Entry 35.
Okay here's where it gets critical and I don't care if you like me or not, you need to be praying in church for me because both hands are hurting and my foot sometimes hurts when I wake up and I still have fibromyalgia that I have to contend with and migraines sometimes (well all the time, it's a syndrome and what I really mean is sometimes I still have migraine ATTACKS sometimes but you gotta know the literature if you're gonna know how to talk about it in any sensible way, meaning that if you don't HAVE migraine you can't POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND and thank god for you, somebody must have been praying in church for YOU or maybe they still are) AND there is another little pregnant pit bull or something running around Langston that I have yet to catch. Part of her leash is chewed off and Roscoe and Roscoe Junior are barking at her sometimes and I'm trying to put food out but I have no idea what's happening with all that, she won't even stay when I come to the fence, she just runs off and you see how frustrating this all is.
And to top it all off there was a tiny dog at the end of a driveway yesterday when I went out to get gas. As I was coming home I saw it and it was all by itself and I couldn't see the house as it was a wooded area and I stopped really quickly and picked it up, it was very friendly and very small and I thought, Who in the hell coulda dumped THIS dog? No effing way! And when I got it home and put it (her, actually) in a crate, she was very quiet and I went to posting on Facebook and calling everyone in Langston that I could think of to call, and finally someone messaged me and we figured out whose she was and got her home. When I got to the driveway (same driveway...back up in those woods is her house) there was a strange vehicle, I think it was a four-wheeler but I've never actually seen one up close, and there was a big flashing light on it that flashed red, green, blue, purple over and over and it was a sight to see. So I pull up and give the little dog to the man and he says thank you, and I say no sweat and I get in the car and try to back out and get stuck in the ditch. So he says Let me go get a chain and he goes to the house to get a chain and there I am perched in my small economy car over a ditch and wondering how in the hell do I get myself into these things. He comes back and says That's not the first time anyone's done that, by the way. And I'm laughing at this point (because what else is there to do, truly) and I say Well I don't do this every day and he laughs and I wait for him to drag my ridiculous car out of the ditch, which he does, and somehow the guy from the fire department next door (in tiny towns like this the fire department is always next door, believe it or not) (you should try living out here, it's really beautiful and people are kind) has pulled up in some sort of white van and he has his safety yellow vest on and looks fairly non-threatening and he's helping, and so I am told to put it in Reverse and I do and I get back out of the ditch somehow by some miracle of God.
Well that is enough for today. But now I have to talk about my militant anti-diet stuff too because it's the roll that I'm also on besides saving all the dogs of Langston which my family doesn't want me to do but what they should actually do is help more and start calling people and putting out Facebook campaigns and writing best-sellers of their own and then we would be a family effort which is so rare to find these days, in fact you better start supporting family farms unless you want to eat generic goo out of a plastic packet all the rest of your life.
Ooh. Yeah I said it didn't I.
So. This morning I"m getting emails from Isabel Foxen Duke about how spirituality ddoes not equate with thinnessa nd then I"m thinking about all the stuff that got absorbed by me even worse than any nutrients or sugar or fat or proteins that ever got absorbed, and it's this: That this crap is generational, because your mom, if you're the same age as me, saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and wanted to look just like her and what she didn't realize was that Ginger Rogers was on her painful dancer's feet all day every day without even much TIME to eat and when she did she probably slammed down a hoagie and got back up on the dance floor and she also had to contend with all the sexism and racism and other evil elements of Hollywood, they used to make the gay movie stars get married because it would "look better" to "stupid America" which they were pandering to because that's how they got their big money, that's how they got people into the theatres, it was either to flatter them or to shock them with sensational stuff because they knew that appealing to people's prurient interests was a big seller too, so stop saying "Hollywood is evil" (even though it kinda is) because you're evil too if you're the ones participating in the whole scenario especially if you're paying fourteen ridiculous dollars or however much it is to go sit inside an air-conditioned escapist movie theater with all the popcorn and red wine and other perks to see something that makes YOU feel more comfortable...
Jesus.
So you know, too, if you've got some big diet and you're losing weight on it and la-dee-dah and whatever and you can't eat this and you can't eat that and it's obnoxious and your friends get really bored with all your shit and don't even wanna hear you rattle on and on about it, well are you really surprised, because all that diet stuff that you're doing is just one big high-maintenance boring over-and-over tap dance routine and it's a fatness all of its own, it's its own special kind of fatness really, when you're doing it that's creating just one more giant fatness that's fatter than the fat that you would have on your natural body had you never dieted in the first place, and so don't come crying to me when that unsustainable shit all falls down, which it probably will, 95 or more times out of a hundred, because not that many people can stay on a diet unless you're a dried-up little adrenaline junkie living on tunafish and diet Jell-O like Helen Gurley Addicted-To-Her-Bathroom-Scale Brown. Gross. Yeah she was thin all right, I still don't wanna be her. I don't know what sustained her, unless it was her pure ambition or diet pills or some other kinda smack. Who knows. Anyway I think she's gross, and gross is just another word for fat and now "fat" isn't even an insult anyway because larger people have taken it back so I might just as well not be typing anything at all here.
(Because in the modern body-positive view, fat is NOT gross, it's just fat, it's value-neutral even though it scared Helen Gurley Brown to death. Bless her poor misguided heart. Was it worth it, Helen? Was being thin worth all that? Must have been, to her, anyway. And I guess I'm not supposed to judge, but eeuww. Diet Jell-O? Eeuww.)
Where were we? Oh, yes. Your diet stuff is a huge fatness. Now are they gonna say I'm body-shaming or fat-shaming here? Let's just say it's large. Your diet stuff is a large high-maintenance bunch of bullshit. It's just as much of a pain for others and eventually for you yourself to have to deal with as wearing those "few extra pounds" or whatever it is anyway, so you might just as well dispense with it before you ever get on that train, and if you wanna dance, go put your goddam dancing shoes on and get the music turned on and get movin'. See how long you can go for, I don't care. Do whatever it takes.
That's what Ginger Rogers did. Whatever it took. To scramble to the top of the caterpillar pile and to stay there for as long as she could. And who knows how many people she stepped on in those tap shoes while she was doin' it. Or maybe not, maybe she was super nice and kind and just doing her job, I dunno. I have no idea WHAT was really going on with her. People say a lotta shit. Wikipedia says she was kidnapped by her natural father as a child and then once returned to her mother she never saw him again, she married five times, didn't have any children (well that's one pain in the ass she saved herself anyway) and fought for better parts and better scripts for women in Hollywood. Well that sounds like a life I'd like to dance my way out of if'n I was her, but no matter what I think, she was still Ginger Rogers and she still had a huge influence on American women. And we never know what influence we're gonna have in this life...I don't know whether Ginger knew that Anne Frank and her sister Margot cut out Ginger's picture and pasted it on the bedroom wall of the home they were living in while hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Along with a lot of other pictures of famous people from the thirties and forties, and that bedroom wall full of cut out pictures is now preserved under glass as part of the Anne Frank Museum.
And so you have this beautiful famous glamourous movie star's picture cut out of a magazine with scissors and pasted onto a bedroom wall in the middle of the Nazi horrors, by people who can't make a move during the day lest they be heard and snatched up outta there. Which they eventually were anyway except for the father.
And I leave you with that. And I have no idea what influence it's going to have on you. No idea at all. Maybe none. Maybe some.
No. Idea.
And Schiaparelli. As avant-garde as she was, she could never have predicted that fat would someday be fashionable. She never saw Lizzo or Billie Eilish coming down the pike. She was avant-garde, true, but not enough. She was still using her thin privilege to dictate to us what "fashion" should be: "Never fit a dress to the body but train the body to fit the dress" "Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women" and "Remember, 20 percent of women have inferiority complexes. 70 percent have illusions."
What about the other 10 percent, Elsa? I guess that was you...well bless her, I mean it's not like she didn't have some hard times, with a failed marriage and then Mussolini to contend with...and she did some interesting stuff...but I'm guessing those moles on her face that she hated made her seek refuge in her thin privilege and communicate that to others...how could it have been otherwise? She's kinda conflicted though about the issue (or has an extremely high metabolism, either one or maybe both) because she also says, "Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale" and "A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness."
So I mean, whatcha gonna do? It's so fucking confusing.
Here's some more craziness for ya.
Gross. Now for god and chrissakes, and mine, and the dog's, go eat something you want, and go save a dog. And for god's sake, give the dog something to eat, too.
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