05: Everybody's a Critic

[Gretel Bosch; first entry.]

May 14, 2006

This is ridiculous. 50-year-old women shouldn't keep diaries. Can't believe I even still have this thing.

But, there's nobody I can talk to. Telling the truth now would just lose me another family. But holding it in leads to -- what are they called? Episodes. Maybe writing it down keeps me sane. I mean, calm.

I haven't touched a corpse in years. I don't think about what happened. Then I'm browsing in a second-hand bookstore and find this: Alabaster Angel: Yvette Vervoot and Injustice in an American Town.

Good thing Marmot Delacroix is such a bad writer. One printing, and surely nobody read all 858 pages. Jesus, what crap. The book should be called My Sinnes Abound. A Donnetonian would know that.

Ridiculous opening sentence -- must be two hundred words. Talk about missing the point -- nobody was in shock that Rickhauser hit Vervoot with the maximum for misuse of public property. Hell no, they were amazed she'd beaten the Murder One rap.

"Alabaster Angel"; that's hilarious. Ask Dan Cant. She was the "Bone-White Basilisk" in his will, the one that burned when the Diluvian Street Firehouse went up. Nobody knows that.

04: Plant Cant

[Clipping, Donnetown Daily Elegy, Friday, May 24, 1985; Mayor Obert Bundt's eulogy at funeral service for Deputy Mayor Daniel Cant.]

"While Dan served Donnetown in many ways, what he loved most was driving the eighteen-wheeler that houses City Hall. He drove so smoothly that once Councilwoman Bakker broke a few bones stepping outside for a smoke. [Laughter] Look first next time, Sabine!

"Dan's single finest attribute was his honesty. The one time he drove City Hall through a red light, he pulled right over in the Cornucopia Market parking lot, walked to the back of the truck and paid his fine to Arne Smets, the traffic court judge on duty.

"I trusted Dan, both as a colleague and as a friend. So when certain aspects of his private life came to light -- what a recent editorial called a 'dizzying labyrinth of infidelity and manipulation' -- I had to ask myself, 'Was I wrong about Dan?'

"I say no. I prefer to think of the whole thing as a practical joke of epic proportions. If those hacks at Bosch & Sons Mortuary had fixed Dan up enough for an open casket, I bet we'd see a big smile on his face."