“don’t nobody bring me no bad news”

A day in which I’ve slept little through the wee small hours because the cats are sitting in various spots on top of me urging me to get up by pressing cold wet noses or sticking sharp needle claws into me (especially Pearl who insists on ‘petting’ my face with her stickers), is not usually going to be a day when I feel on top of things.

Finally somewhere around dawn I jumped up, snagging Pearl under her ‘arms’, and plopped down with her on a chair after grabbing the nail clippers and cutting the needles off of 3/4 of her feet. I had to stop at that point because of the tell-tale gurgling of her innards, reacting to her own sense of being out of control, and rush her to the litter box. Ugh.

I went back to bed and tried watching the Masterpiece Theater episode of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen that I had already tried to watch 3 previous times. It is actually a good tale, it is just that when I watch from bed, I tend to fall asleep so have to start again repeatedly after trying to remember where I last could claim recognition.

Today, it took me 5 (FIVE!) more times to get through it (I kept falling asleep to be awakened by noses or stickers) to find the show was either over and the TV was playing some infomercial or was deep into the story with my having no grasp of how we’d gotten there.

Finally I made it consciously to the end and then also polished off a couple of half-hour shows I had Tivo’d (the real pleasure, in addition to being able to watch shows recorded earlier whenever I wanted [as long as I hadn't filled up the memory], is to be able to zip through commercials so the shows don’t take up as much time as watching them live).

I have been enjoying-ish the HBO series In Treatment, based on an Israeli show (they say), but since I am usually trying to watch the nightly 30-minute show long after bedtime, it too has a soporific effect taking repeated attempts to finish an episode.

By the time I got out to the den, I couldn’t find Chick or Snowy. I noticed the wheelchair was missing so my first thought was that they had gone out on a walk/roll on a beautiful day. Slowly details returned as I moved around the kitchen emptying the dishwasher and putting up dishes in the drying rack (having started a wash with my bedspread and Pearl’s revenge)(still drying!)… and I remembered that Chick and Snowy had gone to the beauty parlor since our stylist had been ill the day before on the usual day.

I felt such a relief to have captured that fact back into my sieve-like memory. Whew! It is unsettling not to know for sure where the loved ones are. I began watching the clock because it doesn’t take an hour, more or less, for Snowy’s appointment. But the clock ticked on and they did not return.

I was anxious. I wasn’t worried. I just started feeling like the world had tipped off balance a bit. I played about 50 games of First Class Solitaire on Pogo (working on a badge I know I won’t get because FCS is ridiculously less winnable than my favorite World Class Solitaire in which you ‘fly’ endlessly around the world stopping in exotic locales by winning games). I was about to jump out of my skin until finally I heard the car drive up.

Once they were back in the house, Chick told me that after the salon, since they were just across west of the intercoastal waterway, they had taken the wild hair to make a run to the beach to ‘make sure the ocean was still there.’ This is something Snowy likes to do from time to time. She’s not and never has been a beach-girl — she was that auburn-haired gal with fair skin and freckles in her younger days.

But since moving here, it has really interested her to JUST OCCASIONALLY go to one particular part of the beach and just stand about halfway down (not close enough to get wet) to the edge and watch the waves pound in and out and the endlessness of the ocean. She does like to know it is still there.

For awhile she had decided we lived in Miami, and started saying that to people. It took Chick a while to figure out where she came up with that since we don’t, not anywhere near, never have, and have rarely visited it. It just seemed like an odd quirky thing to have come up with.

She finally decided that it had to be because Snowy HAS seemed to retain we are in Florida, and then, during the writer’s strike when all the favorite shows dried up, in desperation they had started watching reruns of CSI: Miami because we had not watched any of them before. The show is awful, acting wretched, stories, worse, but the cinematography and scenery are gorgeous and color-drenched (filtered or whatever), and this LOOK had captured Snowy’s attention. Before long Snowy had started randomly commenting about how interesting it was that ‘they’ had made a show about where we live. Ah. Yep. That’s it.

So, fun to drive 10 minutes and be on “Miami Beach” (NOT!). But it soothes her and satisfies something in her, so we will do it any time we find her interested.

But, I didn’t know. I was anxious. I wanted to know where my family was.

Now it is closing in on midnight (and I’m still waiting for the 3rd or 4th run through the dryer to finally dry the bedspread), and I know my girls are both fast asleep, Snowy around 4:30 or so (long day for her getting up and putting the energy into dressing to go out to the salon and on to the beach) and Chick about 2 hours ago after we caught up on some other shows recorded in the den.

Snowy I can hear snoring softly on the baby monitor we have in her room to be sure we hear any disturbance with her and can quickly run in. As Chick has commented, it is a very comforting sound to hear Snowy sleeping peacefully.

And I am feeling buried under the relentless horror of the world and the country and the state and the city as reported by the local news channel. Over and over it’s murder, death, horror, and the unbearable things people do to each other. It made me want to cry as story after story was poured out in sonorous tones of macabre and unctuous teleprompter reading by self-important local ‘talent’ talking heads.

 

It made me feel I should be afraid to go through the front door and face the world. How do I feel I can go out to work and expect to return? How do I not feel perhaps it is unsafe for my daughter and my mother to make a beach run? Even one ‘positive’ story was the honoring of some firefighters for their rescue efforts when a parking garage fell in (and caused death). Oy!

I don’t want to feel that way about the world or about life, not matter what the evidence is. That is one more way of being boxed in and limited from truly living. Actually after I spent several minutes after the show ended (I was sitting across the room from the remote trying another 50 games of FCS and just didn’t get up to change the channel) digging my way out from under the rubble of doom that had been shoveled onto my psyche, I got a bit angry. WHY is the morbid and the wretched and the horrible what the owners of the airwaves deciding they should put on us?

I suddenly remembered that I was not having an original thought. What I was feeling was related to at least 2 other, better-articulated expressions of NO! So I share these here before I head over to find something POSITIVE on the tube — or better yet maybe even turn the thing off. (It’s my night to put Snowy to bed and to be up with her in the morning so I will be sofa-sleeping [sans kitty-cats] where I can here her when she gets up in the morning.)

Here’s #1:

Network
written by Paddy Chayefsky
Howard: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.” Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.” So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

And here’s #2 (from The Wiz)
Song: Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News

“When I wake up in the afternoon
Which it pleases me to do
Don’t nobody bring me no bad news
‘Cause I wake up already negative
And I’ve wired up my fuse
So don’t nobody bring me no bad news

“If we’re going to be buddies
Better bone up on the rules
‘Cause don’t nobody bring me no bad news
You can be my best of friends
As opposed to payin’ dues
But don’t nobody bring me no bad news

“No bad news
No bad news
Don’t you ever bring me no bad news
‘Cause I’ll make you an offer, child
That you cannot refuse
So don’t nobody bring me no bad news

“When you’re talking to me
Don’t be cryin’ the blues
‘Cause don’t nobody bring me no bad news
You can verbalize and vocalize
But just bring me the clues
But don’t nobody bring me no bad news

“Bring some message in your head
Or in something you can’t lose
But don’t you ever bring me no bad news
If you’re gonna bring me something
Bring me, something I can use
But don’t you bring me no bad news.”