Two pieces from the original Scrivening

The Sean Young Report
I thought about Sean Young today. I wonder what she's been doing lately.
I see so many movies and I think to myself, "This movie would be so much more interesting if one or more of the roles was being played by Sean Young."Sometimes I say this out loud. During the movie. People get angry.
I get angry back.
Who are they to judge Sean Young? They wouldn't be so snooty about Debra Winger? How dare they criticize my critical appreciation for Sean Young.
And maybe I have a bit of personal concern there too--after all, who is Sean Young if not a stand-in for each of our own personal souls? Sean Young represents who we are--or at least she would, if she was given more chances to be in things.
I thought about Sean Young again later today, after the first time I thought about her. I still wonder what Sean Young is doing. I don't condemn her for turning her back on the world--I know if I had seen her playing some bit part in Jarhead I would have just been disappointed.
Besides, I'm still wondering why David Duchovny doesn't love Bree Sharp.
Another mystery to solve.
Another night with the stars.
Here's to you, Sean Young. Keep fighting the good fight, whatever that is, wherever you are.

Pomeroy's Secret
Pomeroy Cannon had a secret. His secret wasn’t that he had slept with his Aunt’s best friend one cold and lonely winter. That was a secret too, but that was a safe secret from deep in Pomeroy’s history, the kind that rarely surfaces and loses its power to destroy, or even shock, with time.
So, Pomeroy Cannon had two secrets, but only one of them involved a continuing event that could destroy his life; only one of them held the possibility of ruining his friendships and sending his wife out the door and out of his life. And unbelievably enough, even though he was sure that his behavior would one day destroy his life, Pomeroy simply could not or would not stop it.
Pomeroy Cannon loved his wife, considered himself lucky to have even gotten her attention or her love and, notwithstanding the occasional lapse into the memory of an old girlfriend or the aforementioned older woman and the cold and lonely winter, behaved as a model spouse and attentive lover. He never forgot a birthday or an anniversary, listened to his wife’s words as if his life depended on it (and sometimes it did), and with a skillful combination of his superlative memory and listening skills had constructed an impressive mental file of his wife’s likes and dislikes which he put to good effect not just on the birthdays and anniversaries but on all kinds of ordinary Tuesdays and Wednesdays that usually don’t merit any special attention.
All of this had earned Pomeroy an extraordinary reservoir of good will from his wife—good will that Pomeroy knew would be rendered worthless in an instant if his secret were to be revealed—because, somewhere along the line Pomeroy Cannon had picked up the habit of urinating in the sink.
Not the kitchen sink, mind you, because Pomeroy still appreciated limits even as he violated this one—no, Pomeroy Cannon had spent the better part of the previous year experimenting with urinating in bathroom sinks.
He wasn’t sure when it had started, or why.
Surely, Pomeroy thought, it must have begun as an expedient solution to some problem that had prevented him from using the toilet like a normal person. But despite his superlative memory, Pomeroy couldn’t remember when he had started his terrible habit, only that it had started in his own home, on the sly, at nights and then during the day when his wife was a bit late getting home from work. Pomeroy worked only a mile from his house while his wife usually spent thirty minutes commuting back and forth. So, Pomeroy learned to count on the chance to get one or two sink sessions in before his wife got home.
But even as he learned that he could get away with urinating in the sink all the time Pomeroy found that he could increase his secret thrill by engaging in his secret habit at his office facilities.
Pomeroy had never liked his job, or his coworkers, and had secretly despised his boss Mr. Walsh ever since Mr. Walsh had expressed his lack of fondness for Pomeroy’s favorite film. That resentment, tucked into Pomeroy’s deep memory finally boiled over in his mind one day in the office washroom.
A thing done once, Pomeroy thought, is a thing that can be repeated for effect and Pomeroy soon turned his habit into a party trick—a secret party trick that only he knew about. He imagined the shock that would register on his friends’ faces if they found out about what he did in their houses. He enjoyed the thought, mostly because he had never liked his friends, besides he didn’t really consider most of these people to be his friends. They were neighbors, acquaintances, his wife’s friends, his children’s parents but not really his friends—and their sinks were asking for it.
But if Pomeroy did what he did outside the home out of spite it didn’t explain why Pomeroy did what he did at home. Did he secretly resent his wife? Was he trying to wreck the happiness that he had spent so much energy nourishing and enjoying? What did he gain from it? A few seconds? Pomeroy thought about it extensively and one day, at his Aunt’s home for a family reunion as he was zipping up it came to him—it was never so much about the secret thrill, not the hate, not the time-saving. No, it was that it all just seemed too easy to him.
Pomeroy Cannon was the kind of man who enjoyed a challenge, who derived his pleasure from acrostics and brain-teasers and the most obscure of crossword puzzles. He had known his wife was high-maintenance, and he loved her all the more for it. He hated his job because it all came too easy to him.
And so even the simple act of urination had lost its challenge for Pomeroy and he just couldn’t let it go. Maybe someday he’d get old and have one of those issues that old people always seem to have, and then he wouldn’t have to go in the sink to make it more challenging. But for now, the constant state of calculations he made when he encountered a new bathroom and a new sink—this is what kept him going.
And so, despite the fact that Pomeroy Cannon knew that no one in the world condoned what he did, despite the fact that he knew the revelation of his secret would destroy his life—and maybe even because of these facts—he couldn’t stop himself.
If we ever move, Pomeroy thought, the new sinks could stand to be a bit lower. Maybe by then he could learn to stop himself. He would have to, he thought. He loved his wife, and if this continued and he was ever caught—well, it was too horrible for Pomeroy to imagine.
What Pomeroy Cannon, in none of his imaginative wanderings could have imagined, is that his wife had figured out his secret—not the one about the cold and lonely winter, that one was still safe—several months ago.
She, with her keen powers of observation—the same ones that had allowed her to see something special in Pomeroy—had long since added up all the clues that let her know that her husband was urinating in the bathroom sink. Nor could Pomeroy Cannon know that his wife had a secret, a once terrible secret, which she had once thought would drive her mad one day, but which now only made her smile—and which made her love Pomeroy Cannon as much as all the little ordinary Tuesdays and Wednesdays that he turned into special occasions with his little acts of kindness.
Because at some point in college, though she couldn’t really remember exactly when or why, Pomeroy Cannon’s wife had picked up the habit of urinating in bathroom sinks.

(http://scrivening.blogs.friendster.com/the_scrivening/)