Meeting a lady dying of cancer all dressed up on way to Basha's

I was dying to take a photo of her as she had on the cutest hat, and was carrying a bag with material in it that just matched her hat, but I was afraid it would bother her. She is dying with such panache. Everybody is admiring her going out style and talking about it. "Oh, have you seen Hildegarde? She is so determined she is going to go out and visit with people!"
Speaking of dying I got a movie over to the red box that Raymond said he liked. It was about a dog named Hachi and starred Richard Gere. It was taken from a story from real life that happened I believe in Japan. The dog was an Akita known for their faithfulness and service to their master. This dog Hachi used to meet the train every day when his master came home from work. One day there was no master. He had died while away, so for 9 years this dog met the train every day until finally he, too, died. Richard Gere plays the professor who has a good Japanese friend who talks to him about this breed of dog.
Hildegarde said she was hunting for someone who was going to Basha's so she could tag along. I had to go pick up my meds at Walgreen's, in another direction so off I went, leaving her to find another friend.
I left Doc watching a Woody Allen movie. Ever since he had an affair with his then wife Mia's adopted Vietmanese daughter I have had trouble liking Woody. I have wondered if he has quietly discarded her by now and their child. Never can tell about Woody.
Watched some more beheadings in the Tudors. I don't know that I can hardly stomach that Henry the Eighth nor could I understand why anyone in their right mind would commit a beheading offense while married to Henry. I had to decide that this queen was just a young flibberty gibbet, drunk with the power of being queen and unable to stop herself from reaching out and taking whatever she wanted. Henry had a very bad leg that from time to time acted up and kept him away from the queen for days at a time, and she found his groom quite fetching and dallied with him. So of course he got beheaded, too. Well, enough of that.
In case we have not had enough beheadings we have The Borgias to look forward to next season. Doc reminded me they killed a lot of people too.
I can't get over how many people kings like Henry were responsible for killing. Well, guess it is no different than the masses of people dictators like Hitler, Stalin and Mao were responsible for killing in more 'enlightened' times. I am reading a novel about the Russian revolution that is based on quite a lot of facts about what happened. It seems that Lady Astor from England came to Russia and asked Stalin in the middle of his blood baths and cleansing the country of his many enemies, "When are you going to stop killing people?" Quite forthright, that lady. I am sure Stalin practically choked on his own spit. There must have been some people he badly wanted to kill like her that he missed, for some reason or another.
So when I see a video of a UCLA professor preaching violent revolution to Latinos and overturning this corrupt capitalist government I wonder what kind of uprisings he might be able to incite before he is done. McCarthy scared most US citizens into not uttering a communistic idea out loud for fear of reprisals at work and so on. Before that I was able to read the LA Free Press in Los Angeles with socialist writers preaching about the virtues of communism quite freely. Remember Angela Davis? She was quite a famous socialist firebrand who irritated a lot of people for years.
But actually I thought we had more to fear from fear itself than from these people. I thought McCarthy was misguided in going around forcing people to name names of their friends who had joined the communist party they thought might preach communism somehow in the movies they made. I do not think it is that easy to overturn the government in a country where there is stability and sanity in too many of its citizens I hope. As I say we have more to fear from fear itself, that is, if we do not panic.
I love to debate some of these radicals. In San Francisco my sister Linda King and I went down and talked to Jack Hirshman to the Cafe Trieste in North Beach. He was then the poet laureate of San Francisco. I read a book of his poetry in preparation before meeting him. I found out he was called 'the red poet.' And he had been fired from his university professor post years before at a prestigious university for his communistic leanings but he had gone on living so he could preach the philosophy of what he believed. He was very well read and knew quite a few languages, a brilliant man, and during his tenure as poet laureate he had organized many poetry readings, one his most notable of poets from many countries.
Of course San Francisco is a very sophisticated city and can handle all sorts of unusual and radical personalities without believing they are a threat to our way of life as we know it. Just recently my sister Linda King did a bust of Jack Hirshman which is on display to the Beat Museum there in North Beach, so if you go there, you can see it! With a father I believe to have been gay I relate to San Francisco which is also the home of the gays, many of whom have had to leave little towns all across America so as not to be persecuted for either being born gay or molested into being one, in either case not being able to help it.
I tend to think my father might have been inclined that way as well as subjected to sexual activities while still a child or an underage teen. By the time I met him at the age of 27 when I was born to him and my mother, who on a mad impulse he had married without either one of them knowing much about the other, obviously.
Believe me, I am having an incredibly tough job writing this story so it can be tolerated by the people in some of these little towns across America who are very prejudiced toward gays and don't think for a minute the gays can't help it. Without walking in the shoes of these people, including my father I think they are judgmental about what they think and don't mind letting you know. I had to say long ago that as long as gays confined themselves to consenting of age adults, this was acceptable, and certainly much better than constant persecution and conveying contempt and non acceptance. Whether people realize it or not, the high percentage of young gays who commit suicide can be caused from that kind of attitude toward them. I think homosexuality is difficult to understand, but tolerance is required of anyone on this earth, unless they don't care about the harm they do to certain people.
My father was certainly suicidal enough to satisfy anyone who believes that gays should probably commit suicide, wouldn't hurt a bit. I do not think that is a Christian attitude and is not acceptable. And we will have trouble getting into heaven if we insist on hounding the gays into hiding and closet life and a suicidal life style.
My poor dad still probably has not recovered to the point that he can admit the truth without feeling shame and upset, even though he was not able to keep from making these connections I thought as long as he was active in his sex life.
I think a certain amount of prejudice is still at the bottom of some of my sisters not being able to accept that he could have been homosexual in his behavior. It is a condition very tough to defend to a very large church society as exists in Mormon Utah, which is one reason I had to leave!
I have to live where gays are just accepted and nothing much is thought about it, for my father's sake, I have to live there, because every day I imagine my father finally calming down and being able to talk about himself without doing what he always used to do in defense, screaming and hollering. I do not remember him ever not screaming and hollering and snarling. You never had a conversation with him without it turning to that. That got awfully dreary. But I knew until my father could accept himself he was going to scream and holler and snarl. He had been driven mad by how he perceived people would view him, in my opinion, IF THEY KNEW THE AWFUL TRUTH.
My father was deathly afraid I know to have his mother and sisters know the truth. I can't even imagine what they would have done had they had to deal with it, even though I even suspected one of the aunts of being lesbian. Isn't that a crock? I am telling you. She had two personalities that did not know each other. One went to church and preached and sermonized to me when I lived with her. The other hung out with a lesbian acting woman who was not even a Mormon and seemed to be having the best time in the world. I thought this is so crazy I have to get away from here. It is bad enough to take Daddy, but not this crazy situation with his sister, my aunt. She was so touchy about me leaving she barely spoke to me again in her whole life. She held my leaving against me even though I could not utter a single thought I had to her because one or the other or her two personalities could not handle it.
That is what we do to people with our prejudices. We force them to be so afraid of revealing the truth that they split into two personalities, and lose consciousness of the unacceptable one, so they will not 'know' she even exists anymore!
I am sure my aunt has been a long time in therapy on the other side so she will be able finally to put her two personalities together and discard what she cannot keep. She would probably have to give up her Mormonism in order to surface the lesbian personality at all. Her religious personality had influenced her two sons to become Mormon Bishops so think what an awful shock to them the existence of another personality in their mother, my father's oldest sister, would be!
I called up one of her Mormon Bishop sons and I was thinking all the time I was forcing some talk with him about my father what he would say if I told him I thought his mother was a secret lesbian, too! That was not a conversation I could have with him on this side.
But he will soon go to the other side where I think he will have to be confronted with some of the cause of his mother's mental illness before she can ever recover in her talks with him. She protected him with her religious personality while he was growing up in a Mormon community. Oddly he went to live in the San Francisco area where his mother's other personality might be a lot more acceptable.
Well, my dad also had two personalities. One was the one that surfaced when he was with homosexual friends, and probably a wittier more fun loving companion never existed than my father when he was with them. As soon as he saw my mother he popped back into the snarly husband personality that she did not even like but which was the only personality she knew since she was never allowed to see the homosexual one. I knew the homosexual one. I met him at five years old in snatches of conversation with the man he would later hire to work on our ranch, and who would in a fit of jealousy, abduct me to the cornfield. This man was a pedofile as well as a homosexual which my father never realized. Danger! Danger!!
Which of course is one of the hazards of splitting your personality and not being able to talk about probably the primary one which was the homosexual one rather than that horrible snarly husband one. I did not even like that personality either, but it was the only way my father seemed to think he could be when he was playing a husband role not comfortable to him.
But my mother was bent on staying with him at that point until he died, and would periodically express disappointment that he was not dying as the doctors said he would. Instead he was even shutting his drinking down! Then she would ever once in a while engage in a fantasy of what she would do with his money and property once he had died, thank god! If he ever would!
My mother was outraged that my dad did die two years after she left him after 35 years of hell as she would tell you, and she blamed me for at least 16 years because she remembered I said he would probably not die for 15 more years, which meant of course that I was conspiring to get rid of her so I could inherit the money, and from there she went to telling her horrified friends that I caused her to sign away her rights to a million dollars! When in reality it was a paper that she had agreed to sign that gave 20 thousand to his daughters each when he died and then she reneged.
So this marriage became all about a struggle for money and property, and one reason we daughters thought our mother left our dad after 35 years of I would have to say not loving him, was because he sincerely tried to kill her by pounding her head on a cement floor until his strength left him. Then she said he was trying to lure her out in the desert so he could kill her for sure, which for all we knew was true the hateful way he was acting, so as a precaution my sister had her husband remove the guns from the house.
Now I am having a very tough time writing about the deterioration of personality both my parents suffered in this long terrible marriage. And I see some of the cause for it lying right in our society's attitudes left over toward homosexuality, so that my father just could not bring himself to be honest about these practices to anybody. He had not been taught in his society that to be honest was the best policy no matter what. Mormonism did not teach any such acceptance of homosexuality as does hardly any other church I know of, and look at what has happened to the Catholic Church as a result of their denial of the way some of their homosexual priests met their sexual needs, in molesting children. The Catholics still can't see that a change of attitude might be necessary to keep the problem from emerging again and again. Ever since probably marriage was banned for priests let alone homosexuality.
I see that one Episcopalian church now has its second homosexual high official, so that is progress, which I am sure is thought to be the road to hell by a lot of other churches.
It's just hard to reason out the best way to go with some of these conditions that man is susceptible to developing.
So I think it is a good idea to keep our minds open, despite the cost.