December 17, 2014

Shedding, discarding and permalinks

Once you trot down couple of decades with the acceleration of a downhill ride, defenses and fences come down easy, long-held beliefs melt like spent wax on a candle, but fires burn hotter, with a glow strong and memorable, like the last spark just before the flame's extinguishing.
Fire for connection, fire for the few and chosen, fire for examining your journey of being.

The progression is as such: a stiffness coats everything, from joints to emotional responses to the old car door that refuses to badge in the morning. Melancholy varnishes that stiffness with the appropriate citron- to support the grey. Then a cold northern gale sweeps up the dust and scatters the pieces adrift, maybe starting up a new thought on someone or niggling out a sensation on an unsuspecting and un-acculturated, tender still, pupil of the human condition. Or, it just falls down as a minuscule layer of detritus in the gutter of life. The end of the fire is ashes, carbon and then ...

Then  comes the long wait for permalinks to flesh out roots, to travel another road, to cloak another Odysseus's body with the scars of the journey.

And so is the start of Winter.

September blahs

Has been a long while..

What is it with these super-constructed coats and jackets and the pseudo-psychedelic prints this season?
Anxiety of our era, relayed thru commercial goods, people trying to insulate the bareness of inner life, lest it is so obvious to all, and the bleakness of future existence with a trippy, nostalgic like packaging of MODA.
The deja vu of '80's  and its dubious splendor is so disappointing, so stuck- in.

I watched "Breathless" on PBS and I was simultaneously overcome by the longing to identify along with  confirmation  of  "you are now middle-aged or just past it- and the downhill has started". What a wicked candy that soap opera was! Same like Mad Men, different wrapper.

The fab '60's, I wanted that intoxicating feeling of cutting(-edge) rebellion, brewing along with  things past their expiration date, like misogyny and male primacy, the dynamite  smacking of   unhindered desire and that hope, the one  that had sprung wings of endless possibilities, the one  that only youth claims as primary power. Ha, you'd think that public television station  programmers plotted to give pleasure and scraps of hope to  lonely middle-aged folks, who could stand back to back shows like "Breathless" and the long-lost and unearthed- just- for- Labor- Day- weekend Beatles "Mystery Tour" movie'.

OK, back to MODA, I now get past the invisibility cloak of pushing-60-something -person only if I wear extravagantly expensive clothes for my Goodwill persona, hard to find ones, paired with prime-sanctioned family heirloom jewelry of baroque dimension, like a garish men's gold Omega watch and an even bigger diamond ring of Macedonian aspirations. Throw in a silk turquoise
scarf from the '68 Winter Olympics. I then get looks. Maybe, mostly: the short, once-over ones of men; and the grief and piss of the young waitress that compliments my teenager profusely yet spits at me with her dismissal; the twice- look-over of young women, making mental notes of outfits and visual statements- honey, practice is the language of age and the currency of perfection.

"What is the listing prize, this Pembroke table is exquisite! "$6,600, of course you probably  know better than I  the worth of such a fabulous period piece, I think it is 18th century".

Back to the obnoxious WholePaychecks  for a French rose and why on earth they pull them out of the shelves before Labor day is over?????

The bitter old bird on the occasion of her 56th birthday