why i love Mad Men and watch it incessantly

dear babs, i'm sick. please shoot me in the face. thanks.










i am ill again. this may have everything to do with my body being trashed. or not.

sometimes i think it's just a natural consequence of a body wanting a hug. you warm up, grow quiet. think about your mother. or soup. or childhood. or something. you think lots. maybe it's just me.

i couldn't sleep. mixture of a headache, fever, relentless lust (i'm always horny when i'm sick). so i just stayed up. watching episodes of mad men till there were no more left to watch.


*___*___*

i think it's a show about unhappiness. and all the ways it is possible to be unhappy. and how complex those unhappinesses are. how they're sometimes not unhappiness at all, but, we're soo used to be being unhappy that we can't help but feel some home-comfort-unhappiness even when we're happy.

because of the sprawl of characters it can slip and slide through all the variations there are of that theme. news of being a father tinged in back-stabbing. absent mothers, catholic mothers, judgmental mothers - licentious fathers, drunk fathers, controlling fathers. cigarette smoke. smoke and mirrors. who people are. who they aren't. or what. or how. sometimes even the darkest part of the inside of your body: why.

hi, i'm Q. in my life i've met two happily married couples. this worries me. a great deal. not newly weds, i'm not talking about that. i'm talking about people who've lived together. had a few babies. manned up against a recession or an abortion or silent dinners and mundane neglect over a couple of decades. time is probably the only thing that can consistently defeat geology and love. ain't no mountain high enough to fight off a couple hundred million years of erosion.

i wanna punch betty draper in the face. if you connect with betty draper please never speak to me. ever. but people do. that's the point. coquettish. subtly kittenish. passive aggressive. self-righteous. self-absorbed. lost in a little kingdom where she's a princess and deserves all the greatness she deserves. prudish in that virginal way that will please no man ever and no man will ever find the words to explain to her why she's not enough in bed. she's porcelain, the bedroom always requires an aliquot or two of whore. she's the damsel you try and save. who then eats you from the inside and picks her teeth with your cracked fibula and walks off to meet her next savior.

Joan's her antithesis. she's every man's mother. buxom. will fix your cares. hold your head to her breasts and whisper shhhh, baby, everything will be alright. then she'll lie on a bed for you wearing nothing but a mink fur and black stilettos [excuse me while i adjust my erection]. the point of the matter is: sexiness can't be taught. it's a matter of temperament and has nothing to do with technique. sexiness is a matter of character. a showing of strength. a self-awareness. a monument to the primal, bestial - but dressed up in the cloak of civilization. it's the primal wrapped in well chosen suggested words that are the inception of some impression. they're an after-taste. they're when you sit on a train on your ride home and think but just what did she mean by that? it's a delicate little snake that some women can send out, that slithers through a man's nose into his brain, and changes the color he sees the world in. my god it's powerful.
___maybe i just belied my oedipal complex.

and Don. oh dear. it's becoming difficult to bear him. every time i see him alone with a woman i think oh god he's going to try to f&ck her. i suppose at the end of the day everyone sees themselves as hard-done. as mysterious. as a well-full of trauma and history. a fully fledged fable. a myth of a man. a brooding genius. ___maybe i just do, i don't know. of course his masculinity is overbearing sometimes. makes me feel uncomfortable. like i'm too talkative or emotional or weak to live up to Don's expectations. too grey in his world of black and whites. odd isn't it? the hyper-male couldn't satisfy the hyper-female.

Roger lost to the Siren's song. that rings true for everyone. you marry. you get old. you get bored. who wouldn't want to get in the car and turn off the radio and drive till you prove physics wrong and drive over the edge and fall into a blissful 100 year sleep in complete utter soundless, blackestness - a sleep with no dreams or distraction, but just to enjoy the sensation of falling away away away from where anyone.thing.thought can find you. failing that, then the youngest most beautiful distraction who hums dulcet ankles and still tender from youth breasts into your ears and dangles french manicured toes and dark hair smelling of hyacinth before your eyes. yes. that will do fine. save me. hide me. take me apart. dissolve me into nothing and breathe me in and hide me in your chest and tell no one where i am. and sometimes go to the pool and dive from up high and i'll hold tight with my ear to your heart like a pillow that speaks back in the night and feel like perhaps i did drive over the edge and for .4 seconds i'll feel... safe.

all this... unhappiness. wives that are best kept in vases out of the light, and husbands who need salvation from week to week and daughters and sons who'll pay the price after the family court packs it up for the day.

pete cambell. snakes and ladders of course. daddy issues. insecurity issues.

all this unhappiness. but it doesn't make me sad. not when i watch it.


*___*___*

i fall asleep at about 5:30am, or thereabouts. wake up two hours later. i scratch my cheek and rummage around to find a half-used tissue to blow my nose with. my mouth is sticky with sore-throat saliva. i have an erection. a single bed. i hear an argument about who will mop up vomit from the dog's private own physiology breakdown.

i'm not ready for where this life is going.
___