No, I was thinking of me, and the fact, that well, I'm still thin. Not as thin as I was, but I'm still, as we like to say in the parlance of subtlety, slim. I know the difference, because I used to be gaunt. Now, I'm (go ahead, say it) forty-ONE years old and my metabolism has slowed down to the point of other mere mortals. I'm now slim. Oddly enough, my bones are bigger, if my waistline isn't. They broadened. I didn't know they did that. I knew they got longer and eventually stopped, but nobody told me my shoulders and ribcage would start heading east/west the moment my legs and arms gave up on going north/south. (Good thing too, I was worried I'd end up dragging my knuckles on the ground and ruining years of finely tuned manicures...)
Which made me think, the body changes, and you my dear, aren't, or haven't. Inside that is. You're still fighting the same demons you've been fighting since you were twenty-one, and really, isn't it time you gave them up and embraced some new ones? I mean really darling, ring the changes a bit, sweetie.
The question of the millennium of course, that bothered me, was, how? Especially when you don't know what it is that's wrong to begin with? An nebulous greyness, a fogpatch in the will, thwarted love, lack of material success, excessive emotional attachment, loneliness. I mean, hell, it's all there for the asking if you want to label it accurately.
The problem as far as I can see, is one of discipline. My will has never been able to match my emotional storms. Despite my best intentions, my rowboat of positive thinking is forever stuck wafting about in the monsoons of my emotional sturms and drangs. Welcome to Hurricane Trev. Bailing buckets to your left.
But that's beside the point.
I had an unproductive day. My fault. I was depressed and couldn't cope with the disaster that is my apartment. I picked at it, cleaned the kitchen, straightened out a table, dusted a few knicknacks, and then thought, screw it, and went out for an ice cream cone. I came back a few hours later, (I also got a coffee, no ice cream cone lasts that long, even in Siberia. Well, MAYBE Siberia.), and it was still sitting there. The disaster. Looking around at papers and books everywhere, I sighed, and I kept thinking of one of my heroes, my dear demented Tallulah, and how, when her father gave her money to live in New York as a youngster to seek her fortune as an actress, she spent her food allowance on a maid, and ate off the plates of friends who dined at the Algonquin Room instead. Very practical I thought, diet wise if you're trying to lose weight, (she was), but the truth is, I'm far too reserved, and now, too old for such a stunt, although I love the idea of it. Plus, I'm far too thin to get away with it for long. I'd collapse from an anemic spleen and a starved ingrown disposition.
More pointedly, I'm too Canadian and plebeian to even entertain the idea of a maid for an abode this size, (think postage stamp with running water and you'll get the general idea) although the inner fascist diva in me wouldn't blink twice at the thought. But I grew up with generations of farmers and working class people before me who'd spin in their graves at speeds that would make Wonder Woman dizzy if I ever got a cleaning lady, maid, sorry, domestic technician to help me out with this Augean stable I lovingly refer to as home.
If the outer is a reflection of the inner, then I am seriously fucked. Oddly enough, my finances are O.K., usually they're dire, but today they're alright. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm still poor, but at least I'm not mired in debt. All things considered, I'm not doing too badly. I'm not satisfied, but I realized long ago, that I never would be. That I would always be striving for more, or at least wanting a state of being as close to my ideal as I could get. Of course, you never get that in this life, and if you do, you're usually too stupid to realize it when you've got it. I had it as a child, but it's eluded me ever since.
I suppose listening to Annie Lennox's DARK ROAD is hardly helping matters any, beautiful song though it is.
No, I got to worrying and wondering today about what exactly it was I'd done with my life. Nothing so far as I can see. I've made a lot of friends, and been loved by a lot of people and I know that if I got run over by a turnip truck tomorrow, there'd be a lot of devastated people out there, but I mean, what past mourning, have I really got left? What exactly have I DONE? Nothing really. No children. No relationships or partnerships that I can look back at with a rosey hue and think, "them were the days...", a job which barely pays the bills, but it's a job, certainly not a career, and not one I embrace on most days. I've written twelve bad plays, made a half-assed attempt on a novel, and I have a B.A. that I just managed to get by the skin of my teeth.
But. while sitting here staring at these horrible sage walls (I will paint these if it KILLS me) sipping peppermint tea, and looking at an article on kids at Sick Kids Hospital, I felt a burning shame, and thought to myself, "You haven't got cancer or a threatening illness you selfish bastard, you have all of your limbs, you're healthy, and you've seen a lot more of life than these wee angels will likely ever have the chance of seeing, and you're not the parent of one of these darlings who has to stand helplessly by and watch this inconceivable suffering, no, you don't have to go through any of that, and still you have the nerve to whine and complain?" How dare you?
I quite agree. How dare I? Stop it now. Just stop it.
Life is nothing if not relative, and although one cannot begin to compare sufferings as though it were a contest, (nor I think, should one) it does help to remind oneself of what real acute suffering can be, and then put one's life into perspective from that vantage point. I AM lucky. Ridiculously so. Perhaps my life isn't what I want it to be, but whose is, really anyway? I have love in my life, maybe not the romantic fantasy everyone wants, but it's love nonetheless, and I am so much the richer for it, especially in view of those who have so little of it or perhaps none at all. I've had darling, marvellous parents who worshipped the quicksand I walked on from Day One, and a brother who's been a rock for my emotional life from the day he showed up, fat, bald, drooling and grinning from ear to ear. Had I only those three in my life, I could still lie down and breathing my last, call myself blessed.
I've had friends I've loved and lost, and who've loved me, and I have so many still that I've had for years and who still make me laugh to the point of tears....yes, I've been lucky. So I'm not married, or partnered, or rich, or eminently successful or any of those things that society might say marks us as having achieved something. It doesn't matter, not really. I know I'm loved, and maybe that's the one thing I need to remember the most when the skies go grey and the storms start battering the hatches. I'm loved and I don't really need much else.
As for the rest of it, perhaps what they say is true; perhaps it does take a long time to become a person. Longer than they tell you.
What the hell. So I'm a late bloomer. A thin one. Big deal. I just got the important stuff done first.
Now what the hell did I do with those soap pads?
