There Are Some Things You Can't Cover Up

 This is what it looks like in my small kitchen at dinnertime.  For one.  It's a mess.  And that is something akin to what it will look like today.  After dinner with my mother last night, she asked, "What are we going to do for Memorial Day?"  I was kind of thinking "nothing," but that wasn't what I replied.  

"I'll try to cook something up."

I had just spent several hours at my mother's house.  Sometimes. . . but she needs my help now more than ever.  And so, I moved bedroom furniture and helped her hang some new blackout curtains that were the wrong size and definitely had little blackout going for them.  Measuring the area over her windows was just too much for her.  How she came up with the dimensions she did will never be known.  I had gone over early because I hadn't eaten all day and she said for me to come early.  Dinner, however, wasn't ready for an hour and a half.  The t.v. played commercials.  I don't know. . . . 

So, yea. . . today I will prepare a meal for two.  I made Sloppy Joe's once a long time ago.  They were good.  That sounds like a holiday treat, right?

Obviously, I have no photographs, no story, nothing clever to say.  I go up, I come down.  I'm in the middle of several big projects that are very time consuming and am on the brink of something that could turn my life around for a bit that probably won't but might happen.  

What I have and can report on is a problematic knee, a desire to lose weight, a liquor cabinet, afternoon visits with my mother, and nightly t.v.  Oh, and the occasional night out and sometimes a little faltering romance.  

And the desire for My Own True Love.  Which I have tragicomedically beaten to death.  That may not be a word, but you get my drift.  

"I'll take television for fifty."

"What television show's finale was watched by over eight million viewers last night?"

Yea, I watched the finale of "Succession."  The show seems to have captured the American Imagination.  Critics and reviewers think the show gives people an insider's view of greed and plays on their distaste for elites and their omnivorous greed.  I don't think so.  I think people who watch the show want to live like the Roy's, the Murdoch-inspired family around which the show revolved.  I won't say it was a bad show.  I will say that critics underestimate the audience's capacity for misunderstanding.  People desire privilege.  What they disdain is their lack of it.  Nine out of ten people are thrilled when, standing at the end of a long checkout line, some cashier calls them over to the lane he or she is just opening up.  

I just made up the numbers there.  No research involved.  Just an uneducated guess that reveals more about my attitude this morning than anything else.  

Because. . . that show got a lot of press, each episode, every week.  It was good.  I watched it.  But how much influence did HBO have in the publishing of those articles?  Again. . . I'm just spitballing.  But goddamnit. . . "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel". . . . 

If you don't believe me, just do this.  Watch the first and last episodes of "Succession."  Then do the same for "Maisel."  See what I mean?  Huh?  Do ya?  Do ya? 

Yea, that's what I did last night.  I rewatched the first episode of "Maisel."  I cried again.  Like I said, something is broken in me, I guess.  I get weepy for complicated reasons.  I hope.  I hope they are complex.  But goddamn, that show draws a perfect arc, and if you watched only the very first and the very last episodes of the show. . . I don't know. . . maybe you would cry, too.  

Do it.  Do it.  

They knew what they were doing down to the song playing over the closing credits.  Every major character story is complete.  Rising action. . . denouement.  Freytag could have done no better.  No?  Look him up.  

Maybe I cry because I feel like Stanley Kowalski. What do you think, doc?  Does that have legs?

"Mos def."  

The day stretches out before me like a giant dead whale.  I'll have to figure out how to navigate this one.  Do things open on Memorial Day?  Surely.  They all have sales, right?  I don't know.  This is the day they used to sell poppies when I was a kid.  Uniformed men would approach you in the street, at stop lights, and you'd give them money that went to. . . the heck if I know.  Oh. . . I just remembered that an old girlfriend had a love of poppies.  The flowers.  Her things were often bedecked in poppy images.  I should have paid more attention.  

The poppy field in "The Wizard of Oz" was full of Papaver somniferum, the source of the crude drug opium.  

"Now it is well known that when there are many of these flowers together their odor is so powerful that anyone who breathes it falls asleep, and if the sleeper is not carried away from the scent of the flowers, he sleeps on and on forever. But Dorothy did not know this, nor could she get away from the bright red flowers that were everywhere about; so presently her eyes grew heavy and she felt she must sit down to rest and to sleep. . . . "If we leave her here she will die," said the Lion. “The smell of the flowers is killing us all."
—Excerpt from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (book, published 1900)

Yes, yes. . . but what a sweet and lovely death. . . . 

O.K.  I need to tackle the whale.  

"There are some things you can't cover up/ With lipstick and powder."

"What a world."

"Tits up!"