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Archive for the ‘Loss’ Category

Free-floating Anxiety Before Tea

Posted in Children, Health, Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, On getting older, Poetry, tagged on November 28, 2010| 12 Comments »

Sounds almost pleasant, doesn’t it? It’s not. Oxymoronic in its essence, free-floating anxiety sees the anxious bit hijacking anything that might be considered free and the sucker floats like a anvil.

Anxiety that lacks a definite focus or content.

And that, folks, comes before the first cup of tea.

I have always lived with demons … depression being the biggest bugger with the fiercest bite … but anxiety is rather new to me. Sure, I’m a worrier. What woman isn’t, especially living alone and having kids to raise? But it’s not often my worries cause me to lose sleep.

In fact, I usually sleep fairly well; I drop off without effort, and if disturbed have little to no trouble drifting back into slumber. Yes, my sleep is dream-plagued/blessed and often not as restful as I’d like, but I do sleep and for the allotted hours.

No, it’s not the sleeping that’s my issue, my demon … whatever … but the waking.

Before my eyes open I now realize I’ve shifted from sleep to awake by the sudden onset of that free-floating anxiety thing. It takes a bit of time to recognize and even more to run it through the filters: I’m late; I’m early; I’m breathing; kids are okay; nothing horrible happened in the night; scan the list of what’s on for the day; yes, I’m here alone. Check. Check. Check.

So, why am I shaking and where is this panic over a new day coming from? Am I sixth-sensing portents of doom? Has a shit asteroid been plummeting toward me in the night? Why is every drop of sadness in my body rushing in to welcome another twenty-four hours of the same old crap? Is the day now tainted? Have I contaminated the glass of opportunity by dropping in a dollop of shite with my quaking hands? Will these backed-up tears cloud my vision? Or drown me?

Tea. I need tea.

And thus begins my day.

It’s not every day that starts this way. Thankfully, I do go through periods where I wake up like a normal person, slowy and with a lovely touch of fog misting my corners. On those mornings my eyes open, the view presents itself in all its glory and potential rolls out in front of me. Those occasions take a second cup of tea to bring recognition of and appreciation for the ease of sliding into what had been tomorrow.

More often than not, however, it’s choking sad and shaking panic that form my salute to the sun.

I can trace the roots of this relatively new … what? … affliction? … waking nightmare? … free-floating anxiety … yeah, that’s it.

Close to eighteen months ago my waking moments changed drastically with the 6-am-ish phone call that told me my son was dead. And although this will not only sound trite, but obvious, I’ve not been the same since.

It’s a fact of life that the older we get, the longer our loss list grows. Over the past few years I’ve lost a lot … a son, a husband, a great love, all semblance of security, the last vestiges of youth, a load of nerve, hopes, dreams, wishes … even, from time to time, the will to live. (Yes, I have a list of gains, too, but I’ve just passed a week being thankful and that’s not what this is about this morning.)

I can deal with each and every loss … one-by-one, please … but first thing in the morning and before I’m fully awake? Not so well. Not at all, actually, since dealing isn’t what happens when I’m trembling and feeling the sting of tears before my eyes even open.

The result, of course, of this free-floating shit is an effort to flail a lasso about and pull it close enough to examine just what the fuck it might be. That sure pulls out the list, and as my mind leaps like a frog across sinking lily pads I am forced to recollect most every crappy thing that has happened, may happen or will happen. And I haven’t even peed yet …

At least I get words out of it, heh? Here are a few from this morning:

Good Morning, Sword

Within my realm I awaken each day
to a view of the sea and bird song
It is in my power to make what I may
But the first works I utter are:
What’s wrong?

I don’t see the sword hanging over my head
but I know that it’s there and suspended
by something no stronger than one single hair
if should break means the world is
upended …

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Shaking Hands With the Monkey … or not

Posted in Family, Health, Loss, tagged , , on November 27, 2010| 4 Comments »

I woke this morning doing the backstroke in a mire of melancholy, the blue funk that too often drains the color from my days, and with the mental image of a disembodied monkey’s paw reaching toward me; a consiliatory gesture, I suppose, that started me thinking of all I have wished for and what I would wish for now if I had wishes left.

After spending much of the past week paying careful attention to the many blessings in my life and processing the appropriate gratitude, I’m not surprised by this equal and opposite reaction today; Newton was, after all, a pretty bright guy, and he called it in that third law of his.

Over-thinking, as I do, I can’t just eat turkey thankfully … and I was SO thankful! Nope. The initial cranberry joy-burst must be followed by digestion, and although not a ruminant I do know the flavor of cud: It tastes of fear. It tastes of grief. Today it tastes of my mother who is not well and thousands of miles away, of Jaren, of lonliness and anxiety over whatthefuckhappensnext.

It also tastes of tired … tired of wishes.

Years ago I wrote a story I called “Beggars Would Ride”, a tale about a wish coming true. There was no talisman required, just a simple dedication to repeating the wish often and believing for a very long time it would be granted.

Although it involved no consequence as dire as as the horror of The Monkey’s Paw, it did speak to the futility of wishes made casually and persued without insight.

I don’t want to think in terms of a paw, but if I had a magic wand to wave would I? And if I had the nerve to give it a swish, what would I wish?

Of course, I wish for my children to live long and happily prosper, but know too well how little a wish, no matter how fervent, controls events. I could wish some things that happened hadn’t and others that hadn’t had, but where’s the good in that?

“Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.”

~ Epictetus

Sure. I can do that … I wish I had a cup of tea. Viola! I wish my dog would stop scratching. TaaDaa!

Easy enough, heh? Right up to, “I wish my mother wasn’t so miserable … “, and, “I wish I could be around to see Sam and Cj grown … “, or even simply, “I wish we were going to Mexico for Christmas …”.

It seems a wish is nothing more than jingling keys meant to draw attention toward the camera … say “cheese” … a bit of shiny fluff.

In some ways that’s fine, I guess. What’s the harm in, say, fantasizing about a world created by your own wish? How many hours are pleasantly spun out globally by people imagining a future after winning the lottery? A waste of time? You bet, but not without value to bleak lives.

For me today, though, it would take more energy than I would choose to muster for something so useless. Instead, I’ll work. Rather than wish this book I’m writing done, I will come closer to making it so.

I’ll also do what I can to arrange for tomorrow to be a better day. Wish me luck …

“Beggars Would Ride” is included in my book, “Papaya … and other seeds”, and was adapted for a short film called simply, “Wish” …

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Memo to self: It’s a day … live it!

Posted in Health, History, Loss, love, My Chinese Checkered Past, News, On getting older, science on November 18, 2010| 4 Comments »

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. ~James Thurber

Not that I have a lot of it spare, but I have been thinking about time quite a bit lately — the non-existance of, the travel through, the wastes of.

You reading me often and in various places must have noticed I have a monkey mind … and I’m not talking evolutionary remnants of a brow ridge but the aptly descriptive Buddhist term for one whose brain is: unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable. Yeah … that would be what happens under my hair most of the time, illuminated here in an article listing six steps to living in the moment.

“We’re living in a world that contributes in a major way to mental fragmentation, disintegration, distraction, decoherence,” says Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace. We’re always doing something, and we allow little time to practice stillness and calm.

When we’re at work, we fantasize about being on vacation; on vacation, we worry about the work piling up on our desks. We dwell on intrusive memories of the past or fret about what may or may not happen in the future. We don’t appreciate the living present because our “monkey minds,” as Buddhists call them, vault from thought to thought like monkeys swinging from tree to tree.

I’m a worrier by nature, a ponderer by profession and with a conscience that rarely has me leaving things to rest, all which have me agitating and ruminating when I should just be experiencing.

Today’s Huff Post puts me in this moment, however, so I pause to consider the ideas in an article called: How Often Are We on Mental Autopilot? You Might Be Surprised.

Although I’m not surprised a study suggests people spend 46.9% of their brain time doing a wander, nor that most don’t consider it a particularly happy path, there is some interesting science in the report.

They discovered that people have two distinct ways of interacting with the world, using two different sets of networks. One network for experiencing your experience involves what is called the “study by Kirk Brown found that people high on a mindfulness scale were more aware of their unconscious processes. Additionally these people had more cognitive control, and a greater ability to shape what they do and what they say, than people lower on the mindfulness scale. If you’re on the jetty in the breeze and you’re someone with a good level or mindfulness, you are more likely to notice that you’re missing a lovely day worrying about tonight’s dinner, and focus your attention onto the warm sun instead. When you make this change in your attention, you change the functioning of your brain, and this can have a long-term impact on how your brain works too.

Living where I do and working from my veranda, I have developed the habit of pulling myself out of my work or my ass or wherever my head might be at any given moment at intervals throughout the day to take some time to gaze upon and appreciate the beauty on offer. Right now, it’s a sapphire sea, the viridescent forest and a few puffy, white clouds navigating their way westward that fill my soul right along with my eyes. Throw in a couple of long-tailed tropic birds and the fruit bats in my jack fruit tree and I’m breathing again in that way I forget to breathe when my mind is full of whatever I’m writing, my heart is heavy with longing for what is no more and my nerves fray with concern over the illusive ‘what’s next’.

Inspired by beautiful music, I once wrote for the description of the video that went along with it:

“For me, one of the most precious gifts the universe gives is the Now, and the Now embraced is the Eternal Hug … a gift without conditions of past or future, but only the joy of the moment. And what is life but a series of moments?

The moments bringing those words are now in my past, but I can and do continue to conjure their joys.

It’s remembering to do it that’s the key:

“Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort… it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.” I love this last statement. Mindfulness isn’t difficult: the hard part is remembering to do it.

Having studied the work of Abraham Maslow way back when, I trust his assessment of moments.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

But life does do its bit to beat that out of a girl, doesn’t it?

I’m not one for wallowing in regrets, and it’s too often the future that robs me of moments; not the desire of it, but the anxiety over having some asteroid of shit fall from this clear blue sky and splatter on my life. It’s an ancestor who provides perspective and a bit of solace on this concern:

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time. ~Abraham Lincoln

True enough, thankfully, and one day leads to another.

Yep. This moment is now the past and the next is still the future and each letter I type becomes a sentence and sentence is a pretty good description of life.

As for quantum physics and that business about the past, like the future, being indefinite and existing only as a spectrum of possibilities … well, I rather like a poet’s version today:

Forever is composed of nows.
~Emily Dickinson”

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Serendipitous DooDoo … or is it VooDoo?

Posted in Friends, Loss, love, Men, Music I like, Poetry on November 11, 2010| 8 Comments »

Funny how that happens, the serendipity thing, but some friends are so close … even from 10,000 miles away … they know without knowing how things need to fit.

What am I on about?

Last night, just before turning out the lights — at about quarter after one — the following verse spilled from my fingers … heart … whatever … because that’s the way my heart and fingers cope.

He Calls

He calls
he says, Please …
don’t tell
Don’t tell about the history
Don’t tell about the future
promises
lies
compromise

He calls
he pleads, Please,
don’t let them know
the truth in the history
the vision of the future
promises
lies
compromise

He calls
we laugh, Please!
don’t forget
Don’t need to hear the history
Don’t need to know the future
promises
lies
compromise

He calls
we fight, Please!
don’t cry
Forget about the history
ponder on a future
promises
lies
compromise

He calls
we kiss, Please …
don’t judge
Glorious was the history
nebulous is future
promises
lies
compromise

Waking up this morning, what waits is music from Robbie, my cosmic twin, who has a keen grasp of my heart and often knows my mind before I do. (He’s a bit spooky, he is.) …

Now, I write a lot of poetry, and most is for therapeutic purposes, very little seeing the light of day, but on this bright, sunny morning in Seychelles, it seems this must.

Serendipty do … or something …

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It Smells Like Time Travel

Posted in History, Loss, Nature, News, On getting older, science, tagged , , , on November 6, 2010| 4 Comments »

Yes, today it’s about time. It is also about immortality. A weird mix, perhaps … especially in a post starting out with the intro from one of the dumbest shows in TV history … but in actuality is where the rubber meets the road we travel.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ~Albert Einstein

I like it. There’s something William Penn in that, since he did say, “For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity,” and that seems a freeing conversion.

But I’m not dead yet and today is an illusion. Hm. Does that mean I can just go back to sleep? Sure. But if today is an illusion, and so is tomorrow … the past, present and future … it’s probably a better idea to pay attention and see if I can figure at least some of it out. After all, if someone was to saw me in half someday, I wouldn’t sleep through that, even if it was merely deception of the entertaining kind.

Instead of plopping back to the pillow, I’m giving my mind a wander around the wonder of time, a favorite confused meander, prompted by this article in the Huff Post titled: Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time.

We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we’re usually referring to change.

Philosophers have been taking this on for as long as there have been philosophers, going back to the oh-so-cool-named Zeno, who came up with the Arrow Paradox mentioned in the article.

Zeno states that for motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one instant of time, for the arrow to be moving it must either move to where it is, or it must move to where it is not. However, it cannot move to where it is not, because this is a single instant, and it cannot move to where it is because it is already there. In other words, in any instant of time there is no motion occurring, because an instant is a snapshot. Therefore, if it cannot move in a single instant it cannot move in any instant, making any motion impossible.

… this paradox starts by dividing time—and not into segments, but into points.

Wrapped your head around that one? Then take on the the idea that “space and time are forms of animal intuition”, simply “tools of the mind and thus don’t exist as external objects independent of life.”

An experiment published in 1990 suggests that Zeno was right. In this experiment, scientists demonstrated the quantum equivalent of the adage that “a watched pot doesn’t boil.” This behavior, the “quantum Zeno effect,” turns out to be a function of observation. “It seems,”said physicist Peter Coveney, “that the act of looking at an atom prevents it from changing”. Theoretically, if a nuclear bomb were watched intently enough — that is, if you could check its atoms every million trillionth of a second — it wouldn’t explode. Bizarre? The problem lies not in the experiments but in our way of thinking about time. Biocentrism is the only comprehensible way to explain these results, which are only “weird” in the context of the existing paradigm.

We are limited by our biology, peeps, packed into a container that can only perceive space and time in relation to our point in both.

Oh! For Stephen Hawking’s brain, who said, “There is no way to remove the observer — us — from our perceptions of the world … In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.” The guy who finds thinking about paradoxes great fun and probably never gets headaches like the one I’m developing just writing this bloody post.

The whole series, plus another 5-parter, is on YouTube, so if you have the inclination you can fill up on his ideas … since it seems time is not a problem.

Check out the bit in the episode above about the worm holes that are everywhere. Tiny, yes, but I can’t help wondering what that’s all about and what would be different if there weren’t there.

Yes, those tiny, tiny passages through time exist in the quantum world, but is that not our world, too?

But this “two-world” view (that is, the view that there is one set of laws for quantum objects and another for the rest of the universe, including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year, researchers published a study in Nature suggesting that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of ions were coaxed to entangle, and then their properties remained bound together when separated by large distances (“spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it) as if there were no time or space. And in 2005, KHCO3 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges half an inch high, demonstrating that quantum behavior could nudge into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.

Do you realize that we all see our own noses all the time? It’s right there in our vision every time we open our eyes, but our brain ignores it. Our noses are big … some more than others … not anything close to microscopic, yet invisible to us unless we consciously focus attention. What in the nanosphere is just as ‘there’ that we’re missing?

Okay. So we know time is not linear, and although it’s trippy to watch someone talking on a cell phone in footage shot in 1928, that’s really not the point. Time travel … backward, forward, sideways … sounds like fun, sure — who wouldn’t want to hear Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address or tool around in a flying car or see themselves young and their lost loved ones walking around — but if there is no time, aren’t we doing that already?

Maybe we’re just missing our noses again …

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2010: The year I was rated XXX

Posted in Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, Sex on November 4, 2010| 10 Comments »

LIFE

Since we’re heading toward the end of another year, I’m starting the mental wrap … and rap … of 2010 and coming to some compelling conclusions. Yes, I’m sure I’ll be sharing more of these than is possibly wise over the next weeks, but there’s one that hit me upside the head this morning that cannot go without being harvested for blog fodder.

It has come to me in some weird bolt of lightning from a clear sky … it is lovely here today, but that’s merely an aside … that at the beginning of this year my love life officially received the XXX rating.

Although some might be ashamed to find themselves rated XXX, while others would be bursting with pride, for me it’s nothing more than the way it is. Neither an achievement, nor a humiliation, one thing leading to another, as it goes, leading to this.

Perhaps it’s my present work writing erotica that prompts this specific self-labeling, but there is no denying the assignation … or designation for those sidelined by the “ass” bit in a post about the Triple X … and I do know that I’m far from a rare woman in having earned three of the bloody things. (My mother is XXXX, so there’s something in the genes, perhaps.)

It has taken a lot of fortitude and no little imagination to reach the point where XXX marks the spot I inhabit, and that tendency I was born with to throw caution to the wind and indulge passion. Sure, it turns and bites me on the ass … and, yes, sometimes I even like that … but living and loving any other way has never seemed an option.

I put too much into it. I know this. Too often I’m full-bore, heedless, yes, yes, YES!

Three of those yeses earned me my X1, X2 and X3. In order of appearance: Stan, Scott and Mark.

Sorry, if you want to read about graphic sex buy the next book when it comes, but this post is about having been married, then unmarried, three times, and if you feel that I’ve lured you in with hints of satisfaction … well … welcome to the club … that’s happened to me three fucking times. Okay … three times that involved paperwork … more that never got that far.

Yes … yes, yes, yes led to ex, ex, ex, and although there’s probably a poem in there somewhere I’m in no mood to put this to verse today.

Rather, I’m pondering the possibilities of ever again contemplating heading toward the end of the alphabet that begins with M and ends in X, since that has been my only Xperience … although I’ve done bloody well with everything up to about F. (I did do the E thing for some years, and still have the ring, thankyouverymuch, but it hit L and that was that.)

It could be best that I take my XXX rating and rest on my laurels. Okay, rest won’t happen since I’m not one for ZZZZZZZZ as a steady diet, but I have no desire to add another X.

I now have a toy I call by the anglicised version of what in Spanish is pronounced Haysoooose , so named because, although I am far from religious, calling that out comes natural when I do. It is true he’s not much of a conversationalist, no challenge at all and missing all but the one limb, but I know where he is and what he’s up to, and we do have our rating in common.

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Dia de los Muertos

Posted in Family, Loss, On getting older, tagged , , on November 2, 2010| 9 Comments »

Today is the Day of the Dead, an event marked with celebration in Mexico, which is an idea that pleases me mucho.

The Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico can be traced back to the indigenous cultures. Rituals celebrating the deaths of ancestors have been observed by these civilizations perhaps for as long as 2,500–3,000 years.

There is something so rational about skeletal characters parading around cities while sugar skulls and bottles of tequila, mezcal and pulque get offered up for their “spiritual essence”, then consumed by those still living.

It makes more sense to me than dressing up as superheroes or princesses and ignoring the whole death thing, as seems to be more the case in the US.

Death being the one thing we should all be positive about as an eventuality, it is amazing how surprised most people are by it, and how stubbornly negative. As the ancients put it:

There’s nothing certain in a man’s life except this: That he must lose it. ~Aeschylus, Agamemnon

No one knows whether death is really the greatest blessing a man can have, but they fear it is the greatest curse, as if they knew well. ~Plato

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. ~Socrates

Yeah, yeah … all that wisdom does jackshit for bringing any cheer when we someone we love dies. FUCK! There’s not a day I breathe that doesn’t have the fact of my son’s death rattling agonizingly somewhere inside me, and that will not stop. Nor should it.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. ~Thomas Mann

It’s been 17 months today since Jaren died, and although I do now manage some days in a row without tears, I carry the loss of him wherever I am. As his mother, that’s not only my job, it is my privilege.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. ~Albert Einstein

Although I would not choose to picture the dead I love dancing in their bones, there is something very comforting in the fact that some do see the life in that, and having loved a Mexican for a long time I can so fully appreciate the bright colors, the music, the fiesta, the food and family, that can make a party out of death, and wish I’d had some of that growing up.

Instead, as Dia de los Muertos comes around this year, what I get is dreams … and that’s okay, too. I see my son in what I consider visits, not all pleasant, but I’ll take what I can get. Some are disturbing, but what’s more disturbing than having a dead child? I can take it.

In something that could almost seem like weird symmetry, my mom’s husband died yesterday. He was not a man I was close to in any way, but she was, and her loss is tremendous. He was 80 and sick and probably more than a bit tired of being 80 and sick, so I have to assume this turn of events in easier on him than it is on her.

A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. ~Stewart Alsop

I’m spouting what I can of words of comfort and hoping it takes only a small toll on her health and well being … she being neither young nor spectacularly healthy, herself … but I know only too well, as does she, having lost her father when she was only 12, that dealing with death is a game of solitaire.

For the moment, I can give her only this:

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. ~Marcel Proust

So, while in Mexico skeletons cavort carelessly … and how else would a skeleton cavort? … in celebration of death, the living cope as they can, not only with their dead, with with the idea of their death.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The Carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
~Emily Dickinson

Feliz el Die de los Muertos, todo. Feliz …Celebre, mi amor!

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“It takes a long time to become young.” ~Pablo Picasso

Posted in Fun, Hopeful thoughts, I wanna, Loss, love, My Chinese Checkered Past, Older women, On getting older on October 25, 2010| 12 Comments »

Not bad for an old broad ...

We turn not older with years, but newer every day. ~ Emily Dickinson

Some time back while perusing facebook, I came across a status update from a friend whose grandfather had just celebrated his 90-something birthday. In the comments it was asked if he’d spoken of any regrets he might carry from his many years of life. The answer went something like this:

The one thing I regret most is having felt old in my 50s and 60s. I wasted those decades because I had convinced myself that I was too old to enjoy them in many of the ways I well could have.

Of course!

To someone close to hitting 100, 50 is a kid only half way through, and with 50 more years on offer.

Although there is little to no chance I’ll ever get anywhere near 100, I’ve incorporated this man’s thinking and keep the words of Mark Twain handy:

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

And the fact is, I don’t mind. I don’t mind my age … I’m really crap with numbers, and like Erma Bombeck, “As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am”, and in dog years, I’m dead …. and I don’t mind the ages of the people in my life. I don’t mind that my youngest child is 5 and that my oldest is 41 or that my last boyfriend is 39 or that some of my friends are in their 70s and others are in their 20s. I don’t mind that my mother is close to 80 … although I wish she was more comfortable.

I do mind that my son died at 38, my father at 69 and the boy I could have grown old with at 19.

As that prolific sage, Anon, once said:

Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.

No. I don’t regret my years. In fact, there are few minutes that ring the regret bell for me.

I do, however, fear senectitude … not the numbers, but the toll … much more than I fear death, although both come in the natural order of things.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
~ Simone de Beauvoir

But I’m not there yet … neither destination … and although I’m faced daily with the evidence of my own personal senescence, I can still ignore much of it, so I do. I wear what I damned well please, parent little kids, dance with whomever I like, talk too much, sing loud, add tattoos to my collection, do tequila shots, take my top off at the beach … whateverthefuck I want to do, I do.

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. ~ John Mortimer

No shit.

Given that I’m single again, I have been giving some thought to just how many years of cute I have left in me, so was encouraged by an article in the news today that showed Jane Fonda, 72, and Raquel Welsh, 70, looking and obviously feeling good.

Despite their combined age of 142, Jane Fonda and Raquel Welch were still turning heads as they appeared together at a charity event in Beverly Hills.

Okay … it sucks that men get away with this all the time without anyone making a big deal of their age (Did anyone ever think Cary Grant at 70 or Gregory Peck at 84 looked anything but hot?), but this is Planet Earth in 2010, so I live with it.

I know people decades younger who are too old for me … lackluster, boring twits with little imagination and no curiosity, wastes of space and youth … and that’s depressing as hell. Thoreau was too right when he said, “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. ~ Henry Ford

I know that timing has been lucky for me. I’m a Boomer and people have been talkin’ ’bout my generation for decades. I’m aging along with the likes of Keith Richards, although he has years on me, as he wades back through his foggy past and reminds us all what a fuckin’ good time we’ve had … and how much fun we’re still having.

And because my generation has buying power, marketing is finally setting out to make us feel pretty … after all, we’re neither blind, nor stupid, so do know that what hugs a 20-year-old ass won’t ride quite the same on one that’s been ridden longer … and models in their 40s, 50s and 60s are making the point of beauty beyond presumed boundaries well.

‘It’s been really fulfilling to create shots that celebrate the wonder of getting older.
‘It’s important to challenge what we see in our media with a broader reflection of beauty.
‘Enjoy the magic of these women, their confidence, their attitudes and their allure.
‘These wonderful faces express the joy of getting older – not something we see enough of.’

Would I turn back the clock if I could? Nah, although I’m not opposed to a bit of the old nip and tuck to make it look like the calendar missed a few pages and may go that route someday. I see nothing wrong with someone opting for a trade-in on a new set of tits or less eye baggage. I, like Oscar Wilde, do have limits, however:

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

As Brigette Bardot so aptly put it: It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.

Yes … I’m ripening, and I’m okay with that. What was once firm isn’t so much now, my hair has less brown in it daily and I don’t shake off a hangover with anywhere near the ease I did a few years ago, but I’m still here and I’m still cute and I’m smarter than I used to be. And I have a good bloody time.

Unless I’m lucky enough to have death sneak up and bite me on the ass, the day will come, however, when I’ll wake up one morning and know I’m old. I’m hoping it will be a false alarm:

There is always some specific moment when we realize our youth is gone; but years after, we know it was much later. ~Mignon McLaughlin

Call me delusional, but I’ve not yet experienced that “specific moment” and I plan on putting that off as long as I can. After all …

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?
~Satchel Paige

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Celebrate the life of John Lennon

Posted in History, Loss, Music I like, News, tagged on October 9, 2010| 4 Comments »

Today I celebrate the life of John Lennon who would be 70 years old had he not been murdered almost 30 years ago. His life and his music changed the world, and his death marked the end of an era of hope and the beginning of the ’80s … a decade of shallow greed and small-mindedness that metastasized throughout our culture and manifests today in polarizing self-righteousness.

How much different our world might be if a poor excuse for a human had not gunned down John Lennon on the 8 December 1980 we cannot know, but that sick and simple act most certainly robbed us all of the wisdom of a great mind, the direction of a generous spirit, the sagacity of a benevolent participant in life’s parade, the perspective of a compassionate genius and a whole lot of music.

We are left with what he had time to give. I share some here today …

“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. ”

“If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.”

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”

“The more I see the less I know for sure.”

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

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Living the year the music died …

Posted in Celebrities, History, Loss, Music I like, My Chinese Checkered Past, On getting older, tagged , , on September 18, 2010| 12 Comments »

“I used to live in a room full of mirrors; all I could see was me. I take my spirit and I crash my mirrors, now the whole world is here for me to see.” ~ Jimi Hendrix

One of the great things about not being young is having a raft of experience that has pitched up in some interesting places during momentous occasions, so when a day like today comes along I don’t have only vague notions of pop culture-fed imaginings, but personal recollections that pull me along and surround me in a sea of memories I can touch, smell and taste.

I can cast my mind back to the day before today 40 years ago … September 17, 1970 … and conjure that world of long, flowing locks on everyone, Indian bedspread material curtains on widows of VW vans, the fragrance of brown rice bubbling with patchouli and weed undertones wafting just about everywhere, the tingly-tongue-taste about to bloom to bare feet from a dot of blotter.

Was there ever another such time? Has history ever gifted such a hopeful youth, one so committed and convinced it perched on the edge of greatness and could easily force feed a future on hope, dreams and hallelujah hallucinations of humanity humbled?

There was a war happening and we shook off our parents’ orchestrated baaing and sang back into their faces that we should all give peace a chance instead of playing dominos and watching our friends and brothers fall in organized lines … confident in the fact that if you want to end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud.

Much of mass media was kept well beyond our reach, but we had our music, and it took over the world. Any song had anthem potential and could become a rallying point, and those who made the music became heros … but everyday heros. The stars of those times inhabited the world we lived in, not some distant, exotic celestial body. They created music for the world, not at it, dissecting and reflecting common experience. (Even the most obscure themes were easily grasped when minds eagerly altered to span distance, ethnicity, exposure and any other differences that weren’t.)

Yes, it was a sanguine saga, a buoyant, confident and expectant generation, but by definition youth lacks experience and growing up had to happen.

Some of that growing up started today 40 years ago … September 18, 1970 … hence this post, today being the anniversary of the death of one of the best guitarist to ever pluck a string, Jimi Hendrix.

Sixteen days later, the world lost Janis. Nine months after that it was Morrison.

We had been accustom to death by war, by accident, by disease, but we’d rather missed the specter of death by life … by excess of passion, by a profligacy of youth, by presumption that power manifested assured immortality.

Or did we?

We grew up … for sure … grasped impermanence and assimilated the assumption of disillusionment into our core just like every generation before us. We’ve shifted gears and goals, darkened the rose tint on our shades, and some have developed a conservative shell to fend off what they once may have embraced.

But … and this is huge …

the music lives, and will outlive us.

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