6-27-09

Today wasn’t all crap. The sun came out. I got my hair done. I ate ice cream. So in that way it was good. But in lots of other ways, it sucked. Like for starters, waking up here in a place that feels alien, temporary, budget. Every morning since I moved in, the very first thing I think about is the fact that I’m here. In this bed, under this window, in this room. I don’t believe in Fate and Luck and stuff like that. Actually it’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I believe more in the cold hard reality of choice. Fate and Luck are like salt & pepper sprinkled over our choices. So when I’m lying in bed in the morning, thinking about how it is that I’ve awakened in this fatigued-looking room, I find myself reflecting on the choices I’ve made along the way. Some good, some bad. Like everyone else, I suppose. But it’s an easy place to avoid, especially since it’s summer. Although you wouldn’t know it by the weather. Every day it rains. Every damn day the sky is laden with clouds—dark, thick, brooding ones. Every day I think, well, this has got to be the end of the rain. But instead another day dawns and the clouds are there and the rain follows soon after. But today, like I said, was good in that regard. The sun was out all day.

So after I woke up and finished bumming out about being here, I took a bath. I take a shower one day, and a bath the next. I like the variety. And I’m not one to go a day without bathing, although I think plenty of people do. I shave my legs everyday, too—even in winter—which freaked out a friend of mine once when I told her. She lets her legs go in the winter, she said. But the hair on my legs would grow as thick as a pair of long johns, and I’m not into that. In fact, it’s a bit of a job keeping the hair at bay when you’re dark like me. So I stay on top of that kind of thing.

After that, I went and got my hair done. What a mood lifter when you come out 90 minutes later, grays gone, bleached and tired out hair miraculously turned into rich dark silkiness. But while I was sitting in the chair, with those funky smelling chemicals lathered over my head, I read one of those magazines you always find in hair salons. Not the ones with all the celebrities in it (almost none of whom I know anymore), but one of those magazines for younger women that focus on fashion and lots of stuff about men: loving men, having sex with men, understanding men, finding men, etc. For some reason, I thumbed through that magazine today, despite bringing a book with me that I’m really enjoying. God, how depressing it was to read all that, and yet, I couldn’t put it down. That magazine makes us seem so desperate. So uncertain. So in need of instruction. Really, it’s there to make us half nuts with the pressure—disguised, of course, as “help”—of catching and keeping a man so we’ll buy products and services to do that. Even more depressing was that I read the damn thing. Couldn’t put it down. Was sort of disappointed when Lady (yes, that’s her name) called me over to the sink to rinse the color out of my hair. Wait, I wanted to say, I’m not finished reading the 100 tips on how to please your man in bed. There were a few in there, I have to admit, that were a revelation to me. I mean, how do they know these things? Was there a small group of staff assigned to pen this article? Was it written by one person? Did they assemble a focus group of men to be the definitive answer on blow jobs, 69s, and different styles of intercourse? Send out questionnaires? I learned, for example, that men like it when you get on top, but that you should lean back and spread your legs really wide so the guy can see himself pumping in and out of you. Yet about ten tips later, they said that you should lean in close to your lover, when you’re on top, so that you won’t be self conscious about how much your breasts and stomach jiggle when you move. You’ll enjoy it more, and so will he, they said. So which is it? I really wanted to know—which, when you think about it, is rather depressing for a woman my age.

So the sun was out, and after I left the salon, I went to the pool. I didn’t want to fuck up my new hair color, and so I plunked an enormous straw hat on my head—and immediately became, I felt, a cliché. White. Suburban. Female. 40s. Straw hat. If anyone saw me, they’d read me one way, and not the way I am at all. (Which is what way? Half the time these days, I really don’t know. But I know it ain’t that.) I set up my chair, got out my book. I love the water, the ocean especially, but pools are a close second. I love the way the sun glints off the water in a pool, especially in the late afternoon. I like the smell of chlorine, the sound of people diving and splashing. And I like to swim naked in pools, although clearly that wasn’t happening today. If the White Suburban Woman in her 40s took off her bathing suit and jumped naked in the pool, it would be like a scene right out of “Jaws.” People running for cover. Leaping in fear. What is that?? We love our youth—especially when it comes to women. Pure unadulterated youth. Please, woman, put your clothes back on! So of course I sat there, a cliché in her straw hat and one-piece bathing suit. And for a long while I read. But even that was hard because the book I’m reading is magnificent. So good that you have to take breaks to think about everything he packed into that passage. Or how he rendered an image so perfectly, so creatively. Pure genius that the rest of us can never achieve, even with an infinite number of revisions. A voice that comes along only once or twice in a generation. And yet I happen to know, because I’ve gone to see him read, that he struggles as an artist in this fucked up country—this place of the Almighty Celebrity (and their pontifications that I once read you can have text messaged to your cell phone throughout the day for a small subscription fee), and it made me sad to think about all that talent and no one knows who he is. No one cares. Hell, no one reads anymore, so who gives a damn about some writer when there’s so much going on with Tom Cruise and Angelina—or whoever’s in the limelight these days. (Actually Michael Jackson’s in the limelight today, but that’s a whole other thing to write about. Maybe tomorrow.)

So I put the book away after a while, and just watched the people around me. Observations? The human body is interesting in its delivery and evolution. Boys thin as pencils, and their middle aged selves with hair sliding off the top of their heads, landing instead on their backs. Bellies hanging over their trunks. And the nubile girls in bikinis traveling in packs. Arms folded over their new breasts, shoulders slouched—but certain they will never end up like the White Suburban Woman in the Straw Hat in her 40s in the one-piece suit in the chair by the side of the pool. And while I sat there, a massively pregnant woman waddled by—a Vehicle really, her sole purpose these days to use her body to deliver a new person to this crazy, upside down world. And it made me think about the fact that we fall in love with one kind of person, and through circumstance and expectation, that person often quickly becomes someone very different. Like the pregnant woman whose body will take a beating from being that vehicle, and who will pump her breasts, clutter a once easy-going life with plastic toys and lots of gear, who will eventually come to fantasize about a much different life. Or the bald headed man with the hairy back who looks around his daydreaming wife, to the TV screen behind her. So few of us know how to navigate all that change.

But don’t get me started on love tonight because I am not in a good place when it comes to that. In fact I’ve never been in a worse place. Actually that’s not entirely true. Many years ago, in a town many miles from here, I was left by the man I loved to suffer alone the physical and emotional aftermath of an abortion in my 9th week of pregnancy. He was so damned relieved to have that baby out of the picture that he couldn’t bear the sight of my suffering, my desperation. Instead, he went whistling down the front steps (I swear I remember him whistling, although who can really trust memory?), leaving behind an enormous specialty sandwich, wrapped in wax paper, that he bought me on the way home from the abortion clinic. You hungry? he asked, as he drove and I sat staring out the window of the passenger side, hiccupping after sobbing my way through that terrifying experience. I couldn’t speak and so he took that as a “yes.” Was grateful for something to do, and so that’s how that huge sandwich ended up on my coffee table that hot day in June all those years ago. Through my contractions, I watched the wax paper slowly unfold after he deposited me on the couch and the sandwich on the table. So, no, I’m not hurting like that. Nothing can be as bad as that. But I’m hurting tonight, just the same.

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