I’m Breaking with You, at Last

What my mother said when she found out I’d never seen Men in Black.

While I was in my Facebook-related funk, I made a point of chatting on the phone with Margaux, and Amy, and Lisa M., and Lisa and David, and maybe someone else I've forgotten about, and then I felt better. I said to Amy that maybe the difference between having a big social set and not is the difference between being 25 and 45(ish) and she said she thinks that’s true—that when she makes new friends now, it’s because they have a certain interest in common, such as running, and while they have a good time doing that, they don’t do anything other than that together.

That made me feel better; I felt connected in my disconnection, anyway. I think it did make a difference when Emily left at work, too. I didn’t chat with her every day, but she was always there nearby, and we talked often enough. Now we talk on the phone and that is quite nice, but it’s not the same as seeing her in person.

I finally finished my giant book on Henry Ford! It took more than two months, but now I know a lot o’ stuff about Henry Ford.

I also read David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which I’m afraid I didn’t like very much. It seemed to be a lot of his very early stuff, recycled. Now I’m reading Karin Muller’s Hitchhiking Vietnam. She is quite an adventurer and has a very vivid prose style.

I really enjoyed the story about Lesbian Nation and the Van Dykes in a recent New Yorker, and called Alix up to see if she’d ever met Lamar Van Dyke, who quite caught my imagination, and she said she had, many times. I was thrilled. The Van Dykes were a bunch of lesbian separatists who took to the road in a you-know-what; Lamar with her ex-, current and future girlfriends: “the lesbian Joseph Smith.” Lamar Van Dyke lives in Seattle now.

DVDs lately seen: Who Am I This Time? This came out more than 25 years ago and features a dewy Christopher Walken as a painfully shy hardware store employee who blossoms only when acting, ferociously, in community theater productions, and Susan Sarandon as the new girl in town who, unaccountably, falls in love with Christopher Walken’s character despite his obvious baggage. She cleverly finds a way to merge his onstage and offstage personas and wrings a proposal out of him by the end of the film.

In Suicide Kings, Christopher Walken plays a mobster who is kidnapped by a bunch of young men who hope to coerce him into finding out who snatched the sister of one of the young men.

I saw Sean Penn play surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I’d never seen before, the night before he won an Oscar for Milk. I thought it was marvelous that he seized the occasion to scold anti-gay protesters, and I loved it when he said, beaming, “You commie, homo-loving sons of guns.”

Here’s why the Bay Area is the best place to live: The best American actor lives here, and also the top metal band.

(I’m sorry to say that, shortly after the Academy Awards, I read an interview with Sean Penn in Rolling Stone in which the interviewer reported that he seemed to take pleasure in cutting cyclists off as they drove around Marin County for five hours. I’m crazy about Sean Penn, but hasn’t he heard of human-caused climate change and if he’s truly a lefty, shouldn’t he like cyclists?)

Tom and I saw two episodes of the Def Comedy Jam. I don’t think Tom cared for it much, but I liked it, especially Katt Williams roaring, “You’ve got to love your m*therf*cking life!” and taking young women to task for claiming that a man has damaged their self-esteem. He said you have to love yourself before anyone else will love you, and that there’s no such thing as someone else robbing you of self-esteem: “It’s called SELF-esteem.”

Speaking of which, on top of our climate problems, on top of our economy collapsing, on top of what’s happened to the imaginary money I used to have in stocks (to paraphrase something I saw in the New Yorker, it’s like a friend has died and the friend’s name was money), it is really depressing to watch Rihanna go back to Chris Brown, and to hear her father say he supports her in whatever she chooses. I’d like to hear her father say, “Over my dead body will she go back to him,” though of course it is her choice.

After Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, I read an article about how O. J. had physically abused her and how her parents—this is so sad—had encouraged her to return to him. The author said that if a man assaults a woman and she doesn’t leave after the first time, he knows then that he can do anything he wants to her, including kill her. I fear for Rihanna.

I saw I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn plays, not always convincingly, a man with the mental capacity of a young child who is the single parent of a young girl he must try to win back after child protective services puts her in foster care. This is probably the least satisfying Sean Penn movie I’ve seen. He can play not so bright and enraged and slick and evil and gay and heartbroken and many things, but out-and-out developmentally disabled is perhaps too much of a stretch.

Also, the Michelle Pfeiffer character is almost a parody, which doesn’t help. And then there’s sort of a loose end with the agoraphobic neighbor. I’m also not really crazy about Dakota Fanning; so sue me.

I saw Megadeth’s video hits, which I actually did not like, though that’s one of my favorite bands. The videos were just too busy and didn’t feature the band themselves enough. I liked Alice in Chains' videos because they showed the band members a lot, and Metallica’s videos are mini-masterpieces, in my opinion.

Last but not least, this very evening I saw Telling Lies in America, about a young immigrant who has some painful learning experiences after he is taken in hand by Kevin Bacon, who does a very assured job of portraying a slick and nearly conscienceless radio deejay. A youngish Calista Flockhart is featured, as well as Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

I did some phone banking for the Bike Coalition one recent evening, meaning a last-ditch effort to get people to renew who have already received five lapsed-membership letters. The coordinator said the success rate for this endeavor is very low, and gave me just two membership forms, saying that if I got even one person to renew over the phone, that would be a good night. As it happened, I did get two people to renew in the course of the evening, but I think I’m going to rest on my slender laurels and retire from that particular form of service.

I finally found the right collar for Hammett, almost. There are lots of different kinds: ones that just buckle on and that’s that, ones that buckle on but have a short elastic section that will stretch a bit if needed, ones that attach using Velcro. The girl at the store said she would never use the kind with the elastic section again after coming home to find her cat hung up in the backyard and foaming at the mouth after what must have been a lengthy struggle to free itself; fortunately, it was still alive.

She said the only kind of collar she would use has a plastic fanny pack-type clip, with three prongs that fit into a second plastic piece. Sure enough, this comes apart quite easily. Unfortunately, I think the particular one I got was flea-infested, and the cute little mice sewed to it were soon shredded from Hammett scratching at it, but I think this is the way to go.

I’m going to get another one, with nothing sewed to it, and get the type of tag that rests flat against the collar, as opposed to dangling down. I’m paranoid about Hammett somehow getting out, and reading online that it’s rare for a cat without a collar to be reunited with its parent(s) has convinced me this is a necessity. He has a chip, but not everyone would think to have a cat scanned, or would have the means to do so. Also, when I adopted him, I signed a form agreeing to keep some means of identification attached to him.

This week I stayed home from work three days in a row with a cold. They were very nice days, though the cold itself got a bit wearisome, with lots of reading, and napping with Hammett, which is a very cozy and pleasant thing to do. He will stay under the covers snuggled against me for hours. Such a darling lovable cat.