"Nine", lunch with Ronda today, catching up with the news, and memoir progress

I just got off the phone with my daughter Ronda who is taking me to lunch to a new Chinese place that just opened in the Taylor Place building, which is the dorm for ASU students. So I am looking forward to visiting with her. She couldn't make it on Mother's Day because she was in San Diego to a West Coast Swing Dance convention. This is my dancing daughter who has out done her dancing aunts, the King sisters, by belonging to a dance club for 15 years. Keeps her trim and exercised and having fun, too!
I must tell her about the musical "Nine" just out in CD that I rented yesterday. I just adored this musical. It is a very adult musical without being too risque delineating the story of a womanizing Italian movie director starring the perfect actor for the part, Daniel Day Lewis. I have never seen him performing better or more sexy. Ladies, this man I adore, but alas, he is married to Arthur Miller's daughter and quite happily.
But oh what an actor! Ladies, if you love this man go out and rent this musical tomorrow! It is a treat, and then he is co-starred with a bunch of great ladies who outdo themselves to keep up with him including the grande dames, Judi Dench and Sophia Loren. Marion Cotillard, the French actress who won the Oscar for her performance in the Piaf movie, plays his wife, the woman who tries to hold on to him despite the wiles of actresses like Penelope Cruz (another of my favorites), Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, and Fergie of Black-eyed Peas fame, who makes a surprise debut performing very well.
I can't imagine why film critics here did not give this movie more praise, but I think it is one of the most intellectually satisfying musicals, story wise, I have ever seen. It just simply has a lot of depth. It pleases on many levels. I was not bored one second. I was on the edge of my seat. I loved seeing this womanizer get his comeuppance. These womanizers are so hard on the ego when their hearts and minds go in all directions. Doc really liked it, too. He certainly has a bit of a womanizer in him, too, but I am afraid a few drinks every evening came first, and that is so frustrating, too, to play second fiddle to alcohol.
I am going to take a rest from politics today although there is always something to alarm in the news now days. The latest is the war the 5 Maricopa County Supervisors are waging to bring Sheriff Arpaio into line. More about that when I understand it better. By the way my first cousin, Max Wilson, has been a Maricopa County Supervisor for ten years, so he is practically on the verge of national fame the way things are going in Arizona. He is a republican and is on good terms with politicians like John McCain. Max's father died when he was ten so he spent some time living with my mother and dad and younger sisters. I was away to school so really did not get to know him during those years. Besides I was 12 years or so older.
Anyway he married and came to Arizona and got into real estate where he proceeded to make a fortune. In his later years he retired from real estate and decided to run for office. He also has another claim to fame for having 20 stents, yes you read that right, so far put into his arteries to his heart. From what I understand it, his heart is strong but his blood vessels are terrible. This has probably kept him from running for high office ala McCain.
I used to talk to him on occasion, but since I am poor and disabled and live in subsidized housing and hang out with drunks believe me this eventually proved to be too big of gulf for us to cross. It is quite hard for the rich and the poor to see eye to eye or for the rich to respect the poor. My own sister is married to a multi millionaire besides having a long money making career of her own as a nurse which has created a gulf between us we find hard to cross.
Money talks but the poor have no option but to insist that money is not the sole criteria for success. It may be one of the big criteria but not all poor people are deserving of contempt.
For example I am far more well read I am sure than my cousin or my sister are and have been writing for years with publication in mind. I just didn't happen to get there yet. One reason I haven't is because my issues are extremely difficult. But these issues were what I had to deal with as far back as 5 years old, child molestation, a criminal pedofile, a bisexual dad, etc, Gee, how much more difficult could your issues be?
I am not even talking to my sister anymore let alone my cousin, because every time I call her up we get in an argument. She is always too highly critical in my opinion and takes the same kind of tone with me my cousin does. I decided in my old age I would quit talking to anyone who habitually disrespected me and insisted on criticizing me in a manner they would not put up with for five seconds. This seems to be what the rich feel they should be able to do to us poor folks. Point out all the reasons why we have not succeeded in life and they have.
I say I have not succeeded because I was a victim. Somebody decided to hurt me.
I note today that a little kid 4 years old in Utah was beaten to death by his step father when he was sent by a judge back east to visit his mother. This was a victim. Is it his fault that he never grew up to be a success in life? No, he ran into a killer. Well, thank god, I did not run into a killer, but I wondered while I was in the molester's power if I would be allowed to go home again.
What happens though, if your life has been altered by molestation as well as terrible upset going on in your home due to alcoholism and fighting, you may eventually become crippled by it.
I don't know if I will be able to resume my memoirs in this public blog delineating when I first began to detect I was becoming disabled. I developed chronic fatigue to the point I could hardly drag myself out of bed around when I was eleven. It was so severe I decided I might be developing leukemia, something like that. But guess what, I decided not to tell my mother and dad because I was just so tired. I did not think they would believe me and would think I was just trying to get out of work. I decided I was going to have to get worse before I told anybody.
Makes sense, doesn't it? Except when I went back to elementary school I was able to sit down most of the day instead of working so got feeling better. My parents believed in kids working. So did quite a few farmers and ranchers who worked their kids hard. Anyway the symptoms receded but I figured as soon as summer came they would probably start up again, as there was just so much work to do without electricity or running water you could not get out of.
Only before summer came my dad nearly succeeded in killing himself by drinking a whole bottle of rub alcohol. He already drank one bottle before and Mother had to take him to the hospital where he was treated. So this time she was so disgusted she said she would not take him and he could just die. So for five days he lay on the couch very ill. I remember he turned gray and beads of cold sweat broke out on his forehead. I would run in every little while and see if he had died. He was far too sick to take himself to the hospital which was 90 miles away on bad road. This naturally stressed me out very badly.
When he finally started getting better another terribly ugly scene took place between him and my mother that I am not even going to put here, but I was not able to handle it. I cracked. I sat down at the kitchen table and started crying in this broken way. Nobody touched me. Nobody said anything to me. I guess it scared them too bad for me to start crying 'for no reason!' I remember my sister running and telling my mother and dad I was crying for no reason. On top of all the other stuff I was concealing and not talking about including another man now posing a threat, another of my dad's near death experiences was just too much stress. There had been too many terrible scenes in my life, too much death, too much drinking, too much fear, too many crises--a young mind just started to break down, and it takes a lot to get a healthy young mind to that point.
My cousin lived with my family long enough to know what my dad was like, but he was not there during his heavy drinking years. My dad had started to shut his drinking down after I was taken out of that home at 13 and sent to my aunt's a year before I was to graduate from the 8th grade. There was no high school so I would have had to go away to school anyway after the 8th grade.
It was recognized that I was suffering some sort of nervous breakdown at 12 years old and my aunt recommended I be taken out of this home. She had witnessed her own brother's nervous breakdowns partially due to many deaths and upsets he had experienced as well as his drinking. She also told my mother and dad that I needed not to be worked so hard! Well, thank God, somebody had some sense around there. That made a big difference in how I got through the summer. It stopped the chronic fatigue from surfacing again, but guess what, it was there embedded, and it would return again if and when the stresses became too great. It had now compromised my stamina. I would never be able to hold a job down very long before it kicked in. I was crippled as a child, before I ever got to the adult working world. Like it or not.
What I experienced that my sister did not was the molesting, the added strain. She had severe asthma as a child. Stress seemed to bring it on. So she contended with that, but it did not compromise her stamina.
So you can see why it upsets me to have it implied I am a failure because I never held a job down very long in my life. That is what a bad case of chronic fatigue will do to you. You have to stop and rest when the symptoms start to surface. If you don't it could kill you. I have ignored the fatigue until I started hallucinating and was scared to death I was going to die. And was so weak I could hardly walk. I learned the hard way what would happen if I tried to ignore the symptoms. It was like living my life in hobbles. But it was a good deal better than dying. Crippled people do live their life hobbled and if rich people sneer at them, it is going to make them mad. They ought to know better, but sometimes they don't. They are cruel, and who is going to get them to act better? If they are rich.
Well now my wealthy cousin who went into politics to give back to the state of Arizona where he made his wealth has the job of policing someone like Sheriff Arpaio! Yes! I think that is a good job for him. Who can give the powerful and the rich a challenge but another powerful person like Sheriff Arpaio who does not mind being called the meanest Sheriff in the USA.
Why am I writing this in my blog? Well, neither my sister or my cousin will read it. Although my sister does read it once in a great while. But I have told her that I will not be coming to Utah this summer. I have been criticized too ferociously for revealing I thought my dad was bisexual. But it came with the molesting. If I was going to talk about that I also had to talk about suspecting my dad of being involved with the molester. Thank god, my dad was not the molester. It could be worse.
So you see how tough my issues are. I can't even get my memoirs written let alone sent to a publisher. Besides this is a tough subject even for publishers. Let alone sisters. None of my sisters saw what I did in my dad. But I maintain the 'opportunity' was not there for them to see it. Lucky me. Well, I don't know when I will be able to resume writing my memoirs and posting them in this blog. It takes strength to write about the bad stuff that happened. I will just have to try to build that strength. The west I lived in was peopled by some bad guys, too. Up close, the bad guys are unsettling. People do bad things. My dad did bad things. He stressed and strained his family something terrible. But this would not be the first time an alcoholic and a bisexual got married and had children and proceeded to stress his wife and family something terrible. My mother had a very bad temper and she took some of her frustration out on her kids, so she was not as easy mother to survive either.