A Cold and Lonely Goodnight

"All children, except one, grow up."  

Per yesterday's post, a friend sent me this link to a blog that listed opening lines to famous stories.  I think they are famous, anyway.  The one above, I assume, comes from "Peter Pan."  "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," comes from "Anna Karenina."

He sent me this detail of a painting, "Danae" by Correggio, too.  It is intriguing, I think, though others might call it provocative.  Others still, of course, might not enjoy it at all.  They have that right, of course.  Who is to say what is great and what not.  I know people who would concede the technique in a dismissive way while objecting to the content.  They are not my friends, of course.  I have that right.  We all have rights, even this Sterling character.  Mark Cuban, the notorious owner of the Dallas Mavericks, made his own "provocative" statement saying that we are all prejudiced in some way.  You go, girl.  But wait.  He is still going to vote Sterling out of the league.  He has that right.

I try to be inclusive rather than exclusive in my life.  I try.  But it doesn't always happen.  I love things but get fatigued when they do not love me back.  I can appreciate my friends who read books like "Fifty Shades of Gay" without reading it myself.  But if my not reading it angers them. . . .

I am tied to old definitions sometimes and am bothered by the new.  "Europe," for instance.  A new book came out called "Midnight in Europe."  "Europe," when used this way, has definite connotations for me. They are tied to old, bohemian American versions of "Europe" that came from television and films in the 1950s and 60s.  It is foreign and intriguing and mysterious and so different from my image of "America" at that time which was everything that "Europe" was not.  I know it is bullshit, but I cling to these things anyway.  It gives texture to the world.  My young intellectual friends, of course, have not been ingrained with those images and think I am not just silly but somehow malicious for touting them.  I love to.  It is romantic and fun.  They think their vision is less clouded than mine, which is silly.  Their version comes from The History Chanel and postmodern documentaries. They use words like "misogynistic" and "postcolonial" in mean, aggressive ways.  And I say to them, "Really?  All you can see when you look at Don Draper is misogyny?  I think the character is much more layered and nuanced than that."  But I might as well be defending Adolph Hitler to the Jews.

O.K.  I wouldn't defend Adolph Hitler.  But I now find myself defending Nixon more than I would ever have suspected in my youth.  The man was a flaming closet liberal.  He was just bitter, that's all.  And bitter people can do terrible things.

I don't want to be bitter.  There's a first line for a story, I think.  I have animal spirits to contend with.  That could be the second line.  I probably deserve them, though.  I've done questionable things.

And so on and so forth, word after word until you come to the end.  You needn't know what you intended to say.  Just say something.  People will take meaning from it or they won't.  You may not like what they say, but you can do little about that.  If you are of an ilk, you could pander, but that is not the sort of crowd we are.  We are the irreverent lot full of ironical quips and things of that sort.  And so on and so forth.

And on a final note, the girl who virtually put me to bed last night, the one who I sent the link to this blog to, the one who said she missed my writing so. . . well, I should know better, shouldn't I.  Last night before I shut the lights off, I made a reference to what I had written that day.  She hadn't read it.

It was a cold and lonely "goodnight."