I have brief periods of respite from depression. Last weekend, for example, I attended my friends' wedding, and was distracted for two days from the unpaid bills on the estate, the worry over the house not selling, the fear that I am sick with something serious instead of merely having a chronic stomachache from anxiety.
Depression and anxiety, my old friends. I was probably experiencing them in utero.
Certainly, I was a depressed child and teenager. As an adult, I take my antidepressants faithfully to ward off falling deeper into the abyss. Now the feelings are exacerbated by grief. I've arrived at the stage where I accept the fact that my father is gone forever.
My intent in writing this is not to gain pity. It is simply to describe what it's like. Sometimes the writing makes it clear that things could be, and have been, a lot worse than they are now. But I have terrible money karma and that I have used up whatever good gig karma I had more than 9 years ago when I left the Four Seasons. If you believe in karma. Maybe it's just terrible luck. I don't believe that people create their own success. People have other people who help them succeed. People with rich parents have an advantage over the rest of us.
I'm trying to enjoy the spring flowers. I'm trying to motivate myself to do something creative with the free time I have left before starting work again on the 28th. But mostly I end up online and watching endless TV. At least I did about 90 minutes of yard work yesterday.
But I feel defeated.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
The house that wouldn't sell itself
My father's 18th century stucco over fieldstone and clapboard mixture house has been on the market since mid-March with about 15 showings and no takers, even when the listing price was taken down from $220,000 to $200,000. Mind you, this house comes with extraordinarily crafted old stone walls and 3.5 acres of land, including a tarn (don't ask) an old barn, garage, and guesthouse, which back in 1960 has an outhouse which my brother and I delighted in, but which has since sunk into the surrounding woodland.
The old saying, "Location, location, location" was never more true than in this case. The house is located in a historic district full of lovely 18th century houses (some even older) in various states of disrepair, or remodeled with the modern kitchen and master bedroom suites which are de rigueur nowadays, at least if you believe the shows on HGTV. The problem is not so much that my father's kitchen and bathrooms have not been remodeled since 1967 (though the kitchen has a floor only a few years old) but that there is nothing to do in Mansfield. Not unless you are Emily Dickinson (I can hear my father laughing at that one) or perhaps an herb farmer or horse owner. The house is an 8 minute drive from the University of Connecticut, which was a selling point for my father when he got the teaching job at UConn. My mother was sold on the beautiful grounds, upon which she eventually created an herb garden, rose garden, perennial beds, and vegetable garden, all lovingly tended. If only a couple like them could materialize today. An unworldly faculty couple who don't notice if there are ants in the non-trendy kitchen, or the occasional mouse. People who regard the phrase "master bedroom suite" with scorn if not derision.
Writers, people whose lives are largely in their minds, as my father's was.
You wouldn't want it as a vacation home even though there is Echo Lake nearby where you can go sailing or boating (at least when I was a kid) and there wasn't a town beach then, though maybe there is now. No, it must be a year-round residence (unless you have a vacation home somewhere else, in which case you'd be rich enough to afford an upgraded house with all the demands of modern yuppie life) My brother wanted to hold on to the old homestead for our sons, but my guess is that neither of them would want to live there, nor would they want to be absentee landlords. And I would never want to put them through the sheer pain in the ass that selling this house has turned out to be.
Land, you say? "It's the only thing that lasts! Tara!" Well, not exactly. Land is almost worthless in Mansfield because of its lack of desirability as a residence--after all, the nearest mall is a couple of miles away, and it doesn't have Abercrombie & Fitch because the beautiful people don't shop there. For some reason, it galls me that my father's land is worthless. And it's not just any land. It's land that was lovingly cultivated for years, and then lay fallow after my mother's death 28 years ago. Old apple trees and evergreens. Lilacs taller than you. Boxwood hedges kept clipped as topiary, large round balls which look as though they belomg to a much grander house. (Not sure whose idea this was; someone probably suggested it to my father.) A hidden garden (or what used to be one) in the foundation of the original barn which blew or burned down in the hurricane of '38.
Tomorrow I am going to the house at 21 Browns Rd. I will be consolidating bank accounts and paying off the last $400 odd dollars that are owed on my father's loan. Tuesday at noon I meet with Paul Johnson, the landscaper who has worked for my father for eons and who wants to do some things that will give the house more "curb appeal."
There is a broken-down fence in back that should be taken away--I hope he can do that, because even if I could fit the wood into my Civic, the town of Mansfield makes you pay for the priviledge of dropping off your oversized trash at the dump.
Then there's the problem of the junk in the garage left there by a handyman friend of Dad's for a few years and which I hope he has taken out by now. If he hasn't, I will have to take legal action to get rid of it which will cost me another $1000+. And the old mattresses in the barn--I have to pay to get someone to cart them away. And the carpenter ant problem in the kitchen. And the leaky roof. This is my karma. I wonder what I did in a former life that was so terrible that I deserve this punishment in this life. I want to be paid a nuisance fee for having to be the executor and give my brother less than half the estate. But this will foment discord, which is more bad karma.
Someone will buy the place. Someone. But when?
The old saying, "Location, location, location" was never more true than in this case. The house is located in a historic district full of lovely 18th century houses (some even older) in various states of disrepair, or remodeled with the modern kitchen and master bedroom suites which are de rigueur nowadays, at least if you believe the shows on HGTV. The problem is not so much that my father's kitchen and bathrooms have not been remodeled since 1967 (though the kitchen has a floor only a few years old) but that there is nothing to do in Mansfield. Not unless you are Emily Dickinson (I can hear my father laughing at that one) or perhaps an herb farmer or horse owner. The house is an 8 minute drive from the University of Connecticut, which was a selling point for my father when he got the teaching job at UConn. My mother was sold on the beautiful grounds, upon which she eventually created an herb garden, rose garden, perennial beds, and vegetable garden, all lovingly tended. If only a couple like them could materialize today. An unworldly faculty couple who don't notice if there are ants in the non-trendy kitchen, or the occasional mouse. People who regard the phrase "master bedroom suite" with scorn if not derision.
Writers, people whose lives are largely in their minds, as my father's was.
You wouldn't want it as a vacation home even though there is Echo Lake nearby where you can go sailing or boating (at least when I was a kid) and there wasn't a town beach then, though maybe there is now. No, it must be a year-round residence (unless you have a vacation home somewhere else, in which case you'd be rich enough to afford an upgraded house with all the demands of modern yuppie life) My brother wanted to hold on to the old homestead for our sons, but my guess is that neither of them would want to live there, nor would they want to be absentee landlords. And I would never want to put them through the sheer pain in the ass that selling this house has turned out to be.
Land, you say? "It's the only thing that lasts! Tara!" Well, not exactly. Land is almost worthless in Mansfield because of its lack of desirability as a residence--after all, the nearest mall is a couple of miles away, and it doesn't have Abercrombie & Fitch because the beautiful people don't shop there. For some reason, it galls me that my father's land is worthless. And it's not just any land. It's land that was lovingly cultivated for years, and then lay fallow after my mother's death 28 years ago. Old apple trees and evergreens. Lilacs taller than you. Boxwood hedges kept clipped as topiary, large round balls which look as though they belomg to a much grander house. (Not sure whose idea this was; someone probably suggested it to my father.) A hidden garden (or what used to be one) in the foundation of the original barn which blew or burned down in the hurricane of '38.
Tomorrow I am going to the house at 21 Browns Rd. I will be consolidating bank accounts and paying off the last $400 odd dollars that are owed on my father's loan. Tuesday at noon I meet with Paul Johnson, the landscaper who has worked for my father for eons and who wants to do some things that will give the house more "curb appeal."
There is a broken-down fence in back that should be taken away--I hope he can do that, because even if I could fit the wood into my Civic, the town of Mansfield makes you pay for the priviledge of dropping off your oversized trash at the dump.
Then there's the problem of the junk in the garage left there by a handyman friend of Dad's for a few years and which I hope he has taken out by now. If he hasn't, I will have to take legal action to get rid of it which will cost me another $1000+. And the old mattresses in the barn--I have to pay to get someone to cart them away. And the carpenter ant problem in the kitchen. And the leaky roof. This is my karma. I wonder what I did in a former life that was so terrible that I deserve this punishment in this life. I want to be paid a nuisance fee for having to be the executor and give my brother less than half the estate. But this will foment discord, which is more bad karma.
Someone will buy the place. Someone. But when?
Thursday, May 9, 2013
The word from Bruno Heller
Well, it seems in the last Bruno Heller interview he says that Red John is "definitively" not
Patrick Jane.
That's a relief!
I was afraid the series (hitherto one of the best on TV for 5 seasons) was going to degenerate into a cheap imitation of Fight Club. Heller also says that Red John is one of the 7 suspects on the list. But which list? a fake one meant for Red John or Jane's real list, which exists only inside his head? Or is the list we saw in photo form and heard Lorelei read on the DVD THE REAL LIST?
I still think that of all the suspects, Brett Partridge fits the profile the best.
Honestly, I don't know why McAllister and Reede Smith are even on the list; they are such minor characters and each only appeared in one episode. Is this the "disappointment" of which Heller speaks? That some nobody will prove to be Red John? The banality of evil and all that?
I don't recall Smith at all, and my main memories of McAllister are
1) my mistaken belief (and intentionally misleading story line) that McAllister was the murderer of the red-headed women in the episode because he acts very suspiciously when Grace is acting as a decoy to entrap him. It turns out that the murders were committed by a nutjob chef and his wife who liked to watch.
2) McAllister loses at several rounds of rock, paper, scissors, with Jane. But then Jane always wins at poker and chess, so it's reasonable to surmise that no one beats him at a game. Which is why Red John loves the challenge and is sure he will win this time.
Hmmm, Gale Bertram could easily be the one: head of the CBI, on the inside in an important position, probably told Timothy Carter to meet Jane in the food court in the finale of Season 3, is involved in some shady plan with Kirkland that involves Lisbon ("can we trust her?") And he quotes William Blake's Tyger Tyger, which RJ recites when he talks to Jane who is bound up with tape. Later on, a dying RJ operative taunts Jane with "Tyger, Tyger." This is obviously some sort of secret word among RJ acolytes.
Kirkland? It seems more likely that he himself wants to catch RJ. Either that, or he stole the timeline from Jane to find out what Jane was thinking in order to mess with his mind.
Kirkland kills Lennon in the hospital for unclear reasons--Lennon worked at the women's shelter where Lorelei's sister Miranda stayed. He asked Lennon "do you recognize me?" and seemed to think he was doing Lennon a kind favor by dispatching him. The type of thing RJ might say--he is a showman about death, as though it were something to be staged in a play.
Ray Hafner? Certainly a suspicious character, trying to co-opt Lisbon into working for him and asking her pointedly if she stays on the job because of Jane (much as Lorelei tells Jane that she thinks he stays with the CBI because of Lisbon.) She discovers he's a member of Visualize, which was harboring the young RJ. So...he certainly is connected, if not the man himself.
Bret Stiles? Too old. Why is he on the list? He's a slimy bastard for sure, and he's got something to hide. He may be enjoying the RJ/Jane show and manipulating both of them--a puppetmaster of sorts. But RJ? No.
And why are there two guys with the name Bret? (tt)?
Getting back to Partridge: He makes an appearance on the season finale after not being on the show for a very long time. Jane hates him, calls him a ghoul, says he likes his work too much (works for CBI coroner and is a crime scene examiner) He also admires "great" killers. He says that Eileen's murder is a RJ copycat, and when Jane asks him if he's sure, he says he's just guessing, and Jane is the expert. He could just be a serial killer groupie like the zombies on "The Following," or he could be RJ himself. We don't know much about him.
To be continued...
Monday, May 6, 2013
The Mentalist Season Finale (Season 5) Red John: Psychic or Mentalist?
The following is the only explanation that makes any sense to me.
"This is the final chase," Heller says. "We will know who Red John is and we will catch him next season. Everything that has happened over the past five years will come to a head, and things will change drastically. This is the biggest finale in terms of game-changing and setting up for the last act of the Red John saga. This is as definitive and revolutionary as you can get." [from the Red Blog]___________________________________________________________________
__________________________
BUT THE REAL MYSTERY IS THIS:
It would seem that either
a) Red John IS psychic, otherwise how would he know not only Jane's exact final list of suspects which only Jane knows, but also Jane's memory of the girl Eileen whom RJ murders? also, that the memory was a treasured one, which he destroys on purpose by killing Eileen. (Note: Heller obviously wants us to believe along with Jane that there are no real psychics, only clever fakers, so I doubt that this is the answer.)
OR
b) Red John is Patrick Jane (how else would RJ know these things if there are no such things as psychics and only Jane knows them?)
OR
c) Red John is a mentalist like Jane and is using trickery to make it seem like he is really reading Jane's mind when actually he is just using info he got from carney people from Jane's youth, and his list of suspects matching Jane's is the result of theft...see explanation below.
If we are going on the assumption that there are no real psychics and Red John is NOT Patrick Jane (this would be horribly obvious and derivative--Fight Club already did this better than Heller would be able to do, and it would be a simplistic plot device not worthy of TM writers.) then we must find out how the hell could RJ have possibly known things known only to Jane himself.
At first glance, it seems that the only possibility here is that Jane told someone else about both the memory and the suspect list, but whom and when?*
It would have to be someone who either told RJ directly or someone RJ got this info out of by force or by bribe. For the Eileen memory, it might be someone from his past who observed that Patrick was happy at the scene we see when he was 12 years old. Or maybe just someone who knew the kind of memories Jane would treasure of someone RJ could kill. Possibly Sean Barlow, the creepy psychic who probably is a mentalist almost as good as Jane, gave RJ this info. Eileen was his niece, so he probably saw them playing together. He has already disowned her, so he doesn't care if she dies. He does want his grandchild, so RJ makes sure he has an accomplice kidnap the baby.
The list of suspects is trickier. The only way someone other than Jane could access it is someone who broke into his room and was able to find it. Jane is far too clever to leave the real suspect list where an intruder could find it, so he probably memorized it and left a fake written list. There was an earlier break-in in which Kirkland ends up with the RJ timeline collage (also almost certainly faked)
What might have happened is that Jane left a fake suspect list where an intruder found it and conveyed it to RJ. So only Jane knows the REAL suspect list but RJ got the fake list. (Jane's photo cards with the suspects' faces on them are also fakes--he actually has a whole different list in his head) So the list Lisbon sees is not the real list and Jane knows it. He also has managed to fool RJ. Jane undoubtedly prepared for the event that RJ gets hold of his suspect list by creating a fake one to throw him off the scent.
The appearance of Lorelei on the video reading RJ's letter was not a surprise to me; I have always thought that she faked her own death, that it was staged. The video could not have been made before her "death" because Jane did not have the final 7 suspect list yet. So we know that Lorelei is still alive. She says Red John will not make her suffer as much if she reads the letter to Jane, so RJ must be holding her hostage.
* actually, RJ makes no direct reference to the actual scene of the memory that we see. It was enough for him to make it seem like he knew the exact memory when in reality he only knew that it was a memory--any memory--of Eileen would be enough to hurt Jane. All he would need to find that out is someone who knew Jane and Eileen as kids and saw them playing together. This points to Sean Barlow for sure. He could have told RJ to stick it to Jane by killing Eileen.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
"This is the final chase," Heller says. "We will know who Red John is and we will catch him next season. Everything that has happened over the past five years will come to a head, and things will change drastically. This is the biggest finale in terms of game-changing and setting up for the last act of the Red John saga. This is as definitive and revolutionary as you can get." [from the Red Blog]___________________________________________________________________
BUT THE REAL MYSTERY IS THIS:
It would seem that either
a) Red John IS psychic, otherwise how would he know not only Jane's exact final list of suspects which only Jane knows, but also Jane's memory of the girl Eileen whom RJ murders? also, that the memory was a treasured one, which he destroys on purpose by killing Eileen. (Note: Heller obviously wants us to believe along with Jane that there are no real psychics, only clever fakers, so I doubt that this is the answer.)
OR
b) Red John is Patrick Jane (how else would RJ know these things if there are no such things as psychics and only Jane knows them?)
OR
c) Red John is a mentalist like Jane and is using trickery to make it seem like he is really reading Jane's mind when actually he is just using info he got from carney people from Jane's youth, and his list of suspects matching Jane's is the result of theft...see explanation below.
If we are going on the assumption that there are no real psychics and Red John is NOT Patrick Jane (this would be horribly obvious and derivative--Fight Club already did this better than Heller would be able to do, and it would be a simplistic plot device not worthy of TM writers.) then we must find out how the hell could RJ have possibly known things known only to Jane himself.
At first glance, it seems that the only possibility here is that Jane told someone else about both the memory and the suspect list, but whom and when?*
It would have to be someone who either told RJ directly or someone RJ got this info out of by force or by bribe. For the Eileen memory, it might be someone from his past who observed that Patrick was happy at the scene we see when he was 12 years old. Or maybe just someone who knew the kind of memories Jane would treasure of someone RJ could kill. Possibly Sean Barlow, the creepy psychic who probably is a mentalist almost as good as Jane, gave RJ this info. Eileen was his niece, so he probably saw them playing together. He has already disowned her, so he doesn't care if she dies. He does want his grandchild, so RJ makes sure he has an accomplice kidnap the baby.
The list of suspects is trickier. The only way someone other than Jane could access it is someone who broke into his room and was able to find it. Jane is far too clever to leave the real suspect list where an intruder could find it, so he probably memorized it and left a fake written list. There was an earlier break-in in which Kirkland ends up with the RJ timeline collage (also almost certainly faked)
What might have happened is that Jane left a fake suspect list where an intruder found it and conveyed it to RJ. So only Jane knows the REAL suspect list but RJ got the fake list. (Jane's photo cards with the suspects' faces on them are also fakes--he actually has a whole different list in his head) So the list Lisbon sees is not the real list and Jane knows it. He also has managed to fool RJ. Jane undoubtedly prepared for the event that RJ gets hold of his suspect list by creating a fake one to throw him off the scent.
The appearance of Lorelei on the video reading RJ's letter was not a surprise to me; I have always thought that she faked her own death, that it was staged. The video could not have been made before her "death" because Jane did not have the final 7 suspect list yet. So we know that Lorelei is still alive. She says Red John will not make her suffer as much if she reads the letter to Jane, so RJ must be holding her hostage.
* actually, RJ makes no direct reference to the actual scene of the memory that we see. It was enough for him to make it seem like he knew the exact memory when in reality he only knew that it was a memory--any memory--of Eileen would be enough to hurt Jane. All he would need to find that out is someone who knew Jane and Eileen as kids and saw them playing together. This points to Sean Barlow for sure. He could have told RJ to stick it to Jane by killing Eileen.
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WHAT DO YOU THINK?
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