I am blue. I suppose I am for the usual reasons. I received a note from my wonderful friend from decades ago. It was right on the money. By that, I don't mean it was calculated. I don't think she's capable of being calculating. Not to me. It was right. It was good. It made me feel good. She is who she was. At least the important parts. And her important parts were damned spectacular. I never in a million years thought this would ever happen. I thought she was gone forever. My world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
The people I love so dearly from G and R are spread out all over the country. And the ones who are here, I can't go and meet them at Old Town. They have to come to me. And they now have wives and kids. It's not so simple stopping by. And I haven't exactly made it easy for any of them to visit. I think I'm still ashamed of what I've become. It's just like wanting to go off by myself and lick my wounds. Why bother anyone else with my crap? That's not nice.
We first see Jack's native American wife in Little Big Man off in the woods by herself giving birth. When I saw that scene, it penetrated my little person in a huge way. I got it. That's the way I wanted to handle all of life's trials, go off by myself and fucking deal with it. I'm not sure that's what the director was going for. I think part of my horror of childbirth was how public it was. I wasn't down with that at all. A person on FB posted his fantubulous black and white photographs of his wife giving birth. On FB! I'm sorry, that's just not appropriate. I seem to recall a book where a character had a ginormous photo of his wife giving birth in living color as the centerpiece of his living room. I could be making this up. I don't know.
I hate my illness. I'm furious that the first pulmonologist and I believe my oncologist fucked up. I think if the latter had addressed my weird chemo reactions sooner and that I couldn't take a deep breath, perhaps we could have stopped the pneumonia in its tracks. (HE listened. He didn't hear anything. Goddamnit. I had fucking pneumonia.) Maybe ARDS was in the cards even if he had taken my complaints seriously sooner. And the first pulmologist just gave me the wrong information. She said "if you get a cold, it's just cold. a bug is just a bug, don't worry." That's exactly the opposite of what I should do. After an autumn of colds and "bugs," I found I lost so much of my lung function. I can't sue, because I don't have one of those cases with legal proof that she is to blame. But I know.
I have to move forward. When I dwell on that nonsense, I get beyond angry. woulda, coulda, shoulda. That's a very bad place to be. I just don't know how I'm going to get through ten years before the medical community develops any treatment for me. (No wonder I get weepy.)
Next step for the painful back...a call and then a visit to the orthopedist. He may just tell me to stay home. What can be done for me that isn't invasive? Yeah, I can get narcotics. I don't want narcotics.
The one thing I've done completely right was to stay home from the Paul D. Schreiber High School Thirtieth Reunion. In a room of wall to wall people, would it not be incredibly ironic if I caught a cold and dropped dead. The long, evil tendrils of Paul D. Schreiber High School stretching themselves to Roslyn to zap me dead of the common cold. But I foiled them. Ha! It would've served me right for hating the place so damned much.
But they did screw me in one way. In a way that was supposed to be really sweet. Well, it does win in the sweet department. But I don't want sweet. I hate sweet. Remember the "bio" I was to submit to get everyone up to date on what I've been up to for the past thirty years? Now I couldn't do that...c'mon guys...so I sent what I sent, assuming they'd never print it, but good for them! They did. Maybe they never really read it. I sent the very nice organizers the following:
Fran Lipman is alive in New York City. How long she will remain in that condition is anybody's guess. Regardless, she has decided that she will remain in NYC. Either in her home with her beloved husband and two cats or as an additive to mulch for the apartment house garden.
But they fucked it up. I think since they knew my lousy tale, they were very sweet when they added a big, fat honking exclamation point at the end of the first sentence. Yes, they're happy I made it through and am able to live yet another day. (And so am I.) But that whopping bit of punctuation breaks the rhythm of the thing. A word to the wise, exclamation points are not funny. Don't question it just take my word for it.
Flow is everything. After finding the LP of The Producers at home. (Who knew it was there? I listened to it until the grooves wore out.) I was in high school. The song "Springtime for Hitler" was "sung" and Mel Brooks' little call out received the appropriate laughs. Another friend, but not one of the five (we were five weren't we?) found all this hysterical and tried to tell someone how funny this was. She said:
Don't be stupid
Be smart
Come and join the Nazi Party
That, my friends, is terribly unfunny. But poor dear, she didn't know the difference.
Its never going to be right, is it?
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