Thursday, July 11, 2024

misery loves company. January 10, 2014

 

 Her Facebook page is back.

Not the arts page, but the regular account, and as to be expected, I’m still blocked.

I’m sure she still allows her close friends access to her inner sanctum.

It is just hard to read her current mindset, and whether or not she is resolved to continue her way of live, and restoring her Facebook page is a means of retaining her contact.

It is possible that she gutted her page by mistake, and may only have sought to do away with her art page, and restored the original when she realized what she had done.

I do not know how to read it, though I suspect she has come to the idea of keeping on keeping on regardless of where she ends up.

In truth, she has not made any drastic changes on the external page that I can see, and has not posted a new photo since Dec. 31 -- when she took down the site.

The two poems posted since were on her blog site.

It is possible she might be scared to actually reform, having no place to go if she does, and no real sense of importance

At least where she is, she has power, even if it is a perverse kind, and to her thinking perverse power is better than no power at all, and most likely, she’s right.

She might attempt to find some place to leap to from her current vantage people, as precarious a perch as that might turn out to be.

My recent talk with our former temporary boss surprised me in regards to a food review she did during the time when our former boss was in charge.

After a diatribe about how awful the other women writers had been (he’s a bit misogynistic even when he claims the opposite), we briefly touched on the story our poet had done. I tried to get him to expand on his opinion on her writing in general by telling him I thought she was a brilliant food critic. He did not go for the bait, although during my driving him home later, he suggested we go for a drink and a meal at one of the places she had reviewed, and I reminded him of her write up and how good I thought was, although he being a curmudgeon, complained that it was “too long” and made him hungry reading it.

This was the first time I’d heard anything critical from him about her – even though she claimed he had picked on her early on. Until that point, he had nothing but praise for her writing.

His tone was even sterner than what he said, as if there was more behind it than just a passing comment, perhaps bitterness at her keeping him relatively remote as she got on with her life.

I kept thinking of the more recent food review and wondered if he had seen it and it has raised some issues with him in regards to her, and whether he suspected that her relationship to the restaurant owner may have been more than casual, and perhaps signals the next step in her changing careers.

I also thought about the batch of poems she posted last spring about being near someone and yet still far away, poems she posted just prior to her diagnosis of cancer (as well as our temporary boss’)

Does he imagine fruit being dangled before him that he will never be able to reach, unable to get closer, and in some aspects, still far away.

Is this why he’s suddenly become closer to me as if needing the company of a fellow expatriate, someone who might understand his feelings, even when he still refuses to admit he has them in the first place.

What’s the old adage: misery loves company.


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