As the song says... it's a gorgeous day. Of course being the Night Nurse, I spent half of it asleep and another couple hours perusing the web. Not a good use of time but as I get OLDER, it seems I have less and less ability to do what I should do before I do what I want to do. I'm all about what do I want to do. And what I need to do today, is apply latex paint to wooden house surfaces. These days will not last and like the ant/grasshopper thing...I'll be sorry later. I've been the Ant for so long, forever. Now I'm kind of Grasshoppering about life and it's not working out real well frankly. Not doing what you should do isn't my style, so I feel indolent, useless and GuILTY. Always guilty.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the aunt, never the Mommy. Always the smiling standby friend who gets your mail and watches out for your house when you're on a nice vacation that I never take myself. The Rock. Well, the rock gets eroded over time too, and some day you sail up with your ship full of problems and bullshit drama and there's no fucking rock. HA!!! The rock is sitting on her ass knitting a sock. For her own DAMN self!! HA!! Maybe having COFFEE with cream in it.
I had a friend once, We'll call him Art - who had this way of sort of very gently, very softly letting you know everything about you was just WRONG. He told me I drank too much coffee and that people in South America drank something else and that they'd been keeping it to themselves because it was SO good. Well, I'm thinking....people in South America are kind of poor arent they? If they had something that was really good, like Say an Emerald, or COFFEE - they'd fucking sell it wouldn't they? So if this stuff is so damn good..... Well, I didn't listen to him. My mother's friend Dorothy's mother was about 101 and she drank BLACK coffee that had been sitting in the pot all day and she looked pretty healthy. She was an avaricious old broad, owned a boatload of real estate and made money up till the minute she died. My own Grandmother for who I was named, also drank coffee in this big silver pot that got as hot as fire and it of course condensed all day and was like boot black in the evening. She lived to be 99 1/2. So there. Then they come out with a study that says it prevents liver cancer. I had Hepatitis B when I was a kid, and being a nurse who has worked in the university hospital system, done transplant nursing, I know that liver cancers develop from hepatitis. So, I've pretty much been waiting for that shoe to drop the last 10 years or so. I read that coffee prevents liver cancers, and here I am at age 51 looking pretty damn good I might add....working on my LARGE cup #3 for the morning (and I'll have another pot around dinner time....) The Defense rests.
So, about this friend. What a complicated mess. I am not going into all of it, but suffice it to say I made a complete mess of it. I don't know what got into me. I think it was midlife crisis. There I was just wanting to get a little crazy, and he kept pointing to the diaper aisle in the drug store saying things like "good thing we don't need any of those" or some other oblique reference to children. At first I didn't pick it up, so in his frustration he had to get more blunt. "I don't want kids." he said. " I don't even want to adopt any. I just want little dogs." I looked at him. I blinked. I scratched my head. "Are you talking to me?" I replied looking at him to be sure he wasn't having some kind of a temporal lobe seizure. "Because if you're talking to me, I'm 47 years old. That ship has sailed. NOT on my to do list." But he didn't believe me for some reason. I even told him that I wasn't willing to put myself through it physically, altho at that time I thought I could, but I didn't want to end up in the wheelchair with the baby propped on my lap after I had a big stroke or something. There are bizarro women out there trying to have babies at advanced ages, maybe they just want to be on the cover of the Enquirer. Not me sister. I work a lot, I sleep a lot and I don't want the latter interfered with. I have dog that wakes me up when it storms and he's almost made his last trip to ground from a second floor window a time or two.
So what happened there? I still don't know. It should have been pretty obvious to me that it wasn't going to happen with him, what I wanted. And what did I want? I wanted to travel, go to plays and drink cocktails in beautiful places with him. I wanted to walk on the beach and talk about French history, or Global Warming, or new shoes that we'd look for tomorrow. Whatever. You know? Life. I wanted some life in the quiet moments under a ceiling fan in the summer. Cube steak and lemon merangue pie and isn't it your turn to go get the coffee? That's ALL I wanted. And he couldn't spare it apparently.
Well, I had it for a few months. Mostly in my head, but when I did see him I was happy. I was happier than I've ever been in my life. EVERYBODY I knew said so. I was shocked to realize, they had never seen me happy. I was kind of Bob Dylany happy - not expecting much and not disappointed with whatever I got - and I've resumed speed in that lane. He seemed happy. Seemed being the operative word in that sentence. He has problems. Divorce problems, divorced daddy problems, room mate from hell problems, money problems, health problems and Reality problems. The thing he tried to divorce, was reality. Guess what Muchacho? No workee. Reality is like gravity. You can ignore it, but drop a pricey Lalique vase and guess what? Gravity creates reality. No more vase.
Gravitas. The Weight, as the Band says. The Weight of it.
So life goes on. It's like weaving and here's my thought for today, a weaving analogy. BTW, I weave, so there fore I'm a weaver. Descartes would have gone for this one. We're all connected threads, weaving a life. A piece. Some parts will be stronger, heavier, and then there will be sparse parts. But you can't really cut if off the loom and start over - cutting it off the loom and folding it up kind of mimics death. It's over and there it is. Put it away and forget about it, maybe somebody will find it later and investigate it's meaning, it's history - but as work in progress - it's not. The threads have to remain attached for that. For living art. You could start something completely different on the same warp, but it's not going to work as a functional thing, it's going to have a very odd appearance anyway. So what will it be? Art? Something that hangs on the wall as a curiosity to provoke thought. I guess some people's lives are just that. They don't work into the strength, or the usefulness of life. They're there as Art.
So we'll call this guy out of respect for his anonymity, Art. I've seen what happens when some one tries to hold him down, and tho that was never my purpose I think that's what happened ultimately. He saw himself getting his laundry done, his back rubbed and his problems dealt with rationally and systematically - somebody saying things to him in the car after a lunch with friends like "OHMYGAWD!! Honey, did you hear what so and so said about such and such?" and he turned and ran the other way. What he wants is his freedom. Freedom to spend his nights waking up every so often and clicking the light function on his watch so he can acknowledge the hours of night passing in sleeplessness as he worries about the coming hours of daylight: and those pass by in worry and torment too. He doen't have the nameless, faceless thing he wants then either. The last night I spent with him I couldnt' sleep. I guess I had caught whatever he had that made you so edgy that you couldn't even sleep anymore.
It was mostly my married friends who warned me against him, from the beginning. One of them said "you've never been poor, you don't know what it's like - don't do this". I am still not sure how I was going to be poor because of him. I didn't want to marry him. I just wanted a partner in crime. Another friend said "well, you don't have many problems in your life. You think you can take his on and solve them all. You can't. He'll just make more". Which reminds me of the Despair.com poster called Strife of the 2 polar bears in the lake and the caption that says "as long as we have each other, we'll never run out of problems". I laugh at that, I don't dwell on the darker meaning.
My own poster of him would be of a wild horse. A beautiful, untamed behemoth running wild out on the plains. One toss of his mighty head, and the thundering of his hooves and he's gone. He will not be back. He doesn't want to be tamed, owned or even sheltered from the elements. He can handle it on his own. Alone. So to the ex-roommate, the ex wife, the parents, the kids, and all the Ex somethings and to everyone else Art has run away from I say: let's assume we all get the same treatment. You knew me when, but you don't know me now. I'm different. So to Art I say this. Okay, baby, you're different. You've changed. You're not the person I knew and I will never know you. I can only stand by and watch you run across the plains because I can't run to keep up with you.
I have found in my life, that all men think they are the wild stallion. But the Cubed steak, the lemon merangue pies, the laundry hung outside so the sheets smell fantastic, the little Life things that say to some one getting out of the shower and into the new underpants you bought them " I love you" - turn them all into lapdogs. And tho they hate being considered lapdogs and occassionally have to go stand in a tree and shoot a deer or something equally pointless, it means they aren't completely domesticated. Which is what Mona Lisa was smiling at, BTW. We all do, baby. We all do. It's our Women's Secret, and now that I've let it out, they're going to kill me.
So Art. I loved you. Well and true. But you need to run, and because I love you still I say this. Long may you run, my love. Long may you run.
