Monday, September 17, 2007
Sadness
One of the blogging friends I have extrapolated from reading/commenting to actually and genuinely caring for (Fresh Bilge's Alan Sullivan), is going through a sad and difficult time at the moment. His long-time partner, Tim, has had several seizures brought on by alcoholism which led to malnutrition and severe electrocardiac misfunction. Coincidences - or Providence - being what it is, Alan was in North Dakota for the first (and last) time in ages when all this happened. So the dubiously good news is that Alan was able to get Tim to the hospital; it's hard to imagine the outcome if all this had happened when no one else was at home. One hopes very much that Tim will have been sufficiently frightened by all this to pull at least some semblance of himself together, since he is only in his mid-fifties and could have several decades of writing and living ahead of him. But Alan's description of their relationship as "a mutual enabling society" in which "Tim went directly from being the spoiled but pressured eldest son in a large family to being my partner [and] sublimely disinterested in mundane aspects of life like shopping, cooking, snow-shoveling, house-painting, etc." suggests that it's unlikely. In fact, Alan "took care of everything in the physical world [while Tim] earned a living with financial planning, and [they] worked together as literati." It must have been quite wonderful for a while and I hope they will both be able to remember and enjoy those memories. If not now, some time in the future. As someone who neither loves nor loathes alcohol, I find both its power and its utterly devastating and disastrous effects most puzzling. Anyway, I wish Tim some modicum of repair. And I hope Alan finds relief, solace and pleasure in the seacoast and waterways he loves so much in Florida.
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