More thoughts of Squeaky
The boi and I just watched “Capote.” In it, Truman Capote becomes very involved with the main character of his book IN COLD BLOOD: murderer Perry Smith. When his dear friend Harper Lee questions his growing emotional attachment to Smith, Capote talks of the similarities in their upbringings (both had neglectful mothers who abandoned them), saying, “It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he went out the back door and I went out the front.” I guess that’s the way I’m feeling about Squeaky. I feel like we had such similar backgrounds, but somehow she took the wrong road, while I somehow found my way to the light. I called my mother as soon as I finished watching the film because she had been admonishing me for months for not yet seeing such an “astonishing” work, and I immediately started chattering to her, a mile a minute, about the nature of insanity and what makes someone walk away from madness as opposed to diving into it, head on.
“I think it all comes down to having people who love you,” she said.
I argued that many of Manson’s girls came from very good homes and loving families.
“But maybe they seemed loving on the outside, but really their love was conditional, like they were only loved if they were a certain way or did certain things.”
She’s probably right.
I know I’ve done a lot of stupid things.
I was afraid in college of my parents finding out about foolish mistakes I made.
But eventually I told them, because deep down, I’ve always known: no matter what I’d done, my parents would still love me; they would know that I was a good person with good intentions and would never disown me or disapprove of me because I took a misstep here or there… I guess that’s why I didn’t become like Squeaky… And now that I’m an adult (now that I’m REALLY an adult, not just one by the government’s standards), what stops me from doing foolish things, giving in to impulses to punch someone in the face—even when they desperately deserve it—or much worse, it’s because I don’t want to let down, disappoint, or bring grief to those who truly love me…
Maybe to avoid crime, madness, and all sorts of horrors, maybe it really comes down to that famous Beatles’ line:
“All you need is love.”
Maybe...
posted by Shannonymous @ 8:09 PM
1 Comments:
There's this great lyrics in Sufjan Stevens' "Johnn Wayne Gacy, Jr." song off the Illinoise record. He's singing about John, describing his childood, his home life, etc. He then ends the song with "And in my best behavior / I am really just like him / Look underneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid."
I think we're fascinated by murderers, serial killers, assassins and the like because deep down, we know we have the ability to become them should enough things go wrong. Is that a kind of fear? Maybe we're afraid that one rejection too many, one subway car door closing just as we're running down the steps, one douchebag in line at the grocery store will push us over the edge and suddenly we're Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's the line that has always fascinated me. The line that many would like to think is a great wall, but really it's more like a piece of string symbollicly placed on the ground - it's made to seperate the functioning members of society from the sociopaths. And it does a fine enough job. But any one of us could, potentially, find ourselves on the wrong side of that line if enough factors go into play.
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