Friday - Fantasies - Photos

 I meant to get back to chronicling the past two days earlier. Then my neck started hurting and I decided I needed a rest. I did not expect that rest to last until around 7:30. Then I needed to get through the email, and watched the end of Hard Boiled on Tubi, and then dinner.

No church today, but no work accomplished, either. I did get up Lahody's Meats for some supplies and to the convenience store for Coke Zero.

It was a good, sunny day.

So, let us talk about Friday's group session. There was the usual chat session, the weekly check-in, and the group leader went back to reading from his computer screen. I think he called it a workbook.

From my notes.

Components of fantasies

Deviant

 - Anything that is deviant

(I had to ask what is deviant. The last decade, or so, of my being single, there were women who liked to be tied up and some who liked to be spanked; there was one who wanted to be choked, but that was too much for me. All that seemed to be deviant to me. Then, too, I think Freud said all sex was perverse - or something like that. It was also pretty harmless. Then it got to be me asking how I got dragged into all these proceedings. The answer: I was easy.)

- Deviant is anything illegal

(Without going wild and citing the Indiana Code in all its profuseness, illegality requires a lack of consent. Well, that has never appeared in my history. Certainly not an interest of mine - too much work and the result never seemed likely to be an interesting experience. Maybe that is my problem - more interested in the experience rather than the acquisition. I would rather drive a Bugatti than own it.)

- Must change that into appropriate fantasies.

 - inappropriate partners

(I don't think this was expanded upon. Possibly, it was assumed to understood by those with contact crimes to have been the minors they solicited. To me, it is pretty much means staying away from anyone with obvious psychiatric issues, women from Madison County, women without any conversation skills, and those who cannot name all four members of The Beatles. There was one point when the discussion was about fooling around outside of marriage, or a relationship. Well, that would exclude and implicate much of humanity. If followed, it would end many plots of literature; starting with The Iliad.)

- Risky thoughts

(No note on any expansion on this, and none from my memory. However, I think it was here I started thinking the program has put the cart before the horse - which I will write more about below. It also arouses a few thoughts I have had about the process I have gone through and the people I have met during it. There seems to be an inherent fear of ideas. That ideas always lead to actions. Which has left me feeling that others are projecting their ideas and their own desires upon me: the arresting officers from ICE, the United States Attorney, my public defender, prison guards, my PO, and this counseling program. I have had the feeling they think any glimpse of flesh, even a nude statute, would result in me turning into a werewolf and, in the case of the statute, humping aid statute. I am left feeling myself surrounded by men who are far more perverse than I ever was. Then there is the sensation of imposing Victorian morals on us without any faith in those morals. There was a conversation about ethics, wherein the group leader declared ethics as a boring subject. Yet, is it not ethics that this program is trying to instill?)

- how to get away and offend again

(Not something I have seen in anyone in the group. They all look thoroughly chastened by their experiences. I knew of a fellow in prison who talked of moving to Cambodia. That fellow I thought of a psychotic. I checked up on him a few months ago. He is in Illinois. More talk than action, I hope.)

- wondering if person in deviant fantasy would like it

(Also, not something I have seen in anyone from the group. This also ties in what I write more about below, in a general overview.)

- getting closer to that person (inappropriate people)

(This also ties in what I write more about below, in a general overview.)

- talking to inappropriate person about your fantasy

(And here I had to open my mouth again. What got me was the idea of talking to a person who would not be amenable - so to speak - to such ideas. I suggested that was a good way to get one's self shot or slapped, or both. This is something beyond my imagination. It came to me while writing this that my reaction is that I am thinking of adults. One's imagination is limited by one's experience. Or education. It also reminded me of a story told me by mother's sister, Mary Ellen Finholt, who slapped some guy silly when he got fresh with her while working at the GM lab during World War Two. Something similar happened to my mother with one of the boarders; same kind of result. They were both about 5'4”. Not a good idea to anger a Scots/Irish woman.)

- staring at person

(And again, I had to say that staring is always a good way to start a fight.)

- setting up an offense

(Yeah, if that needed preaching, then the promoters of this program have already failed in their mission.)

 That was the end, and these are my overarching critiques.

The starting point ought to be the difference between reality and fantasy.

One might have ideas, but recognizing what is reality stifles actions rooted in fantasy.

Reality never matches fantasy.

If you have not learned those two lessons, I doubt any success in dealing with fantasies, appropriate or not.

And there I will end for today. I will catch up with Saturday's report tomorrow. I have photos for that, too.

 

Sunday readings:

The grim truth about the “good old days” (Big Think)

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination — that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.” 

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.  

John Banville (a man also who writes good sentences) reviewed John Updike: A Life in Letters review – the man incapable of writing a bad sentence for The Guardian.

John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.

As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the 20th century.

***

Are his books read now? Towards the end he made a glum self-assessment: “I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.” Perhaps so; but he wrote such prose as to make the envious seraphim sigh.

I am still wondering about Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck review – a kaleidoscopic study of transience (The Guardian). I can feel the loss, but even more is the idea of telling the story in fragments.

‘The Maginot Line’ by Kevin Passmore review (History Today) may show a change in WWII history:

Overall, the Maginot Line’s contribution to the defence of France was mixed, Passmore argues. It blocked the easiest routes to Paris, Alsace, and Nice and was not the disproportionate burden on spending that it is often thought of as being. It was less susceptible to technological obsolescence than other forms of weaponry, though its construction coincided with a revived emphasis on mobility in battle. But most importantly, the book refutes the portrayal of the Maginot Line as a symbol of a defeatist French mentality that, having been originally propagated by supporters of Charles de Gaulle, has been echoed in numerous studies since 1945.

Before Thanksgiving, There Were the Feasts of 'The Order of the Good Cheer' (Gastro Obscura) - ideas for Christmas dinner?

The club’s main focus was a recurring banquet that featured approximately 15 dishes—delicacies like roasted beaver tail (“It’s filled with meat,” says Lalonde, “but you have to scrape away the outer scale”), and moose muffle stew, a bizarre-sounding dish that includes the animal’s upper lip and nostrils, but is said to be both rich and nutritious. Typically, the men finished off their meal with cups of hippocras, a type of warm spiced wine, while the evening’s entertainment included everything from speeches and dancing to music and plays.

Manet and Morisot: rivals or lovers? (The Article) - the vagaries of interpreting art; the painting shown are beautiful. Is that not enough?

I made it through Marlowe with Liam Neeson on Tubi. It was as good as the reviews made it out to be. Neil Jordan directed.

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