The Squeak-Squawk Scrolls

When you say you like something, and someone who doesn't like it is compelled to state, like, REPEATEDLY that they don't like it. It's dubious whether it was necessary to say it even once, but it gets really irritating when they basically don't stop.

For example, say that a person doesn't like black licorice, because they have no taste, and when black licorice comes up they say "Oh, I hate it! Yuck!" and I say "Ah, I love it"...and then they just keep repeating that they hate it. And I don't think it's cuz they want me to suddenly agree with them. It's like they can't bear me not knowing that they don't like it.

But why do I have to know this over and over again?

The reason I'm not just purely complaining about this is that I realized I do a sort of similar thing, at work: when people start complaining that the air conditioning is making it cold in there (because they are weaklings not cursed with the fire blood that courses through my veins) I always feel compelled to say that the temperature that makes most people start to think it's cold is the one at which I finally feel relief from the heat.

Last night I was about to post a self-congratulatory thing for myself about having finally listened attentively enough that I understood the entire sequence of the story in Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts...but when I looked it up to double-check, I realized that I hadn't - actually I hadn't ever - realized that Lily is one of the Jack of Heart's old lovers, and the lines about her taking her dress off and saying "I'm glad to see you're still alive" and "You must have known [your luck would run out] someday" are her, you know, "romancing" him.

But anyway, so in the process of looking it up, I saw some critic or someone had said in 2013 that in his opinion it was the best story song yet written...and I think I might have to agree? Like, I can't think of any that are more masterfully done, even if some of them might have more...resonance, I guess. But I mean, God, that song is not only well-told but it has all sorts of weird significance for America, American history, life as a game of chance, the Wild West, justice etc.

So, I hate superlative type arguments anyway, but I was going to say yeah, perhaps that is the best story song, except then Bruce Springsteen's The River came on the shuffle mix I was listening to and I almost bawled my eyes out, it was so freaking sad and touching and real. Another contender, mayhap.

I still occasionally horrify myself thinking about a girl writing on a (RPG geek) forum that she figured that her boyfriend punching people who hurt her feelings was no big deal, because physical pain is over fairly quickly, but emotional pain leaves lasting scars…

As if there was somehow no emotional pain that came from being physically assaulted…

As if assault and battery were a normal way to deal with your precious feelings being hurt…

As if she’d never even heard of “sticks and stones”...

And as if someone who beat up someone else for saying words was not a monster.

I always thought that Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief seemed too formulaic both in terms of being a rigid progression and in applying a universal template to something so individually variable. Even before I read, much later, that the pop culture representation of them is not exactly what she wrote, and that Kubler-Ross herself both regretted this and later revised the five stages to seven (adding “shock” and “testing,” thus: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, acceptance.) Also noteworthy is that the stages refer to the grief of the terminally ill, rather than the bereaved.

I don’t know if it was her or another who pointed out that, for one thing, some people “skip” a step or two – probably there are few who go straight to acceptance, but it’s not impossible, nor would it be impossible for a particularly pessimistic or not-commerce-oriented person to not bother with “bargaining” – and for another thing, that the stages are not a liner progression at all, that it is possible both to cycle through such reactions “out or order,” and to repeat them over and over.

As Kubler-Ross’s last book put it, “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

And yeah...I’ll be fine for years, and then suddenly I see a picture of one of the women I loved that reminds me why I loved her, or I think of something I wish I’d asked my grandparents, or I see a joke on TV that my dad would’ve liked, that I can almost hear him laughing at, and the years fall away, and for a time the loss is fresh again.