Winky Reflections

  

 

Life is a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

My life is moving really fast. I’m putting a lot of money on credit. It feels a lot like the Roaring Twenties really. I guess that means The Great Depression would be upcoming. You know, I wonder a lot about my mid-life crisis. Since I’ve spent my twenties trying to figure out just what the fuck my deal is, does that mean that I get to avoid the painful crash at forty where you look in the mirror and wonder just who you are. Or will I avert a mid-life crisis simply by being in a state of permacrisis?

I once heard this writer Kate Atkinson doing an NPR interview one day while I was driving around Portland. She apparently wrote her first novel (her first anything) when she was in her late thirties. She said that she couldn’t imagine writing during her twenties cause she was always so caught up in the moment of what was going on. And when I was twelve, MTV ran MTV News at the bottom of the hour (N*E*W*S*) and one time they interviewed Whitney Houston about having turned thirty. She said that at twenty, she thought she had a good grasp on the world but was a fool compared to what she knew now ten years later. And I know, sure, Whitney Houston’s thirties were filled with a lot of crack smoking. But still, maybe she was onto something. With the wisdom of thirty thing, not the crack. Okay, maybe she was onto something with the crack too. My friend Roy was smoking crack when he was thirty-six. In fact, how great would it be if acclaimed Scottish author Kate Atkinson was actually speaking in code for her post-thirty brethren? “How could I have written a novel in my twenties? *Wink* I didn’t even smoke crack back then.”

A lot of times I have something I wanna share. One day it was about what a great friend Kim Harvey has been and how painful it’s been to watch her go thru a tough time and feel like I couldn’t do more to make her life in New York something special. Another day I just wanted to ask anyone reading this what their favorite Pavement lyric was. I had been hanging out with my friends Jen and Amrit and asked if either of them had ever, as Pavement sings, “caught their Dad cryin.” And it turned out one of them had! Lyrics inspiring life, what’s better than that? But then I sit down to write and–vrrrrrrrrrrroom–I’m needed to take pictures of a Hilary Clinton Hummus Head or get a text asking if I wanna come over and finish novels together or or Wet Hot American Summer is playing in the Park tomorrow night. And suddenly I’m swept away. When I finally get back to the two lines I’ve written, the burst I wanted to share is gone. Often there’s a new burst. Now I wanna talk about how the album title “Confusion is Sex” is a phrase that has haunted my life pretty much ever since I first heard it at fifteen. It’s all a big cyclone: my twenties, sex, blogging–ya know, life.

There’s a lot to be said for a pinball existence. Ramps! Flippers! Multiball!

Whenever I used to see a girl that I thought I might like–bleach blond roots, butterfly barrette, rainbow shoelaces, whatevs–I would get real close to her and start singing the Pavement song “Cut Your Hair.” It’s this ridiculous song about haircuts. If the girl looked up, I knew she was a keeper. Freshman year in EVK, our dorm cafeteria, I pulled it on Caroline, a girl I immediately had a crush on upon seeing her with a bowl of Cream of Wheat. She didn’t look up. None of the girls ever looked up. It was a stupid game, okay? But when I saw Caroline a few weeks ago while passing thru San Francisco, I caught myself singing the Pavement song “Range Life” without thinking about it. Some things never change. Except maybe they do. Instead of being a ridiculous song about haircuts, these are the lyrics to “Range Life”:

“I want a range life, so I can settle down. I wanna settle down. I’ll never settle down.”

Mature? God, no. Getting there? Maybe.

Tags: speed of life