Subject: Re: Ok, not "exploding" all the time
WiltonKnight: Attention - whiney French... Good, cause - you got it... And your hope for sunlight really really helps. I "hope" that's all Europe does is hope for sunlight... Looks like we want more. I'm in.

The common thread in your posts is a giddy desire for chaos, the hope that "401K liberals" suffer.

Isn't that about it?

Well, that and out of context quotes: "Hey, if you have a good job and education 'you didn't build that'".....

Since it's steadily raining here right now and I've been reading a lot lately, I'll give you a couple more quotes. I just finished "Memphis," Tara M. Stringfellow's wonderful debut novel, a multi-generational story of life, of love, of heartbreak, and of traumas. One of the characters hopes for someone who hurt her to suffer trauma and when he does, and she witnesses his suffering, she realizes that his suffering, his "trauma could never heal mine."

In John Cheever's short story, "Goodbye, My Brother," four siblings vacation at the family's summer home at Laud's Head on the shore of one of the Massachusetts islands where their father drowned in a boating accident when the children were young. Their mother and three of the children are now happy adults but the youngest brother, Lawrence, who seldom sees the family and gets along with no one, is a miserable cuss.

This is a long short story, first published in the New Yorker where many of Cheever's stories first appeared, and near the end there's an altercation between Lawrence and his brother, the narrator, after Lawrence disparages all of the siblings and their mother, calling them sluts and drunkards and fools. The narrator strikes Lawrence who, although not badly hurt, tells his wife and children to pack and they leave the family reunion days early.

They left for the mainland the next morning, taking the six o'clock boat. Mother got up to say goodbye, but she was the only one, and it is a harsh and an easy scene to imagine -- the matriarch and the changeling, looking at each other with a dismay that would seem like the powers of love reversed. I heard the children's voices and the car go down the drive, and I got up and went to the window, and what a morning that was! Jesus, what a morning! The wind was northerly. The air was clear. In the early heat, the roses in the garden smelled like strawberry jam. While I was dressing, I heard the boat whistle, first the warning signal and then the double blast, and I could see the good people on the top deck drinking coffee out of fragile paper cups, and Lawrence at the bow, saying to the sea, 'Thalassa, thalassa,' while his timid and unhappy children watched the creation from the encirclement of their mother's arms. The buoys would toll mournfully for Lawrence, and while the grace of the light would make it an exertion not to throw out your arms and swear exultantly, Lawrence's eyes would trace the black sea as it fell astern; he would think of the bottom, dark and strange, where full fathom five our father lies.

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming -- Diana and Helen -- and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

Perhaps I am entirely wrong, but I cannot help but see Lawrence in your posts "seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand," searching for chaos and darkness, rather than "inestimable greatness" and "the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless".