Cutting up October 18, 2023

 


Some memories reemerge when we something similar later that resembles them.

and from the new experience we get the same emotions we had as a result of the first experience

and this happened to me while looking at one of her cut up videos, which she posted today or maybe yesterday, harkening back a decade to when she invited me up to her apartments for a meal where she promptly began to cut up vegetables – a moment I wrote about in a poem at the time, and which her video today brought back in full vivid color, scaring me because I had assumed I was beyond any emotional reaction after so long a period.

Even though the cutting up the melon yesterday seems far less ruthless than when she sliced up the vegetables both bore the terrifying concept of being gutted or more precisely back then a kind of castration in my mind at least the total control she wielded with her sharp knife, literally and also metaphorically though I'm not sure she meant it then and certainly did not have me in mind this time only the comparison is in my mind brought out the ruthlessness I thought I detected back then. She seemed angry that Sunday morning long ago an echo perhaps of frustration about me about some expectation of me I had failed to live up to and so brutally she took it out on those vegetables

the video has none of that in fact it has a pleasant feel of a cooking show as she spoons out the guts and slices up the meat yet watching it, I feel it all as if I was the vegetable then melon and was hopeless in either case to hold the process

I do not know why I failed to feel this connection watching her other cut up posts, yet it is a feelings that linger in me, a painful (possibly justifiably so) memory of one of the most emotional times of my life, a time when she seemed to rule my world, wielding her knife while daring me to object.


  Day to Day menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The more things change Dec. 11, 2023

Image
    The rain came in spurts as I made my way to Secaucus for my usual Sunday laundry. I don’t always go to Secaucus, sometimes returning to the old neighborhood in Passaic -- as I will likely do next Sunday when I visit the grave of Peggy, and the graves of my ancestors in the other Lodi cemeteries, dating back to John the Baptist Sarti, who arrived here just after the Civil War. But most weeks, I don’t want to travel that far as was the case yesterday, when I parked near the laundromat, put my laundry into the machines, then headed off to the Dunkin a block away for coffee, a Dukin I briefly worked for after I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin just before my wedding in October 1990 (a time when I had four part time jobs, three of them at different Dunkins, and a fourth as a cleaner for a firm that manufactured elixirs straight out of the 1800s. My history with Secaucus goes back to the 1960s when Hank and I used to pass through it on our way to New York City, at a time when the
Read more

Positive omens? Dec. 24, 2023

Image
      In a week heavily endowed with omens, I thought for certain seeing the funeral procession on our way to Asbury Park posed a dark day ahead. After the amazing omen from our Thanksgiving trip (the whales), I hoped for nothing to counter this positive vibe. The trip down went smoothly, with the except of a few whacko drivers pretending to be Indy 500 racers, and we parked in our usual spot near the top of Asbury where it interacts with Cookman and took our usual stroll, peering into the old merry-go-round house before passing the fake Christmas tree of lights, the Empress Hotel (with its rainbow street crossing) and down the board walk from the Casino to the Coliseum. Even though we had arrived late, the boardwalk was largely empty – although there were a few groups of people on the beach, foolishly standing on the slick jetty stones to pose for pictures. Even inside the coliseum, the only crowd was at the coffee shop, and even this was less well-attended than we expected
Read more

Natural law October 18, 2023

Image
    I saw the pigeon after I had put out stale bread for the birds to feed on. He looked healthy, although he clearly had troubles since when the other pigeons flew off when I came into the yard, she did not. She was either injured or young, but she could not fly, walking around on the concrete in search of food while the others later congregated under the feeder where small birds dumped seed on the ground where they could feed. I spread some seed near the crippled bird only to have the flock of healthier birds swarm down on it, stealing whatever seed it could reach. Worse still, the two young cats that come and go from our yard took notice of the pigeon and began to stalk it. I had seen these cats hunting smaller birds a few days earlier, managing to catch one, which they tortured (played with) for some time before mercifully murdering it. I did not want them to do this to an even more helpless bird. I shooed the cats away. Eventually, I took up the bird, put it inside a c
Read more