Patricia Lockwood is quite brilliant (she didn't even go to college because she had a strange dad who killed her chances by not saving money for his kids' college education). that's her below, writing about the sexual misconduct cover-ups in churches.

"All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.

You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine - it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It's about not being able to choose the secrets you've been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

In the not-so-far future, Bishop Finn will be forced to resign by Pope Francis, who is proving to be a figure worthy of some study. My father will publish a letter of staunch support in the church bulletin, suggesting that the bishop was being persecuted for his conservative beliefs, that in fact he had committed no crime at all, and that the prosecutor in his case was a mercenary with "strong ties to the abortion industry." I will be so disheartened by this that I can barely speak to him or meet his eyes for weeks. Though later he will tell my mother, with perhaps the first stirrings of doubt, "I'm beginning to think any one of them would have done it. That the position is more powerful than the man."

i am lonely, conceited, proud, and a self-made failure. what do I do now?

it cannot be a coincidence. a lot of my last few posts have been about reading, the act of it, the process of identifying with the author and with the character, the religion of it, loyalty to it, about how mostly I've been left alone to love it. etc. etc. for the first time in my life also, the words I've been reading have been coming from people as old as me, almost, round about. this is the age when geniuses begin to shine, have been noticed, been known and start to live upto their introductory fame, and often to overtake that. one of the last few writers I got impressed by - and then felt disappointed by because all her books are like that, beginning with a lot of excited promises, then they pause midway somewhere, kinda lose what they were trying to do and then become little shadows of themselves and wither into some endings - got her PhD the same year that I did, went on a road trip through a similar route that I did (a little before in time than me but hey I didn't know that then), got pulled over and was scared by it in Arizona somewhat like I was. and now this writer I'm reading and am totally in love with right now is guess how old?! just about two months older than me. its not a coincidence, its a sign. but some signs die out, repeatedly, stopping short of manifesting what they portend.

one thing is clear. I will die with an unfinished book on my kindle, in my hands, near my pillow, or wherever or on whatever futuristic device people will be reading in those years. I will die with some future plan of travel, if my death still has an element of surprise in it for me; if not I might die while traveling if I plan it. but in saying this I'm assuming Sartre was right and that my life then - the last few moments of it - will be much like my life now. its funny when I was a young adolescent I once told an aunt that she would find me more than 10 years later still wearing my favorite pair of tights and t-shirt that I was in then. when I was young(er) I believed more that I was an old soul, and as I am increasingly addressed as 'aunty' by kids playing on the road, I've stopped asserting that to myself. I don't even know when I threw those tights and if they had even earned it with any holes in them. many things in fact get trashed now because my marriage is too old to count anymore, and one's husband has to see too much of the things one loves too much. at some point you have to sacrifice one love for another.

about that by the way. I don't remember too many people writing this in too many books but the tenderness in one's marriage grows with the waistline of the husband even though occasions of sex (or the desire for it, or is it quite the contrary and age and this country kill desire by making it ludicrous when there's more urgent stuff always to take care of) dwindle, and a rubbing of cheeks and a peck on the ear feel lazily satiating. and yet I want to share more and more with him. so much so that I have become a running commentary on our surroundings, our friends, his friends, our family, the movies (and other things) we watch, don't watch, pretend to watch, and are forced to watch for lack of choice. I have become like my mother but only in the volume of talk that comes out of me. the nature of it is thankfully different. in short, I am my version of my mother. and I don't even have enough lived life and experienced suffering to my claim. not even the accidental or planned creation of new life for my entertainment that grows out of its purpose, and therefore not even the torment at its (his or her) hands. all that I have gifted myself is a pointless continuous rebellion without a goal and in the process lots of lost friends and earned detesters. and I do have enough to be ashamed of. time to write that book. only if I can muster the guts to come out clean. before I'm much older than the people I read.