chaosorc

I watched Magnoila last night. One of the themes is that the men cheat on the women, but the women also cheated on the men I guess.

One man is dying in bed, his son is a famous misogynist pickup artist. He cries and complains that he cheated on this woman for over twenty years and abandoned her when she was dying of cancer. He also left his son behind and he knew that he was the one who had to take care of her in her final days. To pick up the pieces of her dead life.

The second cheater was the wife of the dying man in a bed. She said when she married him she didn't love him and that she cheated on him for years during their marriage. She told their family lawyer that she didn't want to inherit anything from his death and was told his misogynist pickup artist son would inherit it, which is something she also could not live with.

The third cheater was a game show host dying of cancer. It is revealed he is also a child molester, he abused his own daughter. He gets home from work and tells his wife about how he cheated and says he thought she knew and she kept quiet about it all these years. She asked him about molesting his daughter and he said, I don't know. She told him he should die alone for what he has done.

There is a cop who meets the game show host's daughter when he is called out to her residence because of a disturbance call, she was shouting at her father to leave her house then she started blasting her music very loud. The two go on a date and promise to say things to each other that they were afraid to say. She asks, now that I've met you would you object to never seeing each other again? And he does object.

The movie works through the plot threads at a quick pace, there is a lot of music, at one point they all sing along to Wise Up by Aimee Mann.

I remember seeing it in the theater repeatedly. And breaking down at a stoplight in Arizona on the way to work and crying because it reminded me of a lot of things going on in my own life. The cop's trouble meeting someone to date. The misogynist pickup artist's dark trajectory as a result of the dysfunction, illness, and abandonment in his own family.

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My mother had the strength to lay on her death bed and refuse to eat. Because she had a do not resuscitate order signed the home she was in was unable to install a feeding tube.

This is after she recovered from her aneurysm, attacked my father, and was permanently committed where she regained her addiction to cigarettes and put on all the weight she lost, fell out of her healthy habits, and generally returned to a state of being that resembled who she was before the event.

I wrote at length in a pretentious way about how I felt when she had the aneurysm. The summary is that she came to my apartment to drop off an easel and I told her I loved her and said goodbye to her. She drove home and lay down on the couch in the living room because she was not feeling well. An ambulance was called and they took her to a hospital where they cut open her skull to relieve pressure on her brain from the blood coming out of the burst vessel. When she came to she had lost a few years of time. I fed her ice chips in bed, Crazy Redhead was there with me. My father didn't want to go to the hospital. He also didn't want to cry. He was still drinking. When we got him to the hospital I was disgusted by his behavior.

When she got out of rehabilitation she was like a completely different person. She had quit smoking, she was exercising regularly, she was very happy. She spoke with a very high pitch voice and her words did not sound like her. I decided she was dead to me.

I moved to California with a couple of roommates. One night she called and later she wrote a letter to explain that her voice on the phone was higher pitch than normal because she had been ill. I saved the letter. I don't want to read the letter. It included photos of our dog and the house, all the lights were dim because no one was replacing the bulbs when they burnt out. Her life seemed very dark. She lived downstairs in the breakfast nook where she could smoke cigarettes, drink tea, and look at the mountain. Well, after her aneurysm she didn't smoke. My father was upstairs on the computer or in the bedroom and only coming downstairs where he could see her to get more liquor.

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He died first. From what I recall my sister went to check on him and found him on his back with a mouth full of vomit. Her story was that his heart gave out, said he had a “widow maker” and that I should get my own heart checked.

One day my mother said she wanted to go home. This was after our house was sold, there was no home to go back to. Her husband was dead. She was in the care facility that he worked with the state to place her in, spending down and moving around her income and assets so that the state did not seize them. When he died they did take all but her life insurance policy through the Steelworkers Union that she retired from.

When they would not let her go home she stopped eating. My sister sent me a couple of photos of her on her death bed to try to coax me into traveling but it was during the pandemic, there was no vaccine yet, and my girlfriend and I were deep in credit card debt.

They had an outdoor funeral and her ashes were buried next to my father's. They also managed to mail me a little jar of ashes to match the one with my father's ashes. They're in my bedroom closet on the top shelf. I don't know what else to do with them or the family photos or my baby book.

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I think of these things and I want to drink. But I know that if I drink I will just become more depressed and eventually I will lash out at people I care about because they are not doing the things that I want them to do. And then things will be worse.

I think about these things and I want to die because there is a lot of work ahead of me. I do not want to do this work alone but it is looking like I will have to. And, when it is done I don't know what I will be left with.

I wake up alone in an apartment with an empty master bedroom and think about getting a roommate but I have so much stuff spread out across the rest of the house.

I bought things this weekend that I am beginning to regret.

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My original plan after my roommate moved out. And this is a plan I made back before October. I wanted to get rid of everything I owned. As much of it as possible. I wanted to get down to just a sleeping bag, the ashes and photos, the baby book, my father and grandfather's guitars. And nothing else. Only what was necessary or of paramount sentimentality. The idea was that I planned to die within the next ten years. Looking at the ages that the men in my family have passed away, that's what I can expect. I don't want to leave a big mess for anyone to have to clean up.

And now I have been nesting, trying to make things comfortable for guests.

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This is a very difficult time for me. I've been sober for one month and three days. Tomorrow I will return to the gym for the first time in a week. I am looking forward to seeing how far I have been set back by the illness and working to regain those losses. It feels like the gym and work are what has kept my life together these past weeks.

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I put together a birthday card and flowers for a girl I started dating last week. She said, it's official. We agreed to be monogamous. We connected on December 12, 2023 and she waited forty-six days to get my number and for our relationship to progress. During that time I had been trying to find her based on clues she had given me in brief interactions at her work. I got covid right after our first date and this week she took time off work to celebrate her birthday. I had hoped to meet with her yesterday to give her her card but it didn't work out. I'm hoping I don't have to wait forty-six days to see her again but if I do it will be worth it.