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December 15, 2009It’s my lifeand I’ll cry if I want to! BUT I DON’T.Want to. Yeah, I know, life’s a bitch and then you die. Still, I won’t cry. I hit the double nickel this coming year and enter a new demographic. You know like when you click on a pull-down menu to pick the year of your birth and it takes like six seconds to scroll there. Born in ’55 and will be 55. I guess it’s time to reread Henry James’s The Ambassadors, a book I found intolerable in college but promised myself I’d read again “when I’m old,” thinking I’d understand this Strether guy better. Perhaps I should follow him to Paris to read it! Now there’s an idea. It does feature one of my favorite lines in literature, however: “Live all you can—it’s a mistake not to.” Which in my novel my young heroine turns into “O, love all you can! It’s a mistake not to!” “IT DOESN’T SO MUCH MATTERwhat you do in particular,” it goes on, “so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?” Indeed. And as Jenny Fields says in “The World According to Garp,” “You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life.” SO I WILL NOT CRY.Yes, I am older now, friends and family around me are aging, declining, decaying, dying, Life’s a fuckin’ miserable bitch. My knees get stiff when I bunch myself up on the couch. Unfolding my legs is like prying open a rusty aluminum stepladder. That’s the last time I will ever mention it. Will someone please tell me how to escape the prison of my mind? A few months ago, on the 124th birthday of D.H. Lawrence, September 11th, I started a column out by quoting him: “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.” Then I realized, “be still” was speaking to me. I had nothing to say. So you didn’t hear from me for a while. Was I just in a rut? as suggested to Sandra Bullock (in alcohol rehab) in “28 Days”: “You’re just in a rut, it happens to everyone.” “There is an entire world of people out there,” she claims, “who do everything right—they live right, they don’t drink, they don’t do drugs and they’re happy.” “THAT’S A CROCK OF SHIT!”her boyfriend retaliates. “They’re not happy, no adult human being is happy. People are born, they have a limited amount of time going around thinking life is dandy but then it happens to be tragedy strikes and they realize, life equals loss. The whole point of the game is to minimize the pain caused by that equation. Now some people do it by having kids, by making money or taking up coin collecting, and others do it by getting wasted. Having that little switch in the head, turn the hot light off and the cool light on…everybody hurts everybody, it’s the human condition!” FUCK THE HUMAN CONDITIONStill, having a life, that is the real adventure. After all, I’ve not yet had any of the “selected illnesses” or “difficulties in daily living” that the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project reveals have been experienced by those from age 57-85. I just heard something from out of my childhood on my little Mission Dolores street—the scraping of a woman’s high heels on the sidewalk. I used to hear my mother’s heels approaching the house, when coming home from work, and associated that sound with adulthood—the someday that I would be wearing heels (to work). Actually, at work my mother tripped on some loose carpet, broke about a billion bones in her foot and could never wear heels again. I’ve worn heels, and I’ve worked, but I never really attained the status of feeling like a grown-up. Maybe in my next demographic. In the meantime, all I need is a train ride. Email me your address and I’ll send you a postcard from the Denver Railroad Museum. For real. LOSE TRACK OF TIMEis their motto. That’s the (train) ticket!
If you like, the author can also raid the Depot General Store for a Galloping Goose coffee cup. This smart, gray mug features the famous “Running Goose” with the Colorado Railroad Museum logo. Perfect for hot and cold beverages alike! ------------------------------------------------------------ Her last breath expired,
This is my life, and I don't give a damn for lost emotions copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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