1984

I watched a film version of this story.  I don't remember any of the background of it other than it was about a totalitarian society.  We had to read the book for English class.  It seemed at the time I read it far less entertaining than Animal House, another requisite.  It might have been Freshman English in College where I had to read these books, I don't remember.  I know I had read them both.  I don't recall seeing a film version of Animal House but I have now seen 1984 in film with Richard Burton as the ultimate inquisitor.  The main character is played by an actor named John Hurt but it's not the Hurt of later on with the blonde hair, it's a British chap with a pinched face and thin body.  He suffers a great deal on the path to enlightenment.  His crime is that he has a love affair.  He also smokes like a chimney and coughs a lot.  His country is at war, continents against continents.  You don't get to see the other continents but you begin to assume they must all be like the main character's home base: everyone in uniform, everyone tuned into all the state broadcasts, a few bombs going off, pretty much like World War II only it takes place in 1984.
That it takes place in 1984 is the postfuturistic element of the film version.  1984 has come and gone.  1984 was the year I came back out West after living for about fifteen years on the East Coast, mainly in Washington DC but for a few years on the Eastern Shore in Maryland.  I was a part of the counter culture while I lived in DC, at the last.  On the day Ronald Reagan took office, I was leafleting on Pennsylvania Avenue.  I ran into a good friend of mine, Eileen, who was wearing furs and had been socializing with Senator Warner and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor.  She wasn't with them, of course, she was with Harry, her longtime beau.  Eileen had lost her husband in the South China Sea during the onset of the VietNam War.  His plane was shot down.  I stuffed a leaflet into her hands and went down the block.  She was eagerly awaiting Reagan's motorcade.
At no time during that time leading up to 1984, did it ever feel to me that we were on the downward path portrayed in the story.  We hadn't gotten there because there I was prodding the story line with the kind of rogue mirth that anarchists are good at.  We had elected a competent now government official to lead us and so he did.  He wasn't on the radio too awfully much, certainly not broadcasting from loudspeakers at every lightpole.  He didn't have Richard Burton characters washing our braincells with torture for us.  He had a few little debacles to deal with, one of which was Desert Storm that gave more than a few people that fought there a kind of curious heat rash sort of condition that was assumed to have been caused by biowarfare agents, though one hasn't heard too much about it since that time.  I got to wear whatever clothes I chose to wear and there was the element of mirth again in the little demonstrations we conducted in places like Farragut Square.  You would have certainly been hauled off had you done that in the story.
I wouldn't say I'm championing our freedom here, certainly.  I would say I pushed the envelope all the way across the desk by the time 1984 rolled around in real time.  I had been there and done that in terms of being who I wanted to be in those years.  Well, I still am but there's the other part of it: if we didn't have stories like 1984 to predict for us where our predilections for power might get us, we might actually get there, as they unfortunately found out probably in Stalin's time, and Hitler's.  But we haven't had that gory mess around for while and the strange thing is we don't hear about it until it's a nasty pimple on the butt of the planet.
I would say that the United Nations is always on the spot when a situation becomes tenuous.  The problem with that is those troups that go in for the United Nation on peacekeeping missions don't have enough manpower or anything else to really stop what goes on.  The United Nation is hamstrung by its Joint Security Council because it's always a matter of warring with itself.  So there again, 1984 isn't quite here but if we don't keep that delicate balance Madison was so fond of, we might surely experience it firsthand and wouldn't that be lovely.
1984 more than anything depicts the societal death of love.  You might think it persists, but the story line goes along with the romance of its main character and the little nymphette he befriends who tells him she's done 'it' hundreds of time with hundreds of men, although that behavior is definitely frowned upon by the bureacracy they are saddled with.  A little thing like promiscuity isn't so much overlooked as it is begnine
(bee nine) I don't have my thesaurus along at the moment...it's one of the main symptoms of the rot of the society itself.  We'll just give our bodies for the pleasure of it, which might be argued happens today although the AIDS scare put the fear of God in a few of us profligates, I should think.   Burton then tortures the main character after giving him a tract on the aesthetics of the proletariate to think for themselves, which he finds quite sufficient to persecute the already suffering man with some quite graphic torture sequences, always to bring the person back to the cognizance that the state is all.  Indeed, in that society, it is all...the sum of life we would know it, were that our 1984.  The petty little behaviors of the couple, renting a secret room, sharing coffee and sugar as all things are rationed out, taking naps together, seem almost mundanely routine until the brain police burst through the door and both are hauled off to the interrogation rooms.
We probably didn't know people did such things to one another until it became patently obvious they did so during World War II.  Then there were stories about what happened in Korea, and Viet Nam, and all the places in between where people are caught in the middle of a quasi-jurisdictional dispute, like which tribe is the better tribe to be from.  Not that history is not replete with versions of torture, the Spanish Inquistion comes to mind, a little game we played in parochial school, Romans and Christians, being another.  Rather, it was more vivid, more widespread, more insidious in World War II and the immediate time after it, that made us aware that there were dark forces in the world that we must be ever on guard against. 
So I thought it was my duty to be a counter culture person, work in a cooperative art gallery, do art programs in the schools, protest whatever sword rattling our government was promoting, host events that culminated with myself and several other people doing a mime in front of the White House with red rubber noses on.  The Cuban ambassador happened to be driving by that day.  He actually got out of his limo and took the time to shake our hands.  I wouldn't say it was the highlight of my experiences back East, but I would say that due to those little catalysts of time and energy, we wouldn't be likely to experience 1984 as the book and film portray it.  We've got a little more mirth and ambiguity than to be pigeonholed in our bureaucratic cubicles, wherein we bow down and murmur yes God when the superior's superior happens to breeze through.  We allow just enough irreverance to make life tolerable.  We don't get around to wearing uniforms so much as we consign our clothes when we realize the quality and effort that are in them, and the fact they can be worn another season or four, by someone who didn't have the pleasure of shopping for them retail like we did.  We're becoming pretty good recyclers, and hopefully, through that and our alternative energy efforts and our healthfood diets, and our spiritual pathways, we'll keep on growing our versions of Victory Gardens and walking when it's only a few blocks.  We're not totally motorized yet and probably we won't get there where machines do everything for us.  We haven't lost our heart, I just wish we were a little more romantic, that's all...1984 portrays the death of love, I don't think it's at all dead but we're probably just a little more promiscuous than we should be and a little less tolerance of difference than might oughtn't be good for us.  We could use a rough polish for sure, but we love stuff, even if it's something like American Idol, where we pick a winner and follow him to the last round.  We have simple passions: ice cream, nice cars, our families...but we need to remember the lesson about love: that's when you know the society has died...when they outlaw it...
(oh, and that's something for the readership to ponder...exactly what love is outlawed today?  hmmm, I wonder...)

the bliss of summer

these are the days of warm sun, cool breeze and butterflies flitting across the yard. a total mellowness of purpose..
yesterday I went hiking on the Ozette Lake Cape Alava trail with my daughter and her husband.  the trees in the forest were moss-covered, providing a cool canopy.  there were tiny chipmunks, grazing deer, many hikers.  we didn't go back on the sandypoint trail because the tide was in.  many people were carrying camping gear.  they plan to camp along the ocean shore.  it was foggy.  i had a nap while my daughter and her husband explored the shoreline towards where the archeological excavation took place.  I woke myself up snoring.
yesterday evening we dined with my mother and brother.  I brought a turkey and all the trimmings.  mom made strawbery shortcake for dessert.  afterward we played rounds of Mexican train dominoes until I was so tired I couldn't add anymore.  We came home and all went to sleep  today they return to Gig Harbor, flying home to Phoenix/Mesa on Monday.  I shall miss them.
Today they are at Cape Flattery having another small hike.  The weather is absolutely gorgeous.  My foster kid is in the bathtub, just waking up at 1 in the afternoon!  I think he needs to clean up his room but maybe after he goes out after breakfast I'll do it, since he merely shuffles things around whereas I would sort them out a bit.
Haven't done much in the studio for some time.  Plan to attend to that once I'm over the hump on the builidng, gutters being the last big chore.  I think I can do them fairly easily but am daunted by my abilities.  We'll see.
 

Jandi Nerf..

Bling did think Shereef had what it took to pull off the heist of the century, because that would have been his job, were he not thinking seriously of retiring to a warm, sandy, cool breeze big surf planet with the love of his life, whom he had recently found.  Well, it was rather that he had discovered he was about to find her, thanks to the fact of so much cruising about the universe, he'd rectroed the monislicers to the point where he was coming, and going, at the same time, and he'd run into her there.  She was a most gorgeous creature, just right for him in every way.  There wasn't a way he wasn't delighted with her, even when they sat down and gobbled up three helpings of pomiyat beestaba which does give everyone the subtlest of gas.  The fragrance of her emissions reminded him of the walk he had taken on Soniyar at low tide, when the purple and green rocks were covered in the sand tidings of the sea and very slippery.  She was just amazing.

I digress to my own homelife and the move to the studio, wherein the little white dogs are having a free for all reunion sort of "I smell your piss and I'm glad" behaviors...phew...

So he hadn't met her yet, there was a delightful creature on the scope just found by Shereef and life seemed very good.  Little did he know the tiny soamyatatsia that they had just found would change everything for it was capable of scoping into view that which it wanted its intended victim to behold, just so that it could round it off nicely as a food source, as it were.  Bling was unfamiliar with such things for he depended greatly on his megahardware on the explorer ship he commanded, of which he was in charge, and this was a good fault of his, that he knew each facet so well.  He wasn't a hands-on sort of man, rather he let the many hands speak to him and he facilitated with intellectual prowess, of which he was very good at...

Not that things were terrible for Bling because he was a

if this is fun it should have it's own blog but eh..I think Richard Adams will forgive me...

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Force Planet
Forget Zapfrap Beeblebrox and the rest of them..forget the man in the bathrobe that got shot out into space and doesn’t know who he loves…forget them all…this maybe a story of the big cheese in charge of discovering new planets, and forget the congestion in space about doing that…because there isn’t any

This is a story about the big cheese, for as cheeses go, he was the largest wheel of Tilson ever made and he was, in fact, in charge of discovering new planets. Thing was, as things go, his latest discovery included finding a wife.

This guy’s name, if we are to be so bold as to try to interpret his language, was Bing Bong Bluey…(Ishityounot)..his underlings referred to him as ‘Bling’ to keep it all straight..because he didn’t really have underlings, he had sort of..divisions of himself, if that is the proper term, and they all sat at big glassy (sort of shiny and smooth like glass but not the same material at all..no)port monitors and studied galaxies and pondered the universe.

One day in pondering one particularly rocky and remote corner of the galaxy of Nanarnair..which had three suns, two moons and a nice little quadrant of spooky planets that all seemed to have atmospheres that weeped, Bing Blong Bluey was looking over the screens. One by one he investigated what each guy was finding.

Shereep Dispado had found a little goat-like creature on the particularly yellowish planet they all decided to call Boobaya because it seemed to disappear in its weepy atmospheric clouding and then reappear with a sort of a ‘boo’.. Shereep was a tall awkward Gangfonian from Loffsla. He was particularly adept in panel controls and could zero in on an item on a planet with Bobs’youruncle speed. He wasn’t particularly astute on defining what he mnight have found, however. He had learned, with great trial and error, however, to let the major Bling be aware of the find as well.  So it was, in pondering the strange little beast on his screen, that he pushed his glimigoxen gadforeepia peshnacorlax, right, they definitely called the alert button just that...mmmhmmm, and Bling made his way over to Shereep's station.
 
"Sup bro?" said Bling with some curiousity, for he did think, when he had the bends and twists of Shereep all ironed out with begnine sanguinity and savoir faire, that the underling (divisional) might one day replace him as the supreme cheese of the outfit.  He was confident of Shereep's finds in the great, wide universe with all its myriad facets of life.  Why only last week in the sector of Jadune, there had been that wonderful little sheep-like creature that was so tiny it fit in your hand, all curly white wool, so soft.  Bling had named him Bonecider.  He kept him in a specially designed atmospheric chamber in his private quarters.  Shereep had found little Bonecider.  They had beamed him up to the giant ship that hovered in the outer atmosphere of Jandi, tiny, shivering, probably wondering where the ffff am I?(to be continued)
 

fighting dogs...

welp...have to be in a pensive mood to get this all organized in my thoughts, my little pup, Lucy, has grown up, produced a litter, and now absolutely hates the little white peke I Took in...strange how that capital T got capped...it just happened, that would be a better name for the little white peke...'Ituc'...sort of Polynesian/Samoan..sort of..
n.e. weighs...
Lucy just about tore eyetook to pieces yesterday...for some reason, and I don't know what it is...those two females hate each other...eyetook is the heir to a line of shadowy figures that emanates from a trailer court up on the hill above sekiu...her mistress took care of Lucy while I was in Phoenix last year attending my daughter's graduation.  I found her mistress dead when I came to collect Lucy. hmmm...something tells me this little Prince Charles cocker (sort of, again, there's some Beagle in there they tell me) has strange powers...or weird/quirky karma...now she's chewing on Eyetook, which I didn't intend to keep (does one refer to a dog as 'whom'??) to the point where I'm seriously intending to unload her at the first available opportunity..
I could call Forks Animal shelter, I suppose, but it seems a bit stressed to do that, or do what I had to do for my little Bichan when he was uncurably ill and in terrible pain (dare I say it, no I won't)..something has to be done about Lucy today.  She's sitting in the truck, waiting for the verdict.  She was in the house this morning, terribly fierce with eyetook to the point I had to remove her from the premises.  I carried her out of the house and put her in the truck, where she is sitting.
I try to think that LUcy terribly resents the presence of Eyetook, that she wasn't at all pleased to be left with the shadowy figure who died (seems this person was conducting an illicit relationship with an inmate of the local state penitentiary, so rumor had it after she died).  What I know is the week before she passed, this woman of Scottish descent drove me to Forks on some errands (her idea).  While we were there, she displayed all the benevolent characteristics of a dog sitter.  Lucy seemed quite copasetic with the idea.
We went to a person's house.  There were great animals there, very large pitt bulls.  It was a bit unsettling.  The Scottish woman purchased some illicit drugs.  She was a cancer patient.  It was understandable.  I was a bit unnerved to be party to a drug transaction because she died a week later possibly of the valium she had gotten.  I did not tell the authorities but I can't say why.  I thought if there was an autopsy there might be inquiries but there wasn't.  The Scottish woman was far gone in her cancer, her blood pressure was through the roof, she hadn't long and she knew it.  She was rather a nice person inspite of her illness, which she had put at bay with medication I'd suppose, doting on her little dog.  She was most happy to have Lucy for the week I was gone.  It was traumatic to me to find her dead, her body white, fleshy, cold, resting on the little divan in the front of her motor home.  She'd lived there with her pets, waiting to find a suitable house, as she'd decided to settle here.
(feels like true confessions this morning)
So now Lucy is a vicious hound.  I'm not sure what to do about it.  I'm not beholden to Eyetook (not the name the Scottish woman gave her but I like it.  I raised Lucy from a pup, she was a darling little female puppy with long floppy ears and now she's so jealous of Eyetook that she can't be in the same room with her, Eyetook has taken her place in the home, she's out for blood.  It's a challenge to decide what to do but for starters, keeping them separate is going to have to do, until I can arrange for the cocker to be rehoused with someone else, I think. 
One has the same fierce loyalties to one's creatures, I've found.  I've observed it in other animal lovers like myself.  The pet provides the nuturing that is absent otherwise in the person's life.  It's a comfort zone that aligns itself as a source of care like when my last child went off to college and the house was empty.  We'd always had cats but that's when the little Bichan came to live with us.  Right from the beginning, he was a member of the household.  It was a minor tragedy when he had to be put down.  There was a bullet lodged in his spine that couldn't be removed.  He was terminal.  My little friend, with me through thick and thin, died at the hands of my brother's .22.  He said little Andi walked up the hill with him, as if he knew what was coming.  Andi sat there staring at him as he plugged him between the eyes.  He buried him on the hill behind my folks' house.   Can't help think how sad that was, how I looked for a replacement dog and found the hyperactive Scottie that only lasted a few months (he chewed up my glasses), hehe, then fell in love with a giant black Labrador retriever I took in as a favor.  Off to the pound went those two.  Then came the puppy Lucy, who was as sweet an animal as one could wish for, but never the bright enthusiasm of the Bichan, I must admit.  Eyetook is a little more competent and comported (whatever that means), but she isn't Andi either.  I suppose I ought to find a picture of the little beast but he's on my Myspace photo album for the world to see.  What a nice little dog.  Maybe I just shouldn't have another.  Feel sad Lucy has to go but it seems to be the case.  She just can't share.
I guess I better go deal with her right now. 
The canaries are hanging in their cage over my desk: Tweety and Snowflake (a female, for the lusty male Tweety, so that we may have a dynasty of operatically-inspired canaries).  Easier pets to maintain, but not the patent devotion of the canine.  A warbling song in the morning (though I have to say, Tweety hasn't been quite so cheerful since Snowflake came, so she may be returned to her previous owner as a 'definite downer bird' in terms of my own canary's ability to ignite the morning with his song.

This is the tender heart of the pet owner, in the middle of a house move, the little cocker becomes a savage over territorial rights...

the weather and Hawaii...

I've been slowly moving into the Reef..aka Willison Cottage aka 'the little house'...which I find is an easier reference than 'the Reef' which makes people feel odd I guess..giving a house a name, this isn't England, after all..  The Vinyl Cafe is talking along this morning 'songs about love' because of it being Valentine's Day tomorrow.  I should probably 'tivo' the radio program because I find it hard to listen to the speaker speaking when I'm trying to think/write. 
There's been the addition of furniture to the Reef.  An old dresser so decrepit that it needs glue in every crevice, and I added a dresser knob because one had gone..  but I like its alligatored varnish and the stance of it - maybe six drawers, maybe five.  It's in the back bedroom where I put a queen mattress pad over a set of open shelves, also a new addition.  These will work for storage but I need another at the end and that would upset the paint arrangement in the studio room, where I'm working on drawings in preparation for painting a portrait for John as a Christmas present, since he didn't get to come home for the holidays. 
My paint supplies are in another open dresser so I'd have to empty that but I've got cupboards and shelves for those things only I think if I store them too efficiently, I won't use them.  The point of having a studio is to use it, which has always been a problem in this house.  I thought I'd paint in the upstairs bedroom but it was too shadowy although it was a possibility to leave things sit there because it was upstairs.  No, it's the house itself, right across the street from school, a pine tree in the front yard, lovely place but for being an artist, it took me a year to clean up to get back to a story I was writing...that's what I mean, so many things to do to this house, little chores that add up to days of effort...fun things, all of them, but not the creative things I was aiming for.  In fact, I should get back to that story, shouldn't I?  hehe...I was right on the verge of it, telling it..and then I was out the door to the neighbors' for supper..and then I was gardening and carpentrying and painting the house...I found a lovely set of louvers...speaking of hearts/Valentines' Day...the louvers are cut with hearts, three on each, so I painted them the pimento cream that accents the house itself, which is a military sort of brown, funny monkey I think it's called, with a green blue trim.  The pimento comes in at the concrete fence the Basque who used to own it made, with fleur de lis forms, along the church street (the Presbyterian is right across)..
So I'll have to rent this house I think...see if someone less creatively endeavored can find it as friendly as I have found it.  Several bedrooms, empty now because my children are grown and the foster kid army isn't on call just now (hence the furnishing of the studio house, in case I'm on active kid duty which I love)...a bath and a half, which I wanted to enhance with a second bath upstairs but the last set of foster kids so rowdy I could see broken plumbing and holes in the lower bath ceiling from their escapades..  I didn't do it for that reason but it could be done, the larger bedroom is three times the size of the smaller...most inefficient use of space.  I also though of skylights to lighten it up, especially on the stairs, which now that it's the pouring rain season, isn't probably a good time to install those but there it is.  There is to be a greenhouse off the backporch where my son built a deck.  I pruned back the apricot as far as I could because it takes over the 'ceiling' of the deck.  The new puppy has done quite an overhaul of the backyard generally but I don't know that he'll be a problem at the studio house.  It's yard is quite a blank canvas and his rotarian efforts might even be appreciated.
So now I'm wondering what that story was that I was writing and if I should look for it in my files of things.  Oops, here comes the Vinyl Cafe guy again.  He's on about Valentines' Day and everything is going to speak to the subject.  Stories of people that listen to the program...I couldn't stand it...I went into the bedroom and folded clothing to be taken to the new house...first was a story about a guy who brought his wife a rock for Valentines' Day and then there was the story of the woman who found a Cadbury wrapper behind the bed after her husband had passed.  Memorable stories and memorable music.  Just heard Martha Wainwright, whom I believe may be related somehow to Kate McGarrigle, sing Piaf..
On the with day, a lot of rain...thinking about working on the portrait, very dim light today, might be a challenge...mmm, breakfast is my cinnamon rolls and a fried egg, apple juice..entitled the post Hawaii but didn't speak on it...added a couple of items to my kit  for going over there (one of these days) when I was sorting clothing...