8/20/23

 Sunday, August 20, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 5:30, let Lilly out.  61°, high of 83°, mostly sunny, AQI=53. The wind is W at 7 mph, 6-11/21.  DPs today are 64 to 73😦  No rain in sight.  Sunrise at 5:32, 72°E,  sunset at 746, 13+44.

Sinead's Rememberings.  She writes as she speaks and apparently as she thinks and feels and usually in the present tense and in the vernacular.  It can be pretty powerful. ("I ain't gonna be winning the Booker Prize anytime soon.  And I ain't Bob Dylan or Shakespeare or even in the class of my amazing brother Joseph as a writer.")   Her chapters are short and easy to read.  For some reason, her writing reminds me of James Joyce and Ulysses, though I don't know why, and never did finish Ulysses.  I guess it's because of the use of the present tense, her candor, and the disclosure of just what is going through her mind at the times she writes about, as in the stream-of-consciousness style in Ulysses.  Maybe that was what she was striving for but who knows.  In any event, I am thinking particularly of her short chapter on her mother's death when Sinead was 18 (writing in the past tense.)  "In the funeral home, my father cried over my mother's body.  Said, "I'm sorry, Marie," over and over.  That made me angry too.  Why sorry now and not before?  Why no "I'm sorry" from either of them to the four of us [children]!  Why conduct a war and then say "Sorry" when someone is dead!  I ran away, out of the funeral home.  Down the road through Glasthule and into Dun Laoghaire.  I don't think I'll ever stop running.  I don't know how I'll ever not be angry.  Nothing is ever gonna be fixed now."  I've seen her in interviews say that she loves her mother and believes her mother had been mistreated by her mother as she mistreated Sinead and the grandmother mistreated, and so on.  Nature/nurture thoughts, turtles all the way down, and all that.

Today's WaPo features a 26-minute audio report by Geoff Edgers, A Road Trip with Sinead O'Connor.  For anyone who thinks warmly of Sinead, as I do, it's very touching, especially the concluding minutes in which he plays his recording of her singing Horse on a Highway about her son Shane.  I have to believe that Sinead's death at age 54 was related to Shane's suicide at 17.  I also can't read or think about her fractured life without thinking she suffered from PTSD her entire life.  A story in this morning's WaPo: Study: Kids who’ve been assaulted are more likely to develop mental illness.  Ya think?

The photo that I printed along with these notes is of Sinead at about age 5, looking side-eyed at whoever is photographing her.  I'm reading a lot into her look, knowing what I know of her life, but the wary look on her young face, with her already the victim of physical abuse from her mother, seems to be saying "I'm onto you." 

An excerpt from Rememberings, referring to the Troubles in the North and the IRA hunger strikers:  "They'd all been killing each other up there since as far back as I could remember.  It was horrible on the news, fire and blood, and kids and old people screaming in the streets.  And shit all over the prison walls and hollow-eyed skinny men whose coffins were so light, they could have been carried by one small child.  And gunmen at funerals and men torn from cars and killed.  Through it all, Margaret Thatcher's hair was always perfectly set."

Milwaukee dystopia.  9 people were shot in 10 hours last night, downtown bar district and Northside.

Monarch butterflies in thebackyardd on Geri's butterfly plants, on their way to Mexico.

Ukraine bloodbath, slugfest, endurance contest, stalemate.  I am reminded of both Korea and Vietnam.