Day: February 12, 2018

We went to see “The Shape Of Water,” Monday night, we were trapped in our house by sheets of ice outside for two days over the weekend, we broke out tonight,  I can’t think of a better way to get out than to go and see Guillermo del Toro’s sparkling and mystical and loving vision of a movie.

The two words that come to mind are fantastic and wonderful, maybe enchanting as well. This movie is all heart, and a very big heart.

The film is set at a secret research facility somewhere in the United States in 1960 (shades of Roswell), at the height of the cold war.  In the film, a lonely, mute janitor named Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins,  falls in love with an amphibious creature – a creature from the Black Lagoon type – who is being held in captivity where he is taunted and tortured by a  real monster, a human working for the all-seeing, ever-evil government.

The only cliche in the movie is a ruthless, heartless five-star General who wants to dissect the creature to study him. I’m not sure I have ever seen a nice or ethical general in any Hollywood movie ever.  There are also Russian spies crawling around, including one who cares about our aquatic leading man.

Zelda’s friend and co-worker – Zelda –  is played by Octavia Spencer.

I ought to say there the cast is perfect in every role, they mesh together.

The set and colors and style and feeling of the movie are just amazing, deeply beautiful. Make no mistake about all the hype, this is a very richly and sincerely cast love story, it will take a jaded soul and cold heart not to shed a few tears over what is a very different but richly imagined romance.

del Toro brilliantly captures the silent Elisa and the lost water creature coming to know, see and love one another. There is an extraordinarily beautiful series of love scenes in the movie that just took my breath away.

The movie is very sincerely sweet, it is frightening at moments in a restrained and sorrowful way, and I was grateful to be invited into this magical film, as beautiful as it was unnerving. It is a very different kind of monster movie than we normally get to see.

del Toro must be a man of great heart and soul to make  so empathetic and feeling a love story as this. It is so easy to fumble monster movies, think back on all the casualties and disasters. No one has ever made a monster movie like this that I know of.

I should mention that there is a good deal of violence in the movie, that is very much part of the narrative here. The violence has a distinctly comic book kind of feel to it, but it is still real and explicit.

I would hesitate taking anybody in the family who is especially sensitive or who recoils at scenes of torture, pain and cruelty. I winced a bit at the violence, not because it was poorly done – it was  beautifully and skillfully done – I just don’t love violent scenes that are so explicit and prolonged.

As sweet as the movie is, it has an intensity that doesn’t let up much. It was over in a blink, way too soon for me.

Maria didn’t blink at the violence – she thought movie was absolutely wonderful in every way – she said the violence had a comic book, fantasy feel, and I think this is true. The movie was extravagantly and very purely romantic. It’s a story of the purest kind of love. She loved everything about it.

In a culture that is so suspicious and sometimes hateful to people who are different,  Hawkin’s Zelda doesn’t even seem to notice that the being she loves is seen as a  monster, and to most people, is a monster:  something to be captured, killed and studied, like an exotic frog or butterfly.  Their connection is a soul connection, as touching as it is nature.

If there is any intended message in the movie, it might be just  that – we might want to see the humanity in the others, in the beings that are different from us, that don’t look or speak like us, and that come from strange  and foreign places. Maybe it’s just that this is on my mind these days, but  It isn’t much of leap to get that from the film.

It is not a political movie in any sense, yet I couldn’t help noticing the portrayal of government as indifferent to culture, raping the environment, incapable of empathy or compassion.  Shades of Roswell, and Creature Of The Black Lagoon.

It is interesting that we live in a time when it almost blasphemy to portray the government and its leaders as anything but vicious, dishonest and greedy.

I think anyone who loves movies would love seeing this one. It could be a very  long time before I see another like it.

This movie touched parts of me that no other movie I can think of touched.

Love lives, and even triumphs sometimes. It has more power than many people give it credit for.

P.S. The Shape Of Water has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards, if that matters.

Our wood stove wasn’t drawing properly, and this makes me uneasy. In an old farmhouse like we have, fire safety is not something to take lightly, and if creosote was building up in the stove, we wanted to get to it right away. Chimney fires can be a horror.

It was a miserable and icy weekend, and I couldn’t get anyone from the town to come look at our stoves, so I went online and found a company in Saratoga called Chimney Heroes, which caught my eye.

I was in need of a hero, the winter bites hard.

Jared showed up with Brandon this morning at the farm right on time, and I didn’t realize that the very idea of the Chimney Sweep (a British thing) was quite real. Jared had a top hat and an actual sweep. He had some powerful vacuums and scrapers I hadn’t seen before and he called me out of my office to look at the creosote. It was sobering.

He was not just a pretty hat, he also did a remarkable job. The stoves were, in fact, both clogged with creosote, he scraped so much out – buckets –  I felt extremely fortunate. He didn’t left a trace of soot or dirt, and was fun and friendly. The hat and sweet are a Saratoga gimmick, i think, no local sweep would be caught dead in one.

But then, Saratoga is full of swells and ex-New Yorkers, and getting their attention requires a bit of marketing. After, I was caught by the name. And they sure deliver.

Jared and Brandon were great and did a great job quickly and thoroughly, and our home is warm and toasty once more. They even gave me a detailed report, e-mailed me with photos and recommendations for the future within minutes of leaving. I think they know I’ll never read it or understand it, but I welcome these heroes into the Bedlam Farm family – Maria and I were much impressed.

Whenever any workman says “hey can you take a look at this,” wince. It is never good. Jared came to get me a half dozen times to check on all the junk in the stove pipes.

They’re sending me a wood stove management plan, so that this build-up never happens again, and I’m signing up. We are breaking out, going to see the movie we missed yesterday in the ice storm. Got to get out of the house.

We drive by elder care facilities all the time, and they seem quite and uneventful, but if you spend some time there, you can discover the wild happenings inside.

I was very surprised yesterday when I an into Sylvie and Madeline coming out of the activity’s room. With my camera – the residents love to be photographed  – I am not the chronicler of special deeds. “Jon,” announced Sylvie in her very formal way.

“I think you should take a picture of this.” I was puzzled. “What am I taking a picture of, aside from two wonderful women?”

Sylvie smiled and put arm around Madeline, who is 94 this year.

“I’m adopting Madeline,” Sylvie said. Sylvie is generally serious and reserved. I was a bit taken aback.

Both of them were beaming.

I remembered. Of course. Madeline witnessed her brother stab her father to death when she was five, the family fell apart and she, the youngest in an Italian-American Catholic family, was sent to a Jewish orphanage in the Bronx where she spent the next 13 years of her life, and learned a fair amount of Yiddish, which pops up at odd times in her conversation from time to time.

She was never adopted from the orphanage.

Sylvie, in her 70’s, was the daughter of American diplomats assigned to Europe in the grim years after World War II. She suffered two severe nervous breakdowns which altered the course of her life and sent her into a lifetime of institutional care. She has had other health issues in recent years.

Sylvia is a devout Jehovah’s Witness and is busy in prayers and letter writing on behalf of the church. She heard Madeline tell her story the other day in our story-telling workshop and she offered to adopt her. Madeline was deeply affected by the idea and the two just held one another out in the hallway for a bit, an unusual show of emotion for either of them.

I was very privileged to be there to record this event and I volunteered to photograph the ceremony. Some interesting times at the Mansion, just the other day, I photographed the beginning of the Wonderful Ladies Club. I think Sylvie just joined.

Kim is a Karaluk, an Asian sheep, She is very different from the other sheep we have, there is something wild and intense about here, she is undomesticated and never permits any of us to get too close to here, unlike the other sheep. She is ever vigilant, keeps a wary eye out for the dogs, and even keeps apart from the sheep.

She’s exotic and interesting, perhaps the only animal we’ve ever had who never fully trusted us. There is something vulnerable about her.

As many of you poor and long-suffering people are aware, I’ve been facing many truths about myself in recent years, some good, some awful. Authenticity is a real pain in the ass,  a grind of ups and downs. I’ve been writing about friendship and my sense that it has failed too often in my life.

I wonder if one can ever get there. I had many urgent things to consider as my life disintegrated, and friendship was not something I really looked at throughout my life. I’m considering it now, and realizing that like so many other things in my life,

I think the conventional idea of friendship doesn’t work for me, any more than the conventional idea about bring a grandfather.

I am not really a conventional person, and I need somethings most people don’t need, and don’t need the things most other people do need. People say they feel badly for me when I write about the failed friendships in my life, as if this is piteous,  but I don’t mean to project sadness.

I am actually pretty happy these days, loved, fulfilled and leading a meaningful life. More and more,  I see much of my life as a patchwork and web of grappling with things I don’t need and can’t have.

I’ve made few friends in my lifetime, and kept almost none of them. This isn’t a problem, or a drama, or a crisis. It’s not something to feel bad about, it’s actually quite liberating. It’s just who I am.

My idea of friendship, once I clear away all of the confusion and debris in my curious life is simpler than I thought.

I’ve been writing about what I see as the failure of friendship in my life, but it is coming to me that the real failure is not in the friendship, or in me, but in my idea of what a friend is for me. I actually have many more friends than I think, and they are good ones.

In our culture, we dramatize the idea of friendship, as we dramatize everything else, shaped by the movies and a mindless media.

This is a kind of heroic ideal – the loyal friend who is always there, who rushes to your side, to whom you can say anything, the connection beyond words, the commitment unto death, the long walks and talks in the night. I think men’s ideas about friendship are mostly framed by the myths about combat the Generals and old men who start wars create so they can get young men to die for one another, and for their cause.

All kinds of people live and die for the good of others, but the only ones we really glorify and thank and honor are the ones who die in war. I respect the sacrifice of soldiers, for sure, but for me, this idea of male friendship is flawed and troubling.

I know a social worker who altered and saved the lives of scores of people over many years, it was thankless and grueling work, and it paid little more than the minimum wage. When she died, nobody lamented her on cable news, and no one but her only daughter and uncle came to her funeral. I know an aging priest who devoted his life to caring for the poor.

No one outside of his parish ever heard of  him, he died alone in a Church retirement home.

No one ever invited  his or her family to sit in the gallery at the State Of The Union address. Nobody came up to either of them on the street and thanked them for their service.

My ideas on friendship, now that i am open to thinking about it, are evolving, becoming clearer. And it is a radical change for me. There are good reasons why friendship has been complex for me, and the biggest is that I didn’t know who I was and what I needed.

When friendships fail, it is nobody’s fault, it suggests to me that they were not real to begin with. Duh.

We are all looking for what we need, and what each of us needs is different from what anyone else needs.

There isn’t only one way to have a friend, any more than there is one way to get a dog, or one way to look at politics. And I’m not telling anyone else what to do.

How interesting to finally see what i don’t want.

I don’t want what I call a “Grandma” friend, a friend who only comes around in crisis. When I am in crisis, i don’t really want anybody to come around, I want to fix it myself, those are the only cures that stick. (I don’t care for “Grandma” e-mail either.)

I don’t want a friend who sees me as a toilet bowl, a place to deposit all of their misery and travail. And I’ve shed the habit of reaching out for saviors, and awaiting rescue from others. In trouble, my very best friend is me

I want a friend I can ask for help if I need it, and who will come when I need it. And otherwise support me in caring for myself, in being independent and keeping my dignity in a fragmented and corporatized world.

Otherwise, I embrace a new cardinal rule in my life: people have to save themselves, I can’t save them, and they can’t save me. Nor do I want them to. And no one did, when it hit the fan. I saved me, and that is the way it should be, if at all possible.

One of the best things I have learned about the turmoil of my life is to take responsibility for it.

This is the life I choose, and I have no right to lament it or complain about it or turn life’s twists and turns into a drama. I chose to life on a farm, surrender my resources in a long divorce proceeding, declare bankruptcy when I was overwhelmed by the Great Recession, love and marry Maria, move to our new and quite wonderful and simple home, commit myself to getting help that helped.

That means I will never be rich, never think of retiring, never have the money in the bank I have been told people like me ought to have. That’s the deal, I made, that’s the contract, I accept it. It does not shock or enrage me. If you love dogs, some will die on you, that’s the deal.

For most of my life, I lived the life of the book writer, and when that life changed, I have explored and found ways to continue writing and pay my bills and lately, focus on committing small acts of kindness for vulnerable people. That has grounded me in a way few things have, for reasons that are not quite clear.

None of these good things really have to do with friendships and friends, unless I define them more broadly. I have come to see everyone in the Army of Good as a cherished friend, and I will never even get to meet or see the vast majority of them. That has been a revelation for me.

Look what friends can accomplish together, even if they’ve never met.

I know I need love in my life, and Maria is the best friend I have ever had or hope to have.

So I am learning what it is that I need, not what I have been taught or told to want.

. And I think what I need is to make a new kind of friend, to define friendship in different ways. And I am. i am letting go of this old and tired – and for me, failed – idea of what friendship is.

My friends now are mostly, but not all, strong women, who seem to be to be more open emotionally, gentler and more accepting.  They are available, but never invasive or intrusive.

They love to laugh, and see the irony of our lives. And they can laugh at themselves.

These friends seem to possess the gift of empathy, they value friendship and make time for it in their lives. They understand that sometimes, friendship is about what we don’t do as well as what we do do. Am I romanticizing women? Perhaps. But I see i all the time. And I rarely see it in men, who are so often troubled and broken.

These friends have a strong sense of boundaries, as strong women often need to have.

They seek to achieve, but not dominate. If there are problems, we simply talk about them. They listen to me, rather than presume what it is that I want or know. It is not news and no secret that women, in general, are more emotionally evolved and open than most men.

I think I am coming to understand that most men cannot really be the kind of friend I want or need to have.  And that I really don’t need a lot of “close” friends in the conventional sense.

This is, I am sure, my doing as much as theirs. But that is who I am, and I happy to be seeing it. It feels lighter.

There is a simplicity about the friendships I need. And in truth, I need fewer things from friends than I always thought I did or was looking for. Perhaps that was why I had so much trouble finding friends. I need friends, of course, like everyone else,  but I am letting go of the notion that they are central to my life.

I know many people, see many people, our lives are not isolated in any way. We have a community of people around us,   they are our friends. They are friends.

I lived for many years in drama, and I know how dangerous and unhealthy it is. I don’t want it in my life, any more than is absolutely necessary. I believe in friendships that are nourishing, but not consuming. I  want my friendships to come out of connection, not struggle.

I can’t define a friend any further than that. I think you know a friend when you find one, and you know when you haven’t. I’m getting it.