by banned » Sun Nov 06, 2005 1:52 am
...so check out this latest hilarity from the ever ebullient Dood Abides on dKos:<br><br>The Three Banditos starring Dubya, Rove, and Scotty McClellan<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/5/215133/942">www.dailykos.com/story/20...215133/942</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>========<br><br>Cry and you cry alone, maybe, maybe not...<br><br>I've been in a fog of my own misrubbleness for months and very little has gotten through, RI being one exception to my omphaloskepsis. Tonight at my local bookstore I happened on Joan Didion's newest book, "The Year of Magical Thinking," about the death of her husband and simultaneous serious illness of her daughter. <br><br>Didion has been one of a handful of icons or touchstones for me ever since I read "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" back in the early 1970s. I had heard of her husband John Gregory Dunne's death, but not that she had written about it. When I got home I checked Amazon and was sadly shocked to read that Quintana Roo, her daughter, died a few days before this book was published.<br><br>Not to overdramatize, but I felt like the last shoe dropped on my youthful idols...<br><br>RFK. Political hero, murdered June 1968.<br>The other night watching "The West Wing" I had a mini flip-out when Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda cut through a hotel kitchen, I literally screamed at the teevee "Don't go through the pantry!" One of the central images of my adolescence was waking to my mother crying "They shot Bobby Kennedy" and seeing the picture of him lying on the floor dying.<br><br>Jim Morrison, musician/poet, died in Paris 1971, or did he?<br>Mr. Mojo Rising checked out fast. I've wanted to believe he's alive somewhere, that he just skipped out like Arthur Rimbaud, but at this point I really don't want him to pop up fat and bald and go on tour.<br><br>Freddie Mercury (Farokh Bulsara), musician<br>Died of AIDS, 1991<br><br>Frank Zappa, musician and satirist<br>Died of prostate cancer, 1993, same year I was diagnosed with cancer.<br><br>Christopher Reeve, actor and philanthropist<br>Quadriplegic after a riding accident in 1995; died at age 52 last year. He and I were born 5 months apart. His accident came just as I was recovering from cancer.<br><br>Joan Didion's work always was shot through with what she herself called in "On Keeping a Notebook" a 'presentiment of loss':<br><br>"Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether,<br>lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents,<br>children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."<br><br>This all makes me wonder if indeed she didn't have exactly that, a presentiment or premonition, and if I myself didn't have some sort of premonition in the people I chose to admire, all but one of whom would die before their time, and that one would probably have given anything to go before her husband and daughter.<br><br>The title of the famous book on "The Doors" sums it up. <br><br>No one gets out alive.<br><br>Or unscathed by grief.<br><br>But--Dood Abides' photoshopstravaganza is still hilarious. They can kill you, but as long as you can, laugh every chance you get. As Hemingway said, it's what some of us have instead of God. <p></p><i></i>