We will survive or

we will carry on, or something, yes, we will get lost along the way. We are lost now. It seems that everything that is important is suddenly not important anymore, that there is no rhyme or reason, that living doesn’t make any sense. We are sleepwalking through a nightmare, only hoping at some point to bump into the furniture. But there will be touching, and laughing, and yes there will be parties, and there will be unwarranted uncalled for promiscuous sex. And there will be showing off (how long has it been since I’ve been able to show off for no reason?). In other words there will be a reason to live -- because people do need people (yes Barbra), and there is really no other reason for anything. I mean can you think of one? This is a mad theory -- that someone is trying out -- that people do not need people — but let me assure you, no matter how many doors they lock on us, we will blow smoke through the holes (Genet), we will tap on the wall, we will cry -- and someone will hear us, and say ‘yes they are crying too.’ This is what I imagine. That we will someday be sealed off in our little pods, through life, through school, transporting our sperm and eggs to each other in highly antiseptic test tubes, because we must begat, there must be progeny but not in the old way of course, and we will die in our little pods, but we will have lived so much longer than we would have lived if we had not been alone. No, you needn’t ask — is this isolation worth it? Because it is not, and we all know that, even those of us who have welcomed this and who wished to hide all along, and now have every excuse. Because we all know that life is better than death really, even if we are afraid of life. When separating ourselves is the only way, then there is something wrong with that religion. I will say that I would rather die myself -- or kill someone -- than be so alone. That is now considered heretical and evil, whereas at one time it seems to me it might have just been seen as human. I dreamed of Camille last night — she was a best friend so many years ago (I’ve written about her before). I will name drop now. Her father was Cameron Mitchell (have I already told you this? I think? in another blog? I keep coming back to Camille..) and he was a big movie star, as well as being in the first Broadway production of Death of a Salesman where he played 'Happy,' and I loved Camille so much. She was an actress (she’s been on Smallville for years) and I don’t expect to ever be her friend again, and it probably wouldn’t work anyway, but for that brief golden time, she used to pick me up where I was staying in Niagara-on-the-Lake and drive me around in her sports-car. I remember at one point she was staying in a hotel room with a phone in the bathroom, at a time when there were no cellphones, and that was a big deal. What I loved most about Camille was an attitude she had that said ‘Be happy, why not, Sky? I mean why not?’ It sounds rather simplistic but it wasn’t, it wasn’t even hedomism, it was just an attitude that says we are here for a short while, and there is so much fun and so much beauty, why not take advantage? It helped of course that her mother was a millionaire (A Hungarian Millionaire — described to me by another friend as being ‘like one of the Gabor sisters'). Yes of course it helped that Camille was rich and beautiful and being with her was being a part of that world. I know you are not supposed to enjoy people who are rich and beautiful and talented (she was talented too) anymore, but why not? So I dreamed about Camille having a party a couple of nights ago, because I dream of parties — now, I can’t go to them in real life so I have them in my dreams. I remember she had some sort strange outfit on at one point — it was tights? In odd colours? She was very voluptuous? And she had some sort of fantastic apartment high up. I was going to rush to my desk and write the dream down but I didn’t, so that is all I remember. There is something so terrifically joyless about all of this 'lockdown,' and I know it comes from being reminded every day that people are dying. But yes they are, and yes you and I will die, and sometimes it will be preventable and sometimes not, and that’s part of the beauty of it all. I think of my mother in the hospital bed looking up at a cupboard, very bothered, and she asked -- ‘What is that?' And I said: ‘It’s a cupboard, mother,' and opened and closed it, just to show her.’ She wasn’t long for this world, after that. She just sort of disappeared -- they starved her to death (stopped the nourishing liquids) because that’s what she wanted, and my sister and I dutifully sat by the bed and watched her die. And then there was my stepmother’s death, and when we entered the hospital room — my boyfriend and I — my stepmother’s niece was grabbing her, and hugging her, saying -- ‘It’s okay Carolyn! It’s okay! If it’s time to go then that’s okay! Just go!” (We wanted to get out of there very fast.) And then shortly before my father died, he called me on the phone. I was in a hotel room in Buffalo, and was going to visit him the next day, but the phone kept ringing. I finally picked it up and it was him, and he said something to the effect of ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ and indeed he had, so I went to the seniors apartment he lived in and found him lying on the floor and helped him up. The next week the nurses from the building were in the living room, ignoring him, picking out the pills he wouldn’t be needing in the next couple of weeks as he lay dying. “Oh he won’t be needing those,” they said quite mercilessly (he was in earshot). So I guess I can say I know dying. I won’t talk about the AIDS stuff because it’s expected of me. Or maybe I will. They were phone calls. The men I loved were in other cities when they died, and with other men, whatever, it didn’t matter, I still loved them. They both were perfectly beautiful and sweet and just wanted to tell me they were dying. I didn’t know what to say. So I know dying as well as anyone, but I quite simply do not see that as a reason not to live. I don’t know how to tell you this but if you don’t get this very essence of it all— that if you lived forever life would not be worth living — then — well really there is nothing else to ‘get.’ And in that way life is like ‘the theatre’ and like ‘the theatre,’ it will come back, if not for us, then for someone else. Because the world we are living in now won’t last, it can’t last, because frankly when people are alive they need to live.