Did y'all do the starving brain sucker joke? You massage someone's head with hand in an attitude of a spider doing push-ups and say, "You know what this is? It's a brain sucker. You know what it's doing? Starving."
[SUMMARY: Well... laugh.]
Last night as I was (trying to) fall asleep, I realised I had a handful of semi-related bits† I could blog about.
During the drive in this morning, I was rolling them around, forming them into readable chunks.
As the elevator doors closed to carry me to the 5th floor this morning, I realised I'd forgotten... most of them.‡
[SUMMARY: It's hell getting old.]
Coincidentally enough, most of what I was thinking wasn't maybe so much philosophy as exploration of aging and the sentimental realm.
[SUMMARY: Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.]
For instance, you know the two things I find make me feel old quickest? When kids I used to babysit and haven't seen in years are getting married and having kids and when teachers I haven't seen in years are retiring.
Note the common element.
When you don't see something on a regular basis,§ it arrests at the last place you saw it.
John Kron, my high school drama teacher and director just staged his last musical. He's going to continue teaching, but he probably won't be directing anymore, according to his wife.¶
When I read that, I felt old. He hasn't taught me in years, so he is still my teacher, my director, my mentor... and that's where he stays in the theatre of my mind. To have that jarred loose by reality... *brrrrrrrrrrrrr*
[SUMMARY: Change is good, change is good, keep telling yourself, "change is good."]
Last week, a dear friend tracked me down.%
Mark was the exotic Englishman# who magically appeared my senior year in high school wearing an army green jumpsuit over a Danger Mouse shirt and sporting a new wave sort of haircut.
He sat quietly by himself in the blue commons area,†† checking through homework. Unbeknownst to Mark, a group of were giggling and whispering over him as is the way with teenaged girls. Being the audacious one in the group,‡‡ I bounded over and issued an imperious invitation.
I suspect with that action, I sealed Mark's fate. He could have been the toast of the town, but he fell into the wrong crowd.
Mark was my first gay friend.
Oh, I knew guys I suspected were gay. I knew guys who "turned out" to be gay later. But back in the 80's, there weren't Gay Student Unions and gay couples going to prom and such. It was still a little on the closeted side.
When Mark came out to me, I wasn't nearly as supportive as I could have been. Should have been.
He wrote in his creative writing journal, "I kind of want to fuck Debbie's brains out. Actually, I feel the same way about Dale."
"I'm not sure I'd let anyone know that," I said.
Bad Marin. Bad, bad Marin.
Enough of True Confessions. I hereby humbly and with full heart apologise to Mark for dorking what could have been a shining moment in human relations.
What's really important to today's theme, though, is that Mark said in his last email, "I've been ridiculously nostalgic of late; could be getting to 41 and wondering if the second half of my life will be any better than the first."
"Forty-one?" I thought, "I didn't know Mark was that much older than me."
The memory is the first thing to go.
The logic circuits short out soon thereafter.
You may remember the big deal I made about my 40th birthday. Please remind me occasionally -- apparently I don't.
I still think of Mark every time I see Danger Mouse.§§ I can see him so clearly as the 18-year-old Boy London. I can't reconcile either of us with 41.
[SUMMARY: Oh, dear. Denial is the saddest of all emotions.]
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Um. That's it. I know there was more. Sometime yesterday, there was even a point. I suspect if I could either remember all the bits and bobs OR if I could remember the point, I could back my way into the rest of it and y'all would be very impressed with my acuity and my mad observational skillz. Possibly also my funny.
For now, I think you should take my car keys.
[SUMMARY: If this is Tuesday, what fresh hell will Thursday bring?]
Knitting. I really just need to get back to the knitting. That will make it all better.
†FOOTNOTE (crossed): Semi-related in that I thought I could stretch to call them all "philosophical."
‡FOOTNOTE (double-crossed): *ahem* I don't think we need to get into specific numbers here.
§FOOTNOTE (swerved): And by, "you," I mean "I."
¶FOOTNOTE (paragraphed): It is duly noted that nobody's carving anything in stone. There were a lot of caveats and disclaimers in the email she sent.
%FOOTNOTE (percented): Through the magic of Google.
#FOOTNOTE (pounded): Englishboy? He also had this cool "Boy London" shirt, black and white kinda like "Frankie Says" shirts. We swooned. We called him Boy London for the longest time...
††FOOTNOTE (ddouble-ccrossed): Until right after I graduated, the school was divided into four commons areas, each one home to a particular class's lockers. They were blue, red, green and yellow. You could eat anywhere you wanted, but it was rare (f'r instance) for red commons freshmen to breach the senior blue commons. They've since filled in the commons areas and made them classrooms, adding one large cafeteria at the end of the school.
‡‡FOOTNOTE (doubble-crossssed): Trust me, that's saying something. We were actors, for fuck's sake. Audacious was our bread and butter. Mostly because we were geeks whose only distinguishing factor from the AV crowd was our audacity.
§§FOOTNOTE (awhirl with nostalgia): "Keep your pecker up, Penfold!"
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