Two book opinions and a Dr. Laura

Fat Girl

Why have I not done this post yet? Why did it take so long? Easy, the first part of this post has made me so crazy that I've had to ponder, churn, rewrite, ponder again etc. Each time I try to write this I get nuts at the visceral feelings that this book creates and not in a good way. If this seems disjointed its because I've tried to write it about 10 times since finishing the book. Finally I've just decided to let it go, so here you have my thoughts:

I recently finished the book, Fat Girl: A True Story by Judith Moore. The kindest word I would use to describe it is that is, disturbing. This woman was a writer who had some acclaim and was in her 60's when she wrote the book. I guess the title, as incendiary as it is should have given me a clue to its direction, and within the first hour of listening to it she said that there is not going to be a happy ending. She is/was still fat. Not heavy, not just overweight but fat. She used the word so much that I thought I might get used to hearing it and get dulled to its bite but it didn't. Its kind of like talking about children and then equating them to your children.

She declares by the tone of the book that her life was ruined at the age of 4 when her parents got a divorce and (within reason) it went downhill from there. She was beaten physically and emotionally by her mother and grandmother. The common theme through the entire thing was because she was so fat. Oh, and she never said how much she weighed at any of these times, I think thats pretty important because fat is just a subjective word. The more clinical terms overweight, obese, morbidly obese mean something but fat means whatever negative thing you want to throw into the pot. Errr. Also that they were thin. When I first started the book I thought it was disturbing but tolerable and put it down (or whatever you do with a audio book) for several months until I stumbled across it. In an earlier life (when I was in the Marines) I had a similar struggle with the book Atlas Shrugged. In that book I found whenever I read it I would start feeling down, blue, irritable and when I wasn't reading it (per-audio book days) I was okay. Armed with that knowledge I stopped reading Atlas Shrugged and had the results I predicted. Later (oddly enough it was when the first Gulf War happened) I was on travel for a month and read the whole book. I figured then with all the stress of life (layoffs at DEC, teenage kids, the poverty of being 40ish) had so toughened me that I could handle Atlas. And correctly, it turns out, I was okay with Atlas Shrugged. I applied the same thinking to this book.

Tragically in this case I was wrong. I didn't like it when I first attempted to read it and now that I've completed the book I hate myself for the thoughts its put into my head. I've been struggling with what about it makes me so crazy, was it dealing with overweight, a seriously common theme nowadays, family struggles, something that is has been around since Cain had an attitude about his brother. All this gets another level more complicated because the author died of something like stomach cancer about the time the book was finished. I feel weird because we shouldn't speak ill of the dead. I wish President Brigham Young had read this book so he could maybe put my thoughts into words. Because I think what he would have said was:

1. She was using the word or phrase that gets everybody or more particularly every girl or woman's attention. Fat, and fat girl and claims it as her own. Now that she has it what does she do with it? Use it to help anyone else in the world with the similar problem? No, though the subject was her problem with eating and indolence she spends 90% of the book talking about how bad she had life as a child. In other words she got the podium and spent the whole time talking about her awful life, all the while assuring us that it was nobody else's fault but her own.
I love the thing that is going around nowadays about words have consequences. Nobody would have read the book if the title was, My Self Indulgent Life. If she were still alive the piece of advise I'd give her is: "Judith, be careful with that world..."

2. The reason I'd love to hear Brigham Young's review of "Fat Girl" is that he had this ability to say bold things publically. Things that nowadays public officials would never say, not because he was wrong or anything but because we live in such an age of wimps. I grew up with people who said bold things, but they would never say hurtful things. In my mind there's a difference. I've seen, for instance, Brigham Young's opinion of "modest" woman's clothing. Only a guy could be so totally wrong and think he was right. The woman's clothing looked like a very baggy mechanic's coveralls. The story goes that his wives killed the bad idea before it could get out of the cradle. I think his reaction, here I'm projecting myself I realize, would be that... "Judith, you have a life, a body, brains, family (two children, two husbands, father lived into his 70's), financial, artistic success and most of all you've gotten our attention so what have you done with it? Several hundred pages of complaining about your life.

3. Though she talked about how much she loved her children and wanted to do everything to protect them from her, blah, blah, blah. Well, I wish she would have been as considerate to the rest of the reading public.

Bloody Season:

This was a most interesting history of the Earps and the gunfight at the OK corral.

When I was growing up western shows were all that was on TV and there was even a show about Wyatt Earp when he was the sheriff of Dodge City. One of the first things I wrote as a child was a short story that was about being a sheriff in the old west and preventing a good guy from being unjustly hanged. Also when I was in 3rd grade I came in possession of a painting of Custer's last stand. I had read about the situation and brought it to school and gave a show and tell kind of thing to 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes. My brother George was in the last class and used generous amounts of profanity to describe how bad it was. The story goes that Wyatt Earp or more correctly him and his brother's + Bat Masterson + Doc Holliday were the good guys in this situation vs bad guys. The lives, loves and events of Tombstone Arizona were, of course, not so simple to understand. Dr. Laura would get nuts if I were to say... "Dr. Laura, my question is who was wronged at the OK Corral?" She'd soon get cross when I dredged up the family history:

1. The Earps were big handsome blonde men and wherever they went they made a real statement. The statement that was interpreted by some as pushing others around and by others as being a force for good.

2. Most of them were not married to the women they lived with.

3. They worked as lawmen but also were professional gamblers, and were involved with prostitution. Being the sheriff in a town like Tombstone was like a license to print money. The salary of $10,000 was like being a millionaire today.

4. The Earps had moved as a group from one town to another, Tombstone being only one of the stopping off points in their lives. Previously they'd lived in Dodge City Kansas later Wiatt Earp moved to Alaska when gold was discovered there.

So if that was the Earps story what about their enemies in Tombstone:

1. Known as the cowboys because they made some amount of money by rustling cattle from the Mexico. The other thing they did to pay the bills was robbing the Wells Fargo stage coach which was used to carry silver from the recently discovered silver mines outside of Tombstone.

2. The the marital relations front, where the Earps were guilty of being abusive to their common law wives and running houses of prostitution, these guys spent most of their money at those houses both gambling and paying for prostitutes. An odd ying/yang between the Earps and the Cowboys.

3. The Earps had been lawmakers by being either Federal Marshall or deputy Marshall's. As Arizona was a territory, this had a disproportionate type of power. The local sherrif was an elected office. Johnnie Beehan was the sheriff at the time and was allied with the cowboys in what we call links of affection or friendship. Between contacts in the Wells Fargo shipping office and this close relationship to the local sheriff Tombstone was a never failing well of ill gotten gains.

4. There were other odd relationships going on in this dusty Peyton Place (sorry this is another reference to my youth, this was a potboiler of a book written in 1957 about a New Hampshire town and all the adulterous affairs that went on there. It was also a movie and TV show.) A woman named Josephine something an actress who was living with the local sheriff. Wyatt Earp was smitten with her, smitten enough to start "living with her" and ignore his main squeeze common law wife Mattie, not exactly family proclamation material. She left living with Sherriff Beehan because she was smitten with Warren Earp, not Wyatt. Wyatt eventually dumped is common law wife who later (1886) died from a drug overdose and shacked up with Josephine for the next 46 years. What a sweet story eh?

The story is described as the first american gang war. I think its more like a war between some bad people (the cowboys) vs the sort of good guys (the Earps). If it weren't for all the dead bodies involved it would be more like a children squabble. I could almost hear the cowboys saying, "he hurt me first!" (That would have been after a local friend of the Earps was murdered by the cowboys over a gambling loss which they planned on pinning on another friend of the Earps.)

I love the story, I love the Earps (personal flaws and all), I love the kind of rough nature that it took to civilize the west. This story had it all and there was no fiction necessary needed to make it more believable.

Dr. Laura Story:

There was a story on Dr. Laura's program recently that was absolutely breathtaking, to me. A 12 year old girl and her mother called. The mom said that she saw scratches on her daughters... chest. Asked how they got there the daughter said, "I don't know." Dr. Laura asks the girl, man to man (as it were...) "so what really happened." The girl stuck to her story that she had no idea of how the scratch got there. Dr. Laura tried many things to get 1/2 of an answer out but there is nothing as stubborn as a kid who's determined to not say something. Later Dr. Laura basically talked to both mother and daughter and said she couldn't imagine how the young woman didn't know how the scratch, then was interrupted by mom who said scratches..., scratches got there. And as she couldn't do much more this really seemed like a trust issue between the daughter and the mom.

While listening all I could think was that the mom knew what she saw and it needed to be addressed. What went on? Oh the mom will eventually find out and it probably was not as terrible a thing as the girl thought but sketching out the outline would be that she was involved with someone and got scratched. The mom cared about her being 12 and intimate and the girl was just embarrassed. Rock + hard place.

I thought the thing was interesting because it appeared to me to be a case of 12 year old brinkmanship. After all it was the child who suggested calling Dr. Laura. As a parent you have to call kids on this kind of thing. I liked that Dr. Laura kicked the ball right back to the family. The mom knew the answer didn't square with the obvious facts and the kid needed to know that mom knew it so she was playing.. "run out the clock." Its the kind of Dr. Laura call that I just find endlessly fascinating.

Wecome to the Panic Free Zone...

If you've gotten this far you must care a great deal about me, my family, reading or just have way too much time on your hands.

The title comes from the book, "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy." Each of the guides has the comforting line at the bottom, "don't panic." Many years ago and on a bit of conferencing software that is used by almost nobody anymore (VAXNOTES) we used to enter data with our nodename::username then a clever little title. One of the most memorable ones, to me at least, was "It okay to panic now..." I wonder if I love that book because of the quirky British humor, the comradeship of my children who all read it, or listening to my son (~12 at the time) who read it into tape for me. Also it had so many wonderful quotable lines!

What is on the Ipod Nano?

A Patriot's History of the United States (5 of 7) - a great successor to Stephen Ambrose

Jefferson's War (1 of 2) - a history of the war against the Barbary Pirates - or our first war against terrorist

The Cold War - boring! How can this be boring? Give the best material in the world to a college professor

The Fledgling - A great story about vampire's by a woman named Octavia Butler. It would have made a great series, tragically she passed away last year so the fledgling will stay that way.

The Historian - Another history of vampire's. This one has the hero track down the beginnings of the vampires in Eastern Europe. My daughter and Terrie at work highly recommended this and they weren't wrong! I'm 4 Cd's into the book (of 22).

Bloody Season - A history of the gunfight of the OK corral. This was an amazingly divisive situation. I have read several books about Wiatt Earp and he was never caught in the grey area of life. You were either on his side or against him. He was either the hero or villain.

Dr. Laura - Currently I'm doing the episodes from 20 March. I find most of her things compelling and I have to stop myself from spending 1.5 hours a day listening to her radio shows. The most compelling thing she said on the most recent show was about some protesters in Washington state who burned a soldier in effigy. I do find her radio shows much more interesting than her books. Her book, most recent that I've tried was "Care and Feeding of Marriage" was like reading a car user manual.

The Ensign - March 2007, I love listening to this magazine.


More later...