In Twilight Regalia

My present finally arrived — I have been having such fun with the Olympics, as the winter Olympics are always my most favorite long awaited gift. I don’t know how I got hooked on them; was it my childhood memories when I sat with my Dad in his Dad chair and me sprawled on the floor as we compared the runs of each downhill skier together? Was it when I watched in my teens as the jumpers went shzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs
sssssssssssssssssssssssss
WHOOOOOMPP…………………….
……………………………………….
………………………………………
…………..::poonksssshhhhhhhhhh::?
Or was it when Mike and I sat on a chilly rug in a cold garage in front of a telly with bunny ears and rooted for Kristi Yamaguchi and Michelle Kwan and screamed bloody murder when Midori Ito came out of the worst crashes in skating history to land a quad? Probably bit by bit I got addicted, and I never miss it now. If I won a lottery, I probably would be going there in person, wherever there was. But I’d be hard-pressed to pick one sport, what to do… but give me the opportunity, I would like that.

But you know, I’m just looking at my bare toes here on the couch and…. I have great toes. I like them. They’re great toes. I don’t like frostbite much. I wonder if I could keep them in the freezing hours standing there….

I could stay indoors for the skating; AND LET ME JUST SAY: It should have been Johnny “I’m Here, I’m Weir, and … We forgot the rest, but you know because you’re going to be a designer” Weir. I just have to like that guy. How can you not like someone who says he’s tired of Republican fear over what comes out of his mouth in press conferences? How can you not like an Olympic skating competitor who says “…all of a sudden I was causing a stir because I told Phil Hersh he looked thin and I was wearing a chinchilla scarf that someone thought was a boa. First of all, boas are so out. Secondly, I would never wear a boa to a press conference.” Beside his swans-on-acid costume with its red puppet head hand, I like his rhythm, his emotional carry-through, and his sense of continuity and concept. It sucked that he ran out of steam.

The women I’m not much interested in this time; we’ll see who can entice me. They’ll have a hard job. I do not much like the spotlit calculation and jocktalk of Sasha Cohen, and her neither her dance nor technique inspires me. The shape of Emily Hughes is puppy-like, and I crave something more sophisticated. I haven’t seen anyone I like, really. I hope there is a way out. Someone else. I was sorry to see Michelle go, but I knew she wasn’t going to be there, somehow. In one way or another, I knew she was gone. So… I hope for surprise.

But now, sleep, and hope that I can hold out for one more disasterous day in the place that hates me. I have to jump in an altogether different way. And it’s cold out there. Wish me luck.

I wanted to write something about how I felt lately. I took so long because I don’t know what to say.
This thing is a new color.
This thing has an odd calm.
It’s as if my future ghost moved into my heart early, with a bunch of bags at the door, and said, Let’s have tea a while. There’s some stuff we have to talk about.

This thing is stopping being in denial, stopping wishing for the past and just being. And for once I don’t feel pain every day in my heart. I’ve no good reason why, because the here and now has not gotten all that much better, really…. but somehow I, in the midst of this have somehow been either transformed or just molded a bit. And I can’t tell how to tell it because I don’t care to tell anyone anything now, and I feel like there’s no point in explaining something that had so many subtle moves, more than a Reich minimalist work of song. It took so long it was just like growing, because — that’s what I suspect it must be. It’s a hand unfurling and the rope slipping away; it’s touching something warm that may or may not be friendly, It’s making me make odd decisions.

This feeling is making me recognize I am staring down the endside of my life. I need to decide what it is, and who I am with regard to it.

I have no children to rein me in. I have no certainty of anything, with possible exception of a companion husband.
And even that’s possible. I have the worldly belief of the appointed number of years dealt out to an individual like a vacation. I have this older baggy body. Am I the child or this new thing? This hybrid? I have these things I have to think about now, that I never actually ventured to think about. For some it’s death…. But you see, as a Goth, I dealt with that long ago. It’s not that.

It’s the life. The remaining life. The stuff you don’t think about. The just-what-will-you-actually-do-at-the-end-of-the-world thoughts. Especially when the world will go on tiny ticking incrementally, and you’ll stammer a bit, and away it will all go, and the leaves will fall, and there you won’t be anymore, and it’s not YOU you have to think about, it’s the others. You wonder what it will mean to them that you are here or not in your new olde body, or whether there is something else that will seize your energy and make you renew your youth every morning and there will be some kind of sunbirth. Whether you will always stay a child, or not.

Whether your old dreams will rule your life and your bitterness and make your realm of truth tainted or holy with steadfastness.

Whether they will change and off you will skate on some new thin ice. What will you keep or forget?

Those who have the discipline and the insanity of children have the luxury of being distracted from such things, but I have it facing me now, early. I have to look at the silver corridor and decide the rest of the dance, and it was a place I never was certain I’d be in, in the first place. And certainly not alone in this shiny hallway, this vestibule, this bleakly polished old passage.

It’s quiet in here. You can sing with a great echo in here.

But the fact now comes to me with great clarity and in an emotionless calm: I will be alone in this no matter what. There is no going out with someone. You will ultimately go alone. The meaning of everything will not arrive in a group discovery encounter.

I often do not much like what I have become; ‘it’s the wrong world, I must be on the wrong planet’, sang Todd.
I sang in my chains like the sea, said Dylan. Time held me green and dying. And puzzling the while.
Puzzling evidence.

I see myself wiser than I have ever been, and yet with far fewer heads to turn or ears to bend than ever were in younger days. I don’t know at all anymore what I’m for.

I really wonder whether this should go on? or do i just whistle a tune and polish the floor with a few turns of my heels, ……….,

……….,

……….,

, and wait.

and see what happens…

I want the recorded life of mine to show that I had but 5 or 6 truly good years in my life, and they existed because I believed in love of someone I was certain looked out on life from my own heart’s view. And ultimately, I found even that certainty foundered, and I have never recovered. I have never known a solid thing since, and perhaps the ephemera of this world had been meant to be pointed out to me. Please take my apology for the actions that flowed out of this dark place in me, I am truly sorry for that.

When I look over the span of all the rest of those years, I find that I mothered many youths of varying ages into dislike of me, but that I feel ultimately, in the greater scheme of their lives, they will mark my words and hopefully recall an hundredth part of the affection I felt for them daily, which is the only sure happiness I yet possess.

As for my ambitions, they have been veritably erased by callous disregard, time, fear, my simple lack of continuity in a given path, and perhaps by a God who knows my ambitions were not entirely without longing for a place of respect for myself in the eyes of others. I have not lost that desire but perhaps one day will look out on a time where I am free of its slaving and nagging, as it makes me churn on even now in this writing. No matter how I have said I wanted humble things, I can truly say there are no more humble things to want, for I have had them all, with the one costly exception of a surrounding and constant family.

At this point, my greatest work has been to see that I am not so hated for having struggled terribly to do what I saw was right and good, whether anyone liked the results or not, as to render all of my efforts soured and keep me from the only path that underlaid all the rest: the will to give back and steer free and bolster those around me from this oppressive mindset which is our earthly apparent world. I had wanted to sweeten the world for you all, and I am not at all sure that change was effected, which is my sorriest discovery. With all my hope, my heart was really very innocent. It is ME telling you this, that I am innocent; and you know I do not lie, as it is a cultivated skill which I am too lazy to perfect.