Sunday, February 16, 2020
Almost a full month after his death Jimmy's Family finally came up with
an obituary which had such awful undertones that you would think it was the
Catholic Church twisting arms to make some saint seem respectable.
This was the Garland family Council of Narcia where they all had to
come to consensus on who exactly they wanted Jimmy portrayed as provided it
wasn’t actually who Jimmy really was.
From its tone and from this emphasis you can imagine the infighting
that must have taken place behind the scenes in order to make it sound like
Jimmy was something other than what it really was.
Not only was the document inaccurate but it implied that Jimmy's
primary career was as an executive director of the library and that after his
retirement he indulged in his secondary profession as an artist.
“This makes him look like a white-haired old man puttering with paint
at his retirement,” one person said.
The portrayal is so exaggeratedly wrong that it largely amounts to a lie
and implies that someone or many someone's behind the scenes felt secret shame
over the fact that Jimmy foremost and always was artist first, then
musician. He fell into being a librarian
by accident after finding working in a photo company and then later in a Dunkin
Donut beneath his dignity He was a part-time clerk who after everybody else
retired someone named executive director.
The obituary painted Jimmy as
one of those boring bureaucrats that occupy all the corporate offices around
the world who have after having done executive things all their lives suddenly
putter in the garden with some unimportant occupation like painting.
It is easy to imagine the arm-twisting and political maneuvering that
went on behind the scenes to make sure that his obituary did not reflect how
wonderfully dysfunctional Jimmy actually it was.
It is clear that others who want to have his image preserved did not
want the general public to see him as he
really was a somewhat disrespectful and certainly unconventional character poo
wandered through life in the search of something other than the fake
respectability his obituary for painted him.
The obituary was written for the survivors not for Jimmy ignoring the
fact that Jimmy was a bigger than life character the way some of Kerouac
characters were.
You can see the kind of strain behind the scenes in the various aspects
of the obituary the encouraging of the public to come look at his art when that
was the least part of his life according to this document
Jimmy couldn't care less whether people came over to his website and
looked at his work. What he cared about was the creation of it and the
continuing creativity that occurred despite the fact that he was stuck in
pointless jobs such as Dunkin Donuts or even the library. He was desperate to turn the library into an
artwork and was in the process of doing so when it outgrew him when the
bureaucrats forced him out and turn the library back into a library rather than
an artwork.
His forced retirement pushed him back into his real love music and is
art and in this last days he did what he set out to do from the beginning which
is to live his life is he wanted to regardless of what close family members
felt or how much shame they had in knowing him.
He was a charismatic character that the obituary largely ignores. It is an obituary written by bureaucrats for
bureaucrats and hardly reflects who Jimmy was in life trying to give him
importance that he would not have found important.
Fortunately those who actually know him know how much BS went into this
and more than one has said this was not Jimmy, a disreputable character who
spend his life tearing down bureaucratic walls only to have one built around
him by an obituary like a prison or a coffin he doesn't deserve.
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