"Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget."
"Again, I've encountered no greater mystery in life than myself."
From The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy
You cannot afford to die when you are reading a Cormac McCarthy novel.
It's just too fucking important.
I am a 70 year old man working a part time job to make ends meet.
However, I am not without substance.
I aspire to become an aesthete.
Just met Richard Kuklinski and Gary Tison.
Gary Tison was a dedicated criminal. At one point in his career he was convicted of passing bad checks and sentenced to 7 months in jail. As he was leaving the courthouse he asked to be allowed to kiss his wife. A guard refused.
Tison overwhelmed the guard on the way to prison, killed him, and escaped. He was arrested the next day. 7 months became life in prison. Smart guy. This was in 1968.
Tison's focus became escaping from prison. He tried three times. He successfully (sort of) escaped in 1978 with the help of his three sons. Fred MacMurray would be jealous.
As they were fleeing, Tison, along with Randy Greenawalt - who escaped with him, killed a family, including a baby, in Arizona, and a honeymooning couple in Colorado. They needed transportation.
Johnny Law eventually caught up with them after a couple of weeks. One of Tison's sons was killed, Tison managed to get away but eventually died of dehydration and exposure in the desert. He was 43.
Check out Last Rampage, the movie made about Tison in 2017.
Richard Kuklinski was a hired killer known as The Iceman. He claimed to have killed 100 men. This is what initially attracted me to the movie - The Iceman. Turns out law enforcement believes he killed no more than 15 men. So a guy I considered to be a raging success turns out to be an underachiever.
Still a good movie, though.
After serving 18 years in prison, Kuklinski died of a heart attack at the age of 70. I am 70. I am not dead and I am not in prison. Small blessings.
Anyway, it's a bit horrifying that people like this exist in the world.
Then again, it's kind of interesting.
A crazy wild child entices a man to let her into his car to give him a blowjob.
She tells him to drive into an alley for privacy. Tells him to pull his pants down because it's easier that way. So he does.
Then she pulls a gun on him and commands "Give me your fucking wallet!" He is petrified, begging and shaking. He yells "Why are you doing this to me?"
The wild child says "Because I am pissed off! And the whole world owes me."
I think that is an excellent approach to life.
The scene comes from a movie titled Freeway, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon, from 1996. A deliciously bizarre movie that I watched last night.
"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts and statements of all kinds of people--not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul...we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness."
Thomas Wolfe, from God's Lonely Man
