(Eric Fischl)
"Don't you have a doctor?"
"No. I hate going to doctors."
"But you need a family practitioner. You need someone who can prescribe you things."
"I need a doctor, probably, and I certainly need prescriptions, but I hate dealing with them."
I do hate them. I should have all the codeine I want. Xanax, too. I hate someone being allowed to tell me what to do. I am. . . what shall I say. . . rebellious?
The thunder gives way to rain. It is a wet October. People abandon me in droves now. What have I done? I believe in curses.
The haircut is not so good. I hate sitting at the beauticians looking into the mirror at myself. It is awful. There is no reason for it.
I tell a story to the woman cutting my hair about a friend of mine, older than I, who recently fell for a women much his junior. "There is no fool like an old fool," I told him before it all went wrong. "I know," he said, ears full of clay.
"'April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain.' Remember that?" I ask him. "Maybe it is better to be dead," I say.
"No, it is better to be alive," he tells me with a grin.
He hasn't much experience with this, I thought. But it is fun to watch.
It is slightly depressing to read about the obsession of older men and younger women when you are no longer a younger woman. :)
ReplyDeleteMaybe not really depressing but oddly or something. Perhaps because I don't share the obsession. If it is even an obsession. I don't really know. I've never been that age-sensitive in either direction.
My cousin just got her "chin done" or something -- looked like a sort of facelift to me. But she didn't want to call it that. I think it looks strange -- like her head is balancing on a skinny neck. I seem to be able to pick out all the plastic surgery victims -- one came in to shop at the store yesterday -- she too shared that same lollipop head thing. Maybe someday all the women over 40 will one day look exactly the same. I dunno.
People age it is who we are. Or maybe because one of the people I love more than anything in the world would not be considered "physically beautiful" but he is the most beautiful person I've ever encountered -- literally, his beauty makes me cry, still after 5 years going.
I always think of Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn you know beauty is truth and truth is beauty and all that stuff. When this sort of stuff comes up.
The Wasteland. I haven't read it in 6 months or so.
I've just booked an apartment in Paris for April 12 - 22nd. I'm taking Hannah for her 16th birthday, my mother for her 81st. Beautiful females, both.
I hope it is not too cruel.
P.S. I have not doctor either and hate them but my best friend's husband is one so I call on him for favors.
P.P.S. SeanQ wrote something the other day that I thought was interesting/important -- he said something like -- bloggers earning their readers trust. It made me nervous. It seems a trick or a ploy. But I think it is not just bloggers -- writers/artists -- those who have a need to share something created. The Lie.
I've trusted you. And I'm not too trusting.
It is depressing simply to get older unless you are rabid in your belief that there is a wonderful afterlife awaiting you. It is depressing to disappear in gradually larger and quicker steps in a youth-based society. But everything loves youth. Watch wild animals choose their mates. Even geese.
ReplyDeleteYouth is truth and so is old age. Different truths.
And so are sickness, illness, disease, and physical injury.
We have very limited ranges of truth and beauty. And like Anderson's "grotesques," we become deformed in taking one to be ours.
But human foibles are the stuff of art. And those are truths, too.
Send me the address and I'll come to Paris to be the photographer. I guess I missed Quinceanera. Quel dommage!
I mean. . . since you trust me :)