An open letter to Paul, Paul fans, former fans and former friends,

  

 

For a long time now I've had an idea to write an open letter to Paul. Not because I think he would ever see it mind you. I just thought it might help stifle some personal demons I’ve been fighting. Get some things off my chest… You know, that kind of thing.  

I guess the main point of this is to try to explain (mostly to myself) why I no longer count myself as a Paul fan. I know. It shocks me too. I had loved him beyond reason for the better part of forty years. I thought nothing he could do would change that.  

I never thought he was a perfect human being. In fact I knew him not to be, but who wants perfect? And I'm sure that on any given day he can be kind or unkind. Sweet or nasty. Giving or selfish. Like… well, like everyone on the planet... 

But I always admired the way he lived his life and conducted himself and the devotion and love he, at least seemed, to have for his wife and family. Then something happened that altered the way I saw Paul.  

Linda died.   

For the first year I thought my heart would break for him.  

I hoped that in time he would find someone to spend the remainder of his life with. I really, honestly did. Maybe not some hot blooded passionate romance, but a solid companionable second chance at love. 

However I was appalled that he would even think about finding a new lover so obscenely quickly... and especially with a woman like the one he ended up with. 

I think he was hoping to find another woman like Linda.  

What he found was a woman who was too young,  too greedy for money, and fame and all that comes with it.  But mostly I believe she was/is simply  too self-loving and self involved to even know how to love anyone else. She was transparently a media hungry woman who should have had warning signs flashing over her head at all times. "Handle at you own risk!"  She was a mean faced, shark eyed (possibly mentally unstable) bitch with a less than savoury past.  

And most everyone seemed to know this but him.  

No matter what the press, his fans or even, seemingly, his family said, he thought he was right about this woman and everyone else was wrong. If he thought she was another Linda. He was wrong. 

But back to me. 

Even if we take  'She Who Must Not Be Named' out of the picture.  

In all honesty if he had chosen ANY other woman... If he had gone from grieving widower to ecstatically in love with the any other woman I would still have felt it as a betrayal of Linda to ‘replace’ her so quickly.  

I think I felt a bit  betrayed as well.  I felt as if all those years when I thought  I knew who he was had all been lies.   I had thought I knew what kind of man he was. And if that part of Paul was untrue what else about him had been false?  I began to doubt everything. I know this doesn’t stand up to rational thought. After all I never REALLY knew him did I?   Yet, I couldn’t seem to help the way I was feeling about him.  

I felt that if he had truly loved Linda as I had always thought he did, there is no way he could have ‘replaced’ her with such unseemly haste.   

My sister, who also recently lost her husband, told me all the reasons a person grieving and in pain would grab onto the next relationship so quickly.  Very reasonable.   But I was not feeling reasonable about this new Paul and his choices.

 

~~ My sister by the way is now widowed for nearly four years and still can barely

 get through her days and I know that  the nights are even worse for her.  ~~

 

At first I figured it wouldn’t last. He’d wake up and come to his senses.   

Then came the rumours of the arguments and screaming matches he and SWMNBN got into during their engagement period.  

I just knew he would NEVER be so stupid as to marry her.  He would call it off. I still had hope. Hopes that there was yet some shred of the ‘old’ Paul lurking somewhere inside this new lesser Paul. 

Then… he married her. 

So what was I to think? Was this new Paul the ‘real’ Paul?   This party going, rude to fans, disgustingly effusive in regards to  SWMNBN, defending his wife to the tabloids Paul.    ( as he had never done for Linda when it had been her under attack )  

Or was the old family oriented, live on the farm, ignore the media bastards and take the high road without whinging, the real Paul?  

I will admit I went through a period of intense anger. Anger at Paul, anger at… her.  Anger at anyone who dared to even try to defend her or him to me.  I dropped out of all the Paul lists and communities to which I belonged. I stopped listening to Beatles or Paul  music. I just couldn’t.  I no longer believed in Paul or the Beatles.  

It took awhile for that anger to subside. But eventually it did.  I still feel the same about her mind you. And while I am no longer angry at Paul.  I no longer love him either.  ( I’m sure he feels this loss deeply… or… well…not.) 

Now we come to the war that never was.  Beware further, of interest only to me,  ramblings.  

  Paul update    ~    May 15, 2006 

Paul finally grew some of his balls back and left SWMNBN. Sadly there is now a small child involved in her parents mess. I’m sure neither her parents, or the child, would wish her out of existence… Still…   

I got some of my respect for him back when he actually stuck to his guns and the word divorce started being whispered about. Some of my respect not all.   I will never love him again. I don’t want to.  I know now what I should have known all along… I do not truly know him and never will. All the books and interviews and personal accounts in the world will not change that. 

I have started being able to listen to the music again. Which is nice. And I can still appreciate how gloriously beautiful he was for most of his life and I still mourn for the man I thought I knew and did truly love.   

Even if he never really existed.  

This is where the war begins.  

‘J’ and I met at a Beatles chat room years ago.   Let me just say that J gets offended easily and tends to stay that way. I knew that from the start. 

We all know how easy it is to be misunderstood in emails or IM’s.  I spent years dancing around J so she wouldn’t misunderstand me and get upset.   

Cut to a few months ago.  

J now has no computer and we were conversing by text messages. Pure hell in the world of conversations in my opinion.  How can you say anything in sentences of 20 words or less?  So of course, while discussing various things, misinterpretations occurred.  Normally we worked them out.  

Then came the recent texts about the whole Paul vs SWMNBN.   

J couldn’t seem at first to decide whose side she was on. Then as the stories started to come out in the tabloids, J seemed to decide that she believed the stories of how Paul was a spouse abuser.   

Here J and I disagreed. 

I don’t really defend Paul for most of his problems these days.  I think he was an idiot for marrying the woman and find it hard to feel that sorry for him in truth. It’s not like people didn’t try to warn him or that he got married in a whirlwind romance and didn’t take the time to find out what she was like.   I mean, four years? He had to have known what he was in for.  

BUT  having said that … 

I also do not believe that Paul is any kind of spouse abuser.     

For a start I wouldn’t believe a word out of THAT woman’s mouth.  Everything in SWMNBN’s  history, long before she met and married Paul, showed her to be a pathological liar at best. Possibly even a mentally deranged one. Why would anyone believe a word she said about him or anything else?   

During the course of our texts back and forth it came out that both J and I believed Paul might however have given her a shove or maybe two during an argument etc.   

J put it in terms of Paul being a spouse abuser and declared her opinion that no woman deserves to be abused. Period.  

Now, J has a personal history of childhood abuse that I don’t know the full details of and I can understand her being on the side of the ‘victim’.  

My own history is of a 35 year marriage where in I have learned a few things. One of them being ‘Do Not Try To Argue With a Person Who Is Drunk’.  I learned that one about 32 years ago.  Thankfully, drinking is no longer a fault of my husbands.  

But I also learned that while men have their faults, women are not quite perfect either. Women have a tendency to get in a man’s face and carry on as though somehow if they just go on long enough the man will see the error of their ways.   

A tip for all you young women out there who haven’t had the personal experience yet.   

They won’t.  Trust me on this one. 

If, however,  you harp at them long enough, even after they ask you to stop, leave them alone or get out of their way… then count yourself lucky if all you get is a shove.  

WHICH, I point out, is allegedly  what Paul did to SWMNBN.   

Everyone has a point beyond which they should not be pushed.    Everyone.  

I feel the same way about it if the two people involved are two men or two women by the way. Sober people should NOT pick fights with drunken people.  It is simply not a wise thing to do on any level. Period.   

Not to mention that it’s a waste of your time as they more than likely won’t even remember it in the morning while you will still be fuming. 

J totally misunderstood or chose to misunderstand, I’m not sure which, what I was saying and accused me of being for spouse abuse.   

For the record I’m not.  

But as I said, people can only be expected to be pushed so far, and drunken people are likely to act out in ways that they wouldn’t do when sober.  That might include acting with varying levels of physical contact. And if SWNMBN was screeching at Paul when he was drunk, and she didn’t have the sense to give it up before he lost it… then I think she has to own at least part of the responsibility.  

That doesn’t translate into  “I believe women should be abused by their husbands.”  

Lets just say after that,  the texts between J and I got out of control.  With both sides failing to get their points across.  

J then committed the cardinal sin with me.  She began defending SWMNBN for everything. In that defence she gave me the same reply to anything SWMNBN had ever supposedly done.    

“So what?” 

Stealing? ‘So what?’ was J’s reply.   

Lying? ‘So what?’..  J said,  All men are liars so why should they deserve the truth?  

Etc etc. On and on.  Round and Round. 

Soon J’s  texts were becoming personal attacks of the most absurd kind, and mine were not very nice either. I just got tired of being nice really.   I am not nice when it comes to ‘that woman’. 

In fact, I freely admit I am not even rational on the subject of She Who Must Not Be Named.  There are many factual reasons why I think she is a waste of skin,  but in the end it all really boils down to the fact of the dislike/loathing that I feel for her.   I know it’s petty and childish and all that stuff but it’s how I feel. 

Anyway… long story even longer.  J and I no longer count one another as friends I guess.  The only good thing that came out of it all is that, thank God, I no longer have to text anyone. Who ever invented that will spend eternity in hell… texting.  

So knowing J the way I do I was certain that the next time she made it to a computer she would be sure to fill my guest book with various and sundry insults and flames.  I decided to write this long pent up rant to both vent my spleen about Paul and his life choices and also to explain any nasty posts.   

Well, I think there has only been one so far,  and that’s a good thing.   

Hopefully if she reads this she will finally be able to understand what I failed to find a way to convey in a trillion tiny texts.    

But I still have this need to get all of this out of my system so I decided to kill two birds with the one stone.  Hopefully this will do that.  

 

If you’ve read my ramblings  this far you deserve a medal.  

 

If you are Paul and you read this far… Date a woman or two before you marry the next Lady McCartney will ya? Maybe someone who isn’t the same age as your children? 

And maybe, as a special favour to me, put a bit more effort and thought into the lyrics and melodies for any future albums?     

I may not be a member in a large majority of people who think the last three albums sucked, but I am also definitely not alone either.  

 

All the best to you all,

Calicosoldier