January 6th, 2005
I made some slight clarifications to my Dec. 31st rant. "Why's that?" I hear -erm- certain people ask.
Well, here's something:
My wife and I were in the local library tonight. We were just walking around having a boo; as it turns out, though I have lived 1/2 a block away from it for nearly three years, I have never been in there. Spoiled by the luxury of high-speed Internet and an ever-rising salary to afford new books, I am.
While I looked through books on how to fix the wiring in my feisty little (but starting to tire) car, she looked at the cookbooks, coming to a vegetarian one called Linda's Cookbook. It turns out it was Linda McCartney's cookbook. So she cracked it open to take a look. At the beginning there was a biography which talked all about Linda McCartney and her interest in vegetarianism, her beginnings in photography and, later, how as a musician she "travelled the world with her husband Paul."
Gee, how nice that that Paul guy got a mention in there, eh? That's what the world looks like when everything is All About You. Let's be perfectly honest here: Linda M. rose to prominence from virtual obscurity on the back of one of the 20th century's most prominent (and prolific) musicians (even if John Lennon was right when he sang, "Them freaks was right when they said you was dead"). And without hubby Paul dragging her along on his tours, nobody would give two shakes of a stick about her, her vegetarian cookbooks, her breast cancer, and her ultimate death.
It reminds me of something I used to listen to on the CBC in the early 1990s: It was called Cross-Currents, and featured people writing letters to each other, but instead of mailing them to the recipients, they mailed them to the CBC where they would be read over the radio. Someone wrote on behalf of their cat, and described the world as seen (presumably) by it: "The woman with whom I share the typewriter" was the cat's owner. "The man with whom I share the woman with whom I share the typewriter" was her husband. How cute in a fictional letter by a cat. How utterly self-absorbed for a human being.
What I'm trying to say here ... is this.