Incredibly Stupid Bliss

I retired the last day of 2025 after 32.5 years working to support people with developmental disabilities to get jobs and try to have the lives they want to have. I was lucky enough in my career to be able to pursue all I wanted to do in multiple positions – from a case manager to a vocational coordinator to a project manager. It really was a great way to get to know what the world is about, and to use whatever skills I had to help people often left out of the equation. It dawned on me though that I'm also retiring from close to 47 years of just plain paid work. Almost half a century. I got my first paying job when I was 13. I'm sure most retirees do this: survey their whole work-lives, not just the career part, and try to find the meaning in all that activity, all that dedication to persevering and finding a way to stay sane through it all.  Getting a job, for me, was really when I first understood that I could escape my circumstances. I could become a part of something th...

I think about Blanche a lot now. (And I just stumbled onto STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE on TCM.)  Her ferocious sensitivity, her need for illusion, her clinging to desire and memory and magic while the world around her marches toward a big beautiful bill.  Vivian Leigh as Blanche locates disappointment and depravity and love and kindness all on the same bleak avenue -- finds both insanity and sanity inside the lacy folds of desperation. That's something I want to cling to: the nuance that fuels empathy, the morality that finds itself in sin.   We are living in a Stanley Kowalski World right now, transactional and mean and fractured, full of blustering undeserved comeuppances.  Full of bullshit marketed as truth, and that madeup truth fueling all kinds of decisions and rabbitholes we might never escape. Blanche is something to hold onto. Fragile and ghostly and crazy to the point of making you turn away. But she knows what it means to be real by clinging to her need fo...

THE MORNING AFTER is a 1986 neon-candy-colored Hollywood thriller that beautifully encapsulates the mid-80s without being overly campy. Sidney Lumet directs it, and his serious cinema-verite style gets opened up to a glossy Southern California headspace, a cheery but sad backlot full of blank industrial buildings and pastel hairdresser condos. It's like Altman and DePalma having a deviously fun conversation.  MORNING AFTER would be a great curiosity, but then there's Jane Fonda. She pushes the movie beyond its kitschy itch. As a frantic over-the-hill actress with a booze problem waking up in bed next to a bloody corpse, she navigates every scene with a twitchy but steely ache. She seems to understand both the plight and the triumph of being a nobody, but also she carries the murder plot along with her like a dreamy moldy minkstole.  You feel everything through her determined but about-to-lose-it gaze. She's never been better and I think it has a lot to do with the melodrama...

This is what you get when you AI "Incredibly Stupid Bliss": The phrase "incredibly stupid bliss" is a paradoxical or ironic expression, suggesting a state of happiness or contentment that is based on   a lack of knowledge or awareness , particularly regarding potential problems or negative aspects of reality.   It builds upon the idiom "ignorance is bliss," which means that being unaware of something can make you happier or less anxious. However, the inclusion of "incredibly stupid" adds a layer of commentary. It implies that this state of bliss is not just a simple lack of knowledge but rather a  deliberate or willful ignorance .   Here's what it might suggest: Happiness through willful ignorance:  The person or group is happy because they choose to ignore uncomfortable truths or facts that would otherwise cause them distress. Criticism of blissful ignorance:  The phrase might be used to critique those who are content due to their ignorance,...

Jeff Hiller's self-conscious and self-effacing and pure true gem of a meta-memoir is so flat out necessary and beautiful I didn't want it to end for me. It kind of did today. Finished on Juneteenth and really don't know what that means or if it means anything but there you go: it was incredibly stupid bliss. ACTRESS OF A CERTAIN AGE gives you the inside scoop on what it takes to be an under-the-radar actor/celebrity without any self pity or aggrandizement. Jeff just moves through his gay Christian empathetic sarcastic soul-scorching life-narrative with both a Paul Lynde sense of abandonment and a Oprah sweep of sweetness. Bitterness is caught and shown for what it is: disappointment. Bravery mingles with desperation. If you read this book and don't like it you're nothing to me. That's kind of what it feels like.  Please read the whole thing but the last 25 pages are the shit. Jeff narrates what it was like participating in the making of SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE, the g...

  Carolyn Ard passed away a few months ago. She was a part of our lives when Bill and I were in our early 20s and part of an artists' cooperative in Indianapolis called 431. We were raw absurd kids making weird art and everyone at 431 was kind and helpful and put up with all of our shenanigans, but Carolyn was the kindest and the one who truly kept things going. She was also the most gracious. One story that sticks out for me: she and her husband Tony were going out of town for a week and Carolyn asked Bill and me to house-sit. Their house was gorgeous, like one of those upper-middle-class mansions in ORDINARY PEOPLE. I remember being terrified that we would ruin something. Start a fire accidentally or run up their utility bill or leave behind a whitetrash stink. Bill and I were poor as hell then. Trying to make it through college, living in a shithole apartment. We were also a little uncouth. But Carolyn saw us as sweeties. She trusted us with her house. That kind of cross-class s...