much as a suggestion of mirroring.)
But about that epiphany: I realized, at last, that my inability to appreciate genre fiction[1] stems not from an inability to willingly suspend disbelief or from a woefully underdeveloped sense-of-wonder but instead from the genre convention of writing characters as characters and not as people-as-they-are. Wait, that’s shifting the blame. The problem is not the writers operating within convention, it’s with the fact that I personally don’t care for that convention.
I could go on at length, but a dissertation is simply not on the plate today. I hope to return to this soon, but you know me. I will say that my previously puzzling love for Terry Pratchett and strong like for Harry Potter are explicable within this construct, but I’ll leave it be for now.
[1] Which term Pete will note I leave undefined.
One 40-ouncer and I was knocked flat. Wasn’t expecting that, but at least I didn’t have any plans for later in the evening.
In my slight defense, it was unusually stout.
During conversation with my brother while we were out fetching hash brown casserole on Christmas Eve, I realized something I might have before suspected but had always tried to downplay: I am deeply, desperately attracted to shallowness. Shallow boys with their shallow ways turn me right the hell on.
And but yet! I am unattracted to most overt displays of shallowness. People going on about the labels of their clothes, the price of their cars, the utter grooviness of their groovy things turns me right the hell off.
So I guess what I’m left with is being attracted to people who are shallow but self-confidently so, like maybe Grant Morrisson. I am turned on by people who glidely lightly across surfaces, traipsing from fad to fad, but who don’t expect anyone else to take them seriously.
I think I may be slightly cracked.
The famous cinnamon bun roughly in the shape of Mother Theresa’s head has been stolen from its Nashville, TN home. Shock! Horror!
I’d heard of the divine doughball but hadn’t realized the relic was housed at Bongo Java, where I used to stop for coffee and genuinely heavenly croissants every time I was in town. Don’t know how I missed it, but there you go.