Honeymooners: The Real Fucked Up Shit Begins

The Honeymooners are, 150 pages later, still assholes.

I read pretty heavily yesterday and the day before, so I’m about three-quarters through Kinder’s book. Although I probably should have seen this coming, it’s been interesting to see the characters of Kinder and Carver continue to spiral inexorably into a deeper and deeper pile of shit for the last three hundred pages. At first, I thought their infidelities and drunkenness would be their major flaws, mined slowly but surely throughout the book for material. It turns out that by a little more than halfway through the book Kinder and his characters are all sick of judging one another for drinking too much and fucking any vaguely warm flesh, and it becomes like white noise in the background.

At the beginning of the book there was a couple mentions that Ralph and Jim were desirous of fame, of huge and towering success, but at the time they were so far from the possibility that I ignored it. I’d forgotten that Kinder had twenty years to work with. Eventually Ralph, the Carver character, gets his first book of stories published, and so precipitates a chain of anger and malice that makes for very good reading.

The extent of Jim’s jealously of Ralph is astonishing, and for him the solution is the needle, lie to, and abuse Ralph in every way he can. This of course is after he married Ralph’s former mistress. Ralph falls apart big time not to long after this. He loses everything and is drinking vodka 24/7 in a seedy motel room; eventually he calls Jim for help. He’s at the end of his rope. Jim responds that he’ll throw a party for Ralph’s birthday, and that he should come stay with him. Jim has recently published a book, so I figured this was a good sign.

Jim turns the party into a coming out fest for his book. He makes Ralph a cake with a file buried inside, so that he can break out of jail when they catch up with his debts, but assures him he won’t have time to get out before at least one “buggery.” He even arranges to have Ralph’s estranged wife show up and let him know he has a court date in the morning.

That’s some real fucked-up shit.

Finally Finished With TR

I finally finished The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris. It is, among other things, an incredibly well written narrative history of Teddy up to age 42, when McKinley got shot and he became the youngest president in history. Side note: as McKinley Lapsed into shock, and they were arresting his assassin, he says “Don’t let them hurt him.” That’s a pretty solid guy.

I already read Theodore Rex, which is Morris’ second volume on Teddy, accounting his presidency. Although there’s no chance in hell I’ll reread that for years to come, I do kind of wonder what it would have been like if I had read the books in order. Teddy comes across as super human in the vast majority of each book, but more so in Rex, after he’s matured a bit.

In Rise, there is a long accounting of his actions as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position he used to, among other things, start the Spanish-American War in order to get his rocks off on a battlefield. As soon as they declared war he resigned and created the Rough Riders.

So, with my current self-defeating jones for Big People and Big Happenings, it was great to make sure that Morris, a TR apologist of the first order, did not shy around the intensely imperialist nature of Teddy in the late 19th century.

I’m definitely ready to be done with Theodore Roosevelt for a little. There’s still Colonel Roosevelt to read in the trilogy, but it’s still in hardback, and fuck paying for that. It’s time for more Latin America: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano (whose poetry gives me a sense of a Chilean Bukowski,) maybe a little Isabel Allende…

Suggestions are of course welcome.

Big.

Today I am not in a mood to mocked by the beautiful weather and sun. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I’m pleased to be in the fluorescence of the computer lab for a little. I’ve acquired the bad habit of reading about incredible human beings. Right now it’s the young Theodore Roosevelt, who at 24 became the Republican Minority Leader in the New York Assembly, and introduced and passed the Civil Service reform bill, with the help and aid of Gov. Grover Cleveland. The winter before, he finished his massive book The Naval War of 1812, which was the definitive work on the subject for a fucking century. I feel like every six pages he does something thoroughly impressive and I get simultaneously excited by what I’m reading and seriously disheartened by my lack of anything impressive in my short life. The only consolation is that Teddy seems not to be planning much of it out in advance, just being totally admirable in any given situation.

Then there’s Giaconda Belli, the rich and aristocratic housewife in Leon, Nicaragua, who starts writing poetry and drifts into the artistic circles, and becomes first a Sandinista supporter, then agent, then major player, and she’s having meetings with Ortega and Castro in the 70s. In 79, when they finally did overthrow Somoza, she was 31.

Oh, and Raphael Nadal just won his record-tying sixth French Open Championship. He’s only ever lost one match at the tournament. He’s 25. He won his first at 19.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez published the Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor at 27, the same year a publisher accepted Leaf Storm.

When Hunter Thompson was 21, he got himself (somehow) honorably discharged from the Air Force, drove from Eglin AFB in Florida to Jersey Shore, PA, got a job with a paper there, and had to skip town a week or two later when he broke the office vending machine, crashed his boss’s car, and make some unwelcome advances at the daughter of a prominent citizen in town.

Obviously I’m not doing myself any favors, when it comes to trying to make decisions for my upcoming blank page of a life, by surrounding myself with the stories of these people. I’m sure many people find this kind of stuff inspiring, and I do sometimes, today just might be a kvetching day for me. (Are the any appreciable differences between “kvetching” and “bitching?”)

I think over the past year and a half (although thoroughly declining through 2011 so far) I had a desire to be great, or famous, or as Teddy would put it “big.” I feel genuinely embarrassed at even mentioning that; I’ve never been comfortable with that kind of egotism.  But I did want to be famous, preferably as a writer, at a young age, which would then provide me the opportunity of growing old and becoming some sort of elder statesman figure for a group or organization. I just blushed typing that, I think.

To say that my paradigm has shifted is a bit of an understatement. Right now I’m focusing on deciding if I’m staying it Pittsburgh after my lease is up or running to the West in a desperate attempt to feel like I’m doing something. I need a job. I need an apartment. Hopefully even a little sense of fulfillment. There’s no room or desire for fame or prestige in this.

Like I said earlier, the consolation of Teddy’s story is that he doesn’t seem to have planned anything too far in advance. He rolled with it, and god damn it I’m gonna roll with it too.