“It’s a Pioneering Time,” Because Patti Smith
Patti Smith imparts the wisdom that comes from being a survivor, a learner, a teacher, a woman, an artist. It is like finding a buried treasure, this.
I Love Other Women
As much as I love men (eye candy) I love women even more I think. As I get older, I am appreciating women who are straight shooters. They can cut through the bullshit if they don’t care whether you “like” them or not. There aren’t many because, of course, we’re conditioned to want people to like us and to do that we have to be nice. Why is it so much easier to hate women than men? I don’t know. Miley Cyrus? Can’t stand her. Kim Kardashian, go away. Can I rattle off the names of some men I hate? A little harder.
When you pass 40 you start to know what it’s like to feel invisible. The male gaze, or what I like to think of as the mating circle, is dependent upon who else is available at the time. So, if you stand out on a dating site that’s because the selection is fairly limited, making it easier for you to be singled out and selected by the male population. Walking down the street in New York or Hollywood, or hanging out on the beach, you’re not going to be noticed the same way because the pool of choices is so much more broad. Make sense? Okay, does it half make sense?
If you live in a big city, chances are you will have a less of an easy time meeting people randomly – unless you are one of those drop dead gorgeous types. You have nothing going for you out there in the world other than your looks. If someone likes how you look they will talk to you, notice you. But on a dating site, on in various selective communities online it easier to stand out if you have a “special set of skills” that might be attractive. For instance, if you’re smart, funny and know a lot of stuff and look even half-way decent (on the internet, for the most part, that translates to: not fat) you will get attention. You will feel like a Playboy bunny walking down the street even if, when you walk down the street you look average, worse than average even. Funny how that works. This is what I have always loved about the internet since I got online nearly twenty years ago: it kind of levels the playing field. Or it used to anyway.
I am finding, as I get older, that I appreciate women more. Perhaps this has to do with not being competition with them much anymore, especially the younger ones. Sure, sometimes I am filled with envy that they have their whole lives ahead of them, and other times I remember what things were REALLY like at that age and how hard life can be until you really figure out who you are.
I love to read bitchy, snarky articles online. I love to read women who challenge the mostly male commenters at male-centric websites. I love those who use their smarts and their wits to compete even when it’s so much easier to use their bodies.
The truth about women is that too many of them spend their days marinating in fantasy. I don’t think fantasy of the romance novel kind is very good for women overall. I think it sells an unrealistic ideal that is impossible to attain, for one, but also it’s a time waster. Think of all we could accomplish if we weren’t sitting around waiting for Prince Charming? Honey, that train has left the station. Waiting for Prince Charming is as futile as waiting for Jesus. They ain’t never coming for you. You have to do this life without them. Moreover, half the time, you yourself are the rescuer, the Prince Charming, who is coming to save everyone else.
When we give up our power as leaders, bitches, cunts, rulers, goddesses in hopes of being attractive enough for a guy we define our validity by the fickle desires of a visually based sex who is just as easily distracted by the next shiny object (pair of tits) coming down the pike. It isn’t that men don’t matter. They matter. A lot. It’s that our sense of who we are and what we can be should not depend on what they think of us.
Easier said than done. The thing to do always is to channel Patti Smith. She is the honey badger of older women. Fuck growing old. You can still be this:
I think Sam Shepherd wrote this about Patti Smith – and all I can say about that is, Sam Shepherd. Enough said.
“If you were still around”
If you were still around
I’d hold you
Shake you by the knees
Blow hot air in both ears
You, who could write like a Panther Cat
Whatever got into your veins
What kind of green blood
Swam you to your doom
If you were still around
I’d tear into your fear
Leave it hanging off you
In long streamers
Shreds of dread
I’d turn you
Facing the wind
Bend your spine on my knee
Chew the back of your head
Til you opened your mouth to this life
1/31/80
Homestead Valley, Ca.
Poem – Vertigo
Vertigo
Frisco in the light of day
Painted ghosts
Faces half-lit through windows
and necklaces,
You trailed after an invisible beauty
who only looked that way when you looked for me.
Your shadow freed the light.
A slow moving butterfly, wings trapped in honey
You need me to be Madeline (for a while)
(Here lies Judy)
But oh, the rapture
As your arms pulled me from the bay
Dried my naked body with your clean towels,
My wet clothes crumpled up impacted erased
Did you trace the line of my breasts as you laid me down?
Did you spread my legs and send me to the moon?
But oh baby, can I be Madeline for longer than a while?
I won’t forget about the necklace.
I won’t be sentimental.
I knew where we were headed,
Soaked in red.
I could stay lost.
You could keep finding me.
You could dress me up again
In green, in grey, in grey
Maybe I’ll remind you of her.
For a while.
Come with me,
straight up the spiral staircase
Higher, darker, steeper
You can’t.
You’re afraid.
But don’t forget that I–
Spinning back down
Just remember that I–
Just remember that I didn’t mean it.
I go up, I go down
I go up…
I Think I’m a Mother
I remember when I first became a mother. I remember because I couldn’t let go of my baby. Literally. I held onto her for a full two weeks, I think, after a long and painful labor. I remember being challenged by the (now seeming simple) act of breastfeeding. I remember discarding many of the modern day conventions built to make money out of women raising children and knowing, finally, that everything you really need is already built in. I was lucky that way. I also know down to my ragged bones that if someone delivered a baby, or even a kid on my doorstep I could be a good mother to that child, even without the built in perks.
My daughter is fifteen and it’s the first day of tenth grade. She’s making her own lunch for the first time. I know, I know. Don’t even go there. You see, having just the one kid, and loving being a mother has made me, well, a little resistant to this idea that they eventually grow up and leave. Or grow up at all. I only hope I haven’t doomed the poor girl with my over-protection and coddling. You know I have. You’re sitting there, thinking, wow. She has probably totally fucked up that kid just by trying to be a good mom. And it’s probably true. But I think, in our own ways, we fuck up our kids. We just do. They have to live to overcome the baggage we leave them with.
I can only hope that I left her with enough good to make up for it.
Next comes driving and then college and then…can’t we slow the clock? Does everything have to always move so quickly?
The Missing Dash in the Smiley
You probably wouldn’t notice what happened to the dash that used to make up the full old school smiley as in:
[:-)]
Or the winky:
[;-)]
There were the somewhat intolerable but often used emoticons back in the day of Usenet, before it became the web and the Facebook. And the Tumblr. And the Twitter. Believe it or not, social networking used to be a little less easy to use. We weren’t herded into various places on the web and we certainly weren’t in contact with every person we ever knew starting all the way back in elementary school.
But somewhere along the line, the dash was disappeared. It was the disappeared one. It just vanished. My daughter told me, “we can tell how old you are by what kind of smiley you use.” In all of her 15 year-old wisdom, she delivered the devastating news that I was betraying myself each and every time I put that little dash – to signify, gasp, a nose.
I miss the little dash, I have to confess. Without the dash, the smiley looks, to me, like it has a jaw problem:
[:)]
Well, I guess it doesn’t look that bad here in WordPress type, but usually, on the web, the ) is too close to the : for my liking.
Let’s not even get into the appropriation of the colon, and its promiscuous cousin, the semi-colon. I was hoping that these vital punctuation marks would one day stage a rebellion. Their army would be the half of the parenthesis for happy – ) and the other half for the sad (.
Now that I’ve put a half-sad there, alongside a period, it looks like a one-eyed smiley.
One of my favorite emoticons, though, and remember – I’m old school. I’m not talking about the ones facebook gives you or the iphone. These are typed in, invented by the internet immigrants. We used them because we HAD to.
Anyway, the blank stare remains my favorite one:
[:-|]
Can you use that without the dash?
[:|]
I guess so. It kind of looks like the Cookie Monster, though.
Most of the time, if I’m talking to old friends, I use the dash. But if I’m talking to a younger, I omit the dash to show them I acknowledge their brave new world. It’s funny that I’ve been online long enough to now be considered part of the Olds. Never thought that would happen. In my addled mind I still feel like an internet maverick, slashing and burning through the wilderness. But alas. Things have changed.
We also didn’t tolerate advertising everywhere like people do now. But that’s a different story.
As Bob Dylan would say.
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About Me
I spend way too much thinking about me.
This is the blank space where that paragraph should be.