JOYCE CAROL OATS DOES NOT WRITE QUICKLY

THE GUARDIAN; JOYCE CAROL OATS :PEOPLE THINK I WRITE QUICKLY by Hermoine Hoby

EXCERPT :  Oats, a five time Pulitzer finalist, might be "very intensely interested in a portrait of America", but clearly she has no truck with the ego-vaunting, personality driven paradigm of contemporary celebrity.  She appears more to belong to some other, long-passed era, with a pronounced gothic streak colouring much of her fiction, which tends to be peopled by powerful men and introverted women who frequently experience sexual shame.

TRIVIAL or SUPERFICIAL or LIGHTHEARTED THE LIST OF THE MOMENT

 AM I WHO I KNOW? (or DON'T?)

Top Model I Think is Most Heart-Stopping Beautiful : Gigi Hadid

Actor With Talent Who Is Also My Heartthrob : Jack Huston

Actor I'll See Any Film She Makes : Jennifer Lawrence

Actor I'll Always Miss - I Like (Most Of) What He Did : Phillip Seymour Hoffman

Poet Who Always Gets To Me : Dylan Thomas

I'm Curious About: Jack White (Musician.)

Enough Already :  Harry and Meghan, especially Meghan

I'd Be Totally Embarrassed If She Were My Mother : Madonna

So Bad - So Good :  Fenty Savage Fashion Shows (For starters, I hate lingerie and never buy it or wear it  Secondly, there's anorexia and then there's ugly fat. The masturbation and sex act indicative dance movement are "savage" and not at all titillating. They are gross.  And if Demi Moore doesn't give it a break soon, she'll be on my Enough Already list. Sorry!  But I appreciate that all a dance production is a cross over with fashion and innovative rather than runway shows where mostly anorexics unnaturally walk one foot almost crossing over with the other: amazing that more models are not going splat on the runway.)

I Might Just Be Done With : Daily Mail Online  (So Obviously Anti-Biden with their hideous headlines it's totally unbalanced reportage.)

Historical Person I'd Like To Interview : Benjamin Franklin  (What really went on in the Hellfire Club Ben?)

If I Could Travel Back In Time : The Beatles at the Cavern after Berlin

I'd Like To Meet But Won't In This Life : Jimmy Page 

(New!)  I Could Care Less : K-Pop

My Favorite Person Is : My dog.

AM I WHAT I INDULGE?

Oldie Film(s) I Just Had to Watch Again : Into the Wild, Titanic

Oldie Film(s) I Want To Watch Again Sometime : Grey Gardens, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Not So Oldie Series I Want To Watch Again Sometime : Boardwalk

Newish Series That I Was/ Am So Impressed With : The Wilds

I Just Watched and Loved It : A series on YouTube about dealing with Narcissists.

Oldie Favorite Album I Blissfully Recently Listened to from Beginning to End : None

Oldie Band I Didn't Grown Up With That I'm Listening To Now : None

Oldie Songs I've Been Listening To A Lot : Don't You Care by the Buckinghams. Easy To Be Hard by Three Dog Night

Book I Recently Read Cover To Cover : None

Book(s) I Keep Meaning To Reread :  Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying

Person I Get and Nobody I Know Understands : Andy Warhol

AM I WHAT I EAT?

Favorite Cheese Of The Moment : Irish Butter

Tortilla to Beat All : Trader Joes Whole Wheat Wraps Olive Oil

Condiment / On Pizza : Olives - Black Olives

Chocolate : Peanut Clusters

Canned Soup I Miss That I Don't Think They Make Anymore : Campbell's Scotch Broth

Meal I Miss That I Can't Recreate: Pressure Cooker Stuffed Cabbage

I'm No Longer Into Like I Once Was : Pasta

I'm Drinking : Cheap Von's Signature Brand Instant Decaf  (Horrible) and Freshly Roasted Ground Guatemalan out (No Shakes).

AM I WHAT I BUY?

Scent : Pacifica Tuscan Blood Orange

Shower Gel : Hemp Sweet Orange by Clean and Beauty (defunct business)

Winter Top :  Thrift Store Find by a fashion brand company whose clothes I really like though it upsets me to hear that the local store in Studio City is not nice to its employees. (Won't Buy New.)

Casual Shoes : Skechers

.

AM I WHAT I MISS?

Alone Time - A Long Stretch

Soaking in a Tub  (I'm barely showering, trying to save water)

A long deep honest in-person conversation (with a sane and empathic person).

Sleeping nine hours straight no problem.

LATEST FASCINATION(S)? 

Doreen Virtue's Conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity.

The Heidi Planck Disappearance Case - all that Hollyweird Connection.

I SHOULD : 

Take Yoga Again. Go Swimming.

I WISH:

It Would Rain

I HAVE:  Lost My Patience with:

Snobs.  (Including Organic Foodies.)

Garcetti and any other politician who criminalizes homelessness when there aren't enough affordable housing units anywhere. (A statistic I would like to see is how many people voted but chose NOT to vote for an individual in a category. You can vote on what you want or who you want on a ballot but NOT VOTE for a person too. This is better (i.e. None of the Above or I'm a Democrat but Not This Guy) communication than NOT VOTING AT ALL.)

Malignant Narcissists 

C 2021  Christine Trzyna

Ask yourself the same questions.

Don't let me influence you. 

LOVE IS ALL AROUND ME : THE TROGGS

TRAFFIC DEAR MR. FANTASY

THE SHIPS NOT COMING IN

There are over a hundred ships full of containers waiting to get into the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.  There are trains backed up 35 miles into Chicago.  Truckers with empty containers and nowhere to put them are dumping the containers on streets in Wilmington - even blocking driveways. 

Tied into this is that Dollar Tree and 99 Cents Only Stores can no longer stick to their nothing- over- a -dollar price policy; sadly this is also effecting the pricing of food that they started selling when they got sensitized to the fact that millions of Americans rely on some form of food money from the U.S. government. 

Yesterday a woman told me that at her son's school each child has been given a card with a $300 food benefit.  No questions asked.  No income verification needed.  

When I took my dog for a walk this morning we went past a school and saw that some children had dumped their plastic bags full of food onto the street. These contained yogurt, sliced apples, a tiny burger, chips, and a couple other snaky items. As children they do not have to earn the money to buy these things and neither do their parents who cannot afford to feed them. We the People are trying - some of us anyway - to take care of our own.

I think those ships waiting to come to port are full of junk and mostly plastically easily breakable throw-away junk that will be in our land fills for hundreds of years, crap that people do not need, but I know they are also containing food.  Canned food, including cat and dog food which does not have to bear the place of origin on the can, is also coming from China. 

On my way home from work I stopped in at these stores looking for some inexpensive canned vegetables and there was none.  But I noticed there was meat and fish - protein - at Dollar Tree while the shelves had not one can of beans.

I have to admit I never much thought about one of the nations largest ports being in Los Angeles County or how that factored into the economy here.  It's still a mystery to me.  I know this, however, all that incoming means that the American economy is depending on factory production elsewhere and those manufacturing jobs were exported too and that is the fault of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

I met a Longshoreman recently.  He has spent his life, it seems, driving vehicles off ships, but he owns a house because of it. He can barely stand to do the last few months before he retires and keeps stalling them out, not sure what is next for him.

At Vons, a local grocer not known for the lowest prices, I couldn't believe it when I saw some ground turkey for $6.99 a pound. I skipped the produce section entirely.

The woman with the son who got a $300 food benefit card at school tells me she just spent near $300 sending a box of things to her mother-in-law in Guatemala - including dried beans.  They don't have beans in Guatemala?  I suspect she is married to an "illegal" and there is some form of fraud going on there but I don't really know that.

Meanwhile, I follow what's happening with President Joe Biden, who is under attack because he is trying to do the right thing.  Yes, his age is showing, but then, so was Ronald Reagan's.  Not the constant crisis, the constant self promotion of Trump, who got us used to daily doses of anxiety and flash, Biden seems dull, but he has gumption and morality.  Remember that? Remember the Real Gospel - the feed, cloth, and shelter Gospel - rather than the "Prosperity Gospel?"

You have to have a fortune in the bank not to feel what has happened in our economy due to the Covid-19 shut downs. In recent years I've met more people who not only believe the End Times are coming but cannot wait to be raptured.

C 2021  Christine Trzyna