Itinerantdaughter's Blog

If you’re a porn star, are your bikini waxes tax write-offs?

Janet Frame is not a terribly well known writer outside literary circles, but she should be.  I’m always equal parts heartbroken and awed by her very personal approach to language.  Frame was mistakenly diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight years in and out of mental hospitals in New Zealand.  She was scheduled for a frontal lobotomy when a book of hers was nominated for a literature prize in New Zealand, and she was released.  The below is an excerpt from Faces in the Water, her “novel” about being institutionalized.

“There is no past present future.  Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.  I do not know if my experiences at Cliffhaven happened years ago, are happening now, or lie in wait for me in what is called the future.

I know that the linen room was very often my sanctuary.  I looked through its little dusty window upon the lower park and the lawns and trees and the distant blue strip of sea like sticky paper pasted edge to edge with the sky.  I wept and wondered and dreamed the abiding dream of most mental patients –– The World, Outside, Freedom; and foretasted too vividly the occasions I most feared –– electric shock treatment, being shut in a single room at night, being sent to Ward Two, the disturbed ward.  I dreamed of the world because it seemed the accepted thing to do, because I could not bear to face the thought that not all prisoners dream of freedom; the prospect of the world terrified me: a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun –– like one of those woolly balls we made at occupational therapy by winding orange wool on a circle of cardboard –– rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass.  And the people: giant patchworks of color with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.”

And a hero of mine, Dorothy Parker’s review of the book in Esquire:

“It is always fascinating to read of the insane –– but there is a deeper exercise in a book which treats them not poetically or comfortably, but as they are and as they are treated.  Faces in the Water is a brilliantly written book.”

I have a decent knowledge of psychology and I have seen a great number of reality shows about hoarding (including Hoarders and Hoarders: Buried Alive) and based on this, I am prepared to make a blanket statement:

All hoarders feel starved for physical affection, specifically sex.

Rx:

A) If the hoarder is married, the couple should enter therapy immediately if not sooner. Most often the two should spend some time apart.  Usually hoarding means your marriage is dead and you ought to seriously consider divorcing.

B) If the hoarder is single, he or she should enter therapy

C) Most likely, the hoarder needs to lose weight, or at the least regularly engage in some light exercise.

D) The hoarder needs to have sex.  Details are secondary.

These are the FIRST FOUR THINGS that should happen within a week or so of beginning treatment for acute hoarding.  Then bring in the professional organizers and 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

FINALLY!

http://recycleyoursextoy.com/recycle_your_sex_toy

This is what this heroin addict on Intervention said to his family by way of a smooth goodbye:

“So, I gotta get going…I’ll be at the hotel, you know, I gotta do what I gotta do, and so I’m going to do that.”

(New category: Excuses?)

…to Google Image “Colombian Necktie.”

Update: Tried it.  Not too many terrible results.  Just imagine, though!

Nothing says, “Happy New Year!” like a little magical realism!

Tuesday Afternoon Broadcast

Can a simple seed cure cancer?  A man from Queens says yes.

KPVU visited Hector Gonzalez at the liquor store he runs on Astoria Boulevard where he told us his story.

Gonzalez, 53, says he was tending to his vegetable garden one morning when he noticed seeds falling off of the old tree by his fence.  He describes them as being light pink and perfectly round.  His son Tomas claims that when he looked out his bedroom window at night he saw them glowing in the dark. By the end of the month little piles of the seeds had surrounded the tree.

Adventurous Gonzalez urged his wife, Juanita, to use the mysterious seeds in her cooking.

“My heart said, ‘Hector, these are to eat’ and so I listened.”

The Gonzalez family soon received some terrible news.  Gonzalez’s mother, who lived in the family’s foyer, was slowly dying of pancreatic cancer.

“El dolor era insoportable,” Serena Gonzalez, 84, told us.

But after two months of a steady diet of dishes made entirely from the glowing pink seeds, Serena’s cancer had all but disappeared.  The medical world is baffled by her miraculous recovery.

“It’s unfathomable,” Doctor I. L. Mackenzie, head of endocrinology at Queens Hospital says.

Since Serena Gonzalez’s recovery, thousands of desperate cancer patients have flocked to the tiny red house on 33rd Avenue in Astoria.  The local Days Inn has a waiting list for rooms and some determined souls have started camping out in local parks only to be chased out by the police.  They return nearly every evening.

So yeah, your favorite pretentious asshole has fallen under the spell of JERSEY SHORE…because, cmon, everyone knows the raunchiest reality shows are the best insight into American culture!

Plus, also , the fact that this dude named his abs THE SITUATION obviously reminds me of DeBord! And that makes it FUNNIER!

Quote Numero Uno:

Everybody at the Shore definitely knows The Situation. As far as I know, everybody loves The Situation, and if you don’t love The Situation, I’m gonna make you love The Situation.

Does anyone think he knows who Guy DeBord is?  Probably not, because we’re all smart folk here, but regardless, it’s still funny to replace abs with existential Situation and vice versa…HOURS OF FUN!!!

Update: Was a little tipsy when I wrote that.  Corrected a bit.  The foundation, however, remains rock solid.

I’m being serious.

A Brilliant Idea Whilst Packing

By itinerantdaughter

“The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don’t take life seriously enough; in this sense, all science is ‘bourgeois,’ an affair of the bureaucrats.  I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything.  Otherwise it is false.  Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.  How do we know –– with Rilke –– that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?  Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory.  And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preventing us from incorporating the maximum of experience.  It means the end of hte distinctively human –– or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.”