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| Random pics and sad songs courtesy fanpop.com |
First he wrote a book called Dancer from the Dance. Then Andrew Holleran wrote an immensely sad book called The Beauty of Men. From what had once seemed an eternal party, he went back to the boondocks to take care of his aging mother. If these were the places fled, Michael did not know. "He worked so hard for it," the female officer said of the money the Thais had pillaged and he had squandered in a kind of unknowing, delinquent despair. Whether it was a broken heart or not, he did not know. "Sad story," another officer, knowing he could hear her, said. While all the time he pretended not to know a thing.
"i couldn't believe how upset the guy was," said another of his original pursuers from the house next door. Or was it opposite. He didn't know. All he knew was that everything barrelled down to a low point; and now there were times when he just couldn't handle anything. Holleran, having fled the AIDS ravaged scene of New York, couldn't have been lonelinier as he drover around the flat marshes surrounding his mother's house. Some people kept in touch, but not many, and he had no energy for them. The scene had gone, and with it, so many of his friends. Those haunting descriptions of their dying days. While inside he ached and ached; as if the natural order of things had finally come undone; and all was lost.
Holleran searched for love, or occasional contact, in all the places that men normally do, but out there, on the flat marshes or by the river, there was little movement. Sometimes there was noone at all. He fell inappropriately, hopelessly, in love with a young man down the road, not far from his mother's house, and that, in its obsession, intensely aware of his aging body, was the saddest cut of all. Nothing could be changed, not his longing, his loneliness, his age, his dead friends, thoughts unbidden. Why don't you travel? Michael thought, when he read the book, but his mother was dying and true enough, some people, most in fact, were not born to travel, it never seemed to cross their mind.
So what happened after his mother died? Michael didn't know, he hadn't read any sequels. Perhaps there weren't any sequels, but the same dismal course. The same appalling honesty. What could be dressed up as an "unblinking gaze", if one was writing advertising copy. He could see the amenities by the river. The occasional car. The men who stopped on their way home from work; or on their roamings. Searching for what, being what? Heat and damp and a terrible aloneness, was that all that was left? The Beauty of Men might more accurately have been called The Loneliness of Men, and so they swirled into a cutthroat world, unintended, full of unintended consequence, and Michael found himself in the same place, caring, just by being there, for his aging mother; a refugee from the dance, or from his own delinquent chaos, saddened by everything that had happened, still wishing, sometimes, that the light would just go out.
And staring, yes unblinking, at the places fled.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Nearly a week into President Obama’s campaign to convince Congress that airstrikes against Syria are necessary, he has achieved little headway against a wall of skepticism on Capitol Hill.
The president’s challenge is made more difficult by the fact that the two parties are splintered on the issue — and that lawmakers say they are hearing virtually no support for an attack from their constituents at home.
Kevin Rudd has showed off his prowess in the kitchen in an appearance on ABC TV's Kitchen Cabinet.
Filmed two weeks ago, hours before Mr Rudd took security briefings on the worsening situation in Syria, the episode – hosted by Annabel Crabb – showed Mr Rudd and his daughter Jess in relaxed form, baking chocolate brownies and talking about the importance of family.
Mr Rudd revealed that ''every decision I have made about what I do in life is one that I've worked through with our family''.
''We actually mull these things over for a bit,'' he said. ''We have formal family conferences when anyone wants to do anything significant and so therefore we know what we're doing and why we're doing it and if it works out that's terrific and it doesn't work out you know that you've actually approached it with a reasonable motivations.''
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