Monday, September 26, 2011

You Are Only as Old as Your Self Delusion.

Time can be SUCH a bitch.
Ask anyone over the age of, say....30, and they will tell you that the years that used to last at least 365 days have sped up every year since the candles started completely covering the top of the cake.
Which is not to say that aging should be feared....oh no no no, but it must be acknowledged and it must be treated with the respect it deserves.
Personally, I love aging.
I may be odd that way.
I have ZERO desire to be back in my twenties, or even my thirties, other than to relive those precious moments when my children were younger.
The thought of going back to a time when I knew so little, but I thought I knew everything fills me with horror.
Ignorance is not bliss, as I have often said. It is ignorance.
Not knowing what you do not know does give rise to some amazing leaps in progress, it's true.
There is a terrific amount of confidence in assuming you are right simply because you do not know the ways in which you are wrong.
I am all about taking the mighty leap of faith.
But what I know now is so life affirming, and I simply didn't have those tools when I was younger.
For example.
When I was younger, I used to think that in order to be taken seriously as an adult I needed to be the loudest.
I am not sure WHY I started thinking that, but I did.
It may have come about by never feeling that I was the prettiest. Most certainly I was not the tallest. I had hoped to be seen as clever but I knew, even then, that I was not the cleverEST.
So I endeavoured to be the NOISIEST.
OUTGOING.
That was the word that was used.
It's a nice word, outgoing, and even now I would describe myself as such.
But the difference between the THEN outgoing and the NOW outgoing is that NOW I am outgoing in a friendly, attentive and open way.
THEN is was outgoing in the sense that I was completely fucking obnoxious.
At least, that's what I think of it as NOW.
In the past few years I have come across a number of men and woman who are quite a lot like me.
We are a 'type'.
Bossy and confident, and hopelessly fragile.
A dichotomy, but an entertaining blend.
Unless we have very little self awareness, in which case we turn into a parody of ourselves.
I know women, way too old to be as out of touch with themselves as they are, who are so SHOUTY and NOISEY that they emotionally enter the room before they have walked into the house.
They shriek CLASS with a capital C.U.T.G.L.A.S.S.
"LOOK" they shout "I AM STILL YOUNG AND SEXY AND RELEVANT AND IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME, HERE ARE MY TITS".
These woman always have big tits.
It's like nature gave them superboobies in order to attract men who have mummy issues.
I have big tits, but since getting older, I do not use them as a conversation starter (well, after a few dozen glasses of Pinot Grisio, but by then all bets are off).
There are in existence, I know, HUNDREDS of pics of my cleavage floating around in cupboards taken at such appropriate occasions such as 3 years olds parties , house warmings and funerals.
This is why aging has been good to me.
I may still not be the prettiest, tallest, or smartest, but I now know I have more to give than free hilarious outrage and a bra full of party tricks.
When I entertain these days, it's for an invoice.
Woman in their 40s and 50s who still try to hide behind the role of NOISIEST and MOST FUN EVER at a party should see a therapist, or at least buy a full length mirror.
Leopard print on anything much larger than a scarf makes the mature woman look like mutton dressed as dead leopard.
Not a good look.
Of course, what we are talking about here IS maturity.
Not getting old.
I hardly think I am the type to settle into the rut of a social norm.
But knowing when to remove some of the brass and add some grace is certainly the trick to staying ahead of the game.
We have all seen men in their 60s who swagger through life with their wispy hair wrapped across their balding pates dressed in slightly too tight pants with a 20 something bimbo on their arm.
"Good grief," we wonder "who does he think he is kidding?"
Um, the same people YOU think YOU are if you insist upon being taken seriously in the workplace whilst signing up to face book with the screen name barbiegrlluvs69.
At 20, that's hilarious.
At 50, that's tragic.
And so you see, time IS a bitch.
Because if she just stood still and allowed us our arrested development, everything would be rainbows and lollipops.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way, and the painful truth is that if you are still seeking that kind of attention 30 years after leaving home you will simple never find it.
Not in the way you truly need.
What you actually need, more than the eyes of the room and the title of ' woman most likely to sing an ABBA medley after two tequilas' is love.
Self love.
And by that I mean love from within.
This is what time, and maturity, has taught me.
A bitch she may be, old mother time, but any good parent knows that the lessons we learn the hard way are the ones we never forget.
One day age will take away our memories as well, and as painful as that will be for those around us, for us, it will be just in the nic Time.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

According to Jimmy Buffet, If we weren't all crazy, we'd just go insane.

I need my friends.
I never used to.
But as I've gotten older I have realised that without them, I would live solely inside my own head.
A strange and eventful place.
Luckily I attract forcefully creative and emotionally dynamic people, and the insides of THEIR heads makes the inside of my own look manageable.
I say this with love.
If I wanted to live in white bread world, I would.
Having said that, too much of the 'Drama' and you will find me sitting very still in a corner.
Stupidity terrifies me.
I like crazy as entertainment, not crazy as a brutal imposition on my daily life.
However, as to what counts as 'normality' these days, I am beginning to question.
When I look at the news, and I see people killing each other because they thing that their God is better than another God, I want to reach in and smack some heads.
That has to be the most morbid insanity there is.
I am an avowed atheist, therefore unburdened by the need to seek responsibility or cause from a higher power, but even if I wasn't, the idea that a creator would seek destruction seems absurd.
Logic has no place in religion, this I know.
Men are animals driven to dominate, this I also know.
These two statements are inextricably linked.
To what extent, I do not know.
As for logic in my neighbourhood...sometimes also MIA.
And this is where my friends come in.
I sometimes need to check with the treasured inner sanctum that it's not me.
Twice in the past two weeks I have sat myself down with a quiet hot chocolate in hand and thought about the line between what is eccentric ( and therefore delightfully entertaining) and what is just mentally unwell ( and therefore way too much trouble).
The people who have given me this pause for thought are both relatively high functioning and educated creatures.
Both can be disarmingly charming and have moments of genuine contribution.
Both are egocentric- but then so am I and I don't give a shit- and they both nurture others throughout their day.
And they share one more common bond.
Professionally and superficially outstanding, inwardly they are both damaged.
And I mean broken.
Does this make them crazy?
Is that what that is?
'Cause if it is, I am pretty damned damaged myself, and that can logically only lead to one conclusion.
So I run my crazy past my friends as a mental health check sounding board.
True, the people inside my circle of trust may appear- at least to the outside world- nutty as squirrel poo, but I like them so it works for me.
One very dear friend insists on reminding me that we are all a little damaged.
She is right of course, and it would be foolish to imagine that without that little bit of scarring we would be able to fight the good fight.
One can not forge steel without first beating the shit out of it.
This same friend, and she will know who she is by reading this next bit, told me that her partner was 'dropped on the head at birth type damaged' but that she liked the type of damage he had.
That really made me stop and think.
Hard.
Is it that the crazy that I find so appalling, the selfish and juvenile kind, presses some button deep within my wounded place?
I guess this must be true.
Because if you tell me you believe in faeries, or that you remember things from your past lives, or that you once saw a ghost, or that you only eat yellow foods on even numbered days, or that place the furniture JUST SO to enhance the flow of energy in your room, or that you wish you were a woman even though you were born a man, or vice versa, or can't go into tunnels 'cause you dreamt that they would collapse on you, or that you secretly transform into woodland creatures during the full moon...I will be OK with that.
None of that will surprise me, in fact it will delight me.
I love the diversity of the human psyche.
But if your crazy causes me pain, or causes pain to others........
Not so much.
But that's when I need my friends, just to check that I am not seeing demons where there are none.
That's my kind of crazy, I think too much.
Which appears to be different to many people whose crazy is that they think too little.
Which I consider to be insane.
Reality is based on perception.
So , it would appear, is mental health.
Which makes the majority of us not actually crazy, just a little unwell......and the 'sane' ones, positively barking.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

I Think , Therefore I Should Not Run With Scissors.

OH MY GOD, I am SOOOOOOOO excited.
I have just discovered I have a skill I didn't know I had.
I think you may have it too.
Maybe everyone does, but it's only now I am aware of it.
I finish sentences in my head while I keep talking.
I know you are wondering what the fuck I am on about, but try this.
Imagine you are talking to the biggest prick on the planet....you know who he is.....and imagine he is standing right in front of you.
Now the thing is, even though this you fantasise about this person being hit by a bus, for whatever reason, be it that he's a colleague, your boss or an ex you made children with, you can't actually kill him or ignore him, and sometimes you have to play nice nice and not say the things that are sitting right there on your frontal lobe.
So you do this, you say half the sentence with your mouth, and the BIG EDIT button kicks in, and you finish the sentence in your head, but you can still talk nicely and even listen.
So out loud you say " Actually I sent you those papers yesterday"....in your head...." you mother fucking moron"....whilst you are saying..."I'm sure they will arrive next week"
" Yes , I think I can see your point"...in your head..."because I am excellent at spotting stupidity"......whilst you are saying..." and I am trying to find a way we can both be satified"
This self editting appears to have become a hardwired skill.
This is a great relief.
For years working on radio I used to set myself into safety mode around an open microphone.
My natural syntax is littered with profanity, and I also stand up and speak in front of others most days.
These two things never run concurrently.
The only time I drop a rude word whilst being paid, is if I am BEING PAID to swear.
Even then, on a mic, I find this a little stressful.
I have to override my safety switch.
But that's for bad words.
Bad THOUGHTS are a whole new ball game.
Tonight I was in a pub, working on a mic at a brand new gig when some Strapping Great Middle Aged South African Male decided that he would 'check up' on his ipenis to see if what I had just said was true.
And he decided to tell the bar that this is what he was doing.
So I said " Good idea, check my facts, just in case"...close mouth and inside my head..." You total twat, ps, I think it's time you stopped drinking"......open mouth and outside my head SIMULTANEOUSLY...."I will wait while you find the answer".
So check he did ,and I was right, and he was wrong, but no harm was done.
To me especially.
He was way big.
I know a woman who is so barking mad that the only things that can love her are Labradors and somehow her husband (whom I suspect of being one of those man-babies in the bedroom).
Mixed breed dogs and animals with survival skills keep a wide birth.
Labradors love unconditionally because they have emotional problems.
But I digress.
My point is, that this woman has the body shape of a smurf ( the boy ones) and the personality of a 'past-it's-bed-time-and-wired-on red-cordial' 4 year old.
Plus she is totally insane, and yet every time I see her or (God help me) speak with her my mind sentences get longer and longer.
" How are things with you ? You look well "...internal dialogue......"but why, oh why do you wear things that make you look like an advertisement for pear shaped bottoms? No one is buying the 'colourful smock makes me look creative' bullshit. You look like the joke version of a 70's art teacher and when will you just shut the fuck up about your poor ( and probably straying) husband whom you playfully -shudder- call 'boy'-shudder-? What the fuck is wrong with you?"
See, now I do this, but I don't go silent through this time. I finish the sentence in my head, but I can keep talking about her dogs and her deep deep belief in the Mayan Calender.
That's a skill right?
Or schizophrenia.
Whatever.
I am just pleased to have discovered I have learned tact.
It's taken me the better part of 42 years.
If I've had to contract a mental illness in order to do it, I'm a peace with the concept.
Perhaps the Scientolotards are right, maybe mental illness is a made up thing and the glazed looks and jabbering found in psych units is actually the outward manifestation of mental and verbal multitasking.
I don't know, and frankly I don't need to.
Now that I know my brain will protect me from actually saying things like " Wow, you look like shit" whilst actually thinking it, I shall spend my days making hapless small talk with all the fairies and fruit loops in my domain, safe in the knowledge that I, at least, can think in 'mute' whilst shooting from the lip.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Jeremiah Was A Bullfrog, Which Means he was Great with his Tongue.

I love Nikka Costa.
If you've never heard of her, it's time you did.
Go to you tube, type in the words 'Every one's got their something' and you will hear the sound of my subconscious.
Music is funny like that.
We all have a track that represents certain parts of our psyche, our heartbeat, a pivotal moment in time.
The sound of my soul is Mason Williams 'Classical Gas'.
Without it, I am nothing.
If Wendy Herbert was a piece of music, this is what she would sound like.
The music of my love is Bach's First Minuet.
When I think of love, this is the sound I hear.
I have lived inside music for as long as I can remember, and for someone who can neither read a score, nor play anything beyond a recorder, that is a telling statement.
My earliest memory of music was listening to my mother playing California Dreaming repeatedly on her record player. The song she sang to me repeatedly was Roberta Blacks 'Killing me softly'. I must have been about 4. I still know the lyrics of both songs by heart.
Clearly, one if these songs was her soul, one was her love.
My mother remarried when I was 5, and he was a violent and horrible man.
He didn't so much try and kill her softly with his song as rather dramatically with his fists.
But love him she did.
When they split, I didn't hear either song again.
But I do not tell you this to evoke sadness, quite the opposite.
My thoughts today revolve around the power of music and the concept of having your own personal soundtrack.
A young woman once whispered to me in a confessional tone that she actually had personal soundtrack to her day like it was a sign of mental illness.
Abso-bloody-lutely you have a sound track to your life.....we all do.
Whether or not we hear it, or choose to listen to it, is another matter.
The music is there regardless.
When I was 12 I fell deeply in love with Adam Ant ( laugh all you want) for telling me not to lower my standards whist dressed as a jaunty pirate and commanding not one, but TWO, drummers in the song Prince Charming.
Howard Jones - the ORIGINAL God of Emo- spoke my teenage pain in the song 'no one ever is to blame'.
It is no coincidence that soldiers preparing for battle play thrash metal- or the equivalent- inside their tanks.
It's tricky to fire up the blood to the point of murder under the aural influence of the sound of crickets.
Music is powerful stuff.
Songs are poetry.
Some of it shit.
I may be showing my age, but I personally find it hard to tear my own heart apart with the words " are we an item? Girl quit playin', we're just friends, what are you sayin'..." but I have seen with my own eyes tweenagers fall to the floor with tears streaming down their faces at the mere mention of a song that sorrowfully pleads " I thought you'd always be mine,mine."
" Oh God," they cry " Always and forever Justin".
Of course, here we are talking about the words.
But two of my musical heartbeats are wordless.
What they have in common, I realise, is that they both have a kind of a back story inside them.
They are multi layered musically, and I think this reflects me personally.
I am a tad complex.
Songs like 'Numb' by Linkin Park were there for me when I separated from my husband, but that is a no brainer.
Eltons 'The bitch is back' spoke to another more positive chapter.
Alanis Morresette's 'I'm not the doctor' pops into my head every time I sit across the table from a potential mate like a musical checklist.
If I find myself silently humming Sara Bareilles's 'King of anything' , I just cut to the chase and ask for the bill.
My daughter prepares for a night on the town with Katy Perry's Firework.....even though the plastic bag line makes us all snigger.
I prepare for a night on the town with Mr Mister's 'Kyrie Eleison'......but then I am a little more jaded and I need the cheer squad.
James Taylor also writes me as does Van Morrison, and then there are the days when my whole life is a private conversation between me and Eminem.
When I die, I want them to play The Byrds 'Turn Turn Turn'.
I do not believe in God, but I do believe in the words of Ecclesiastes 3.
Would I have these words with me if they were not set to music?
It's doubtful.
And it may mean nothing to anybody else, but I like the question " What is your personal soundtrack ?".
I would like to think that you read this and think about the music of your soul, your heart, your mind.
And then ask yourself why it is so.
Perhaps , like me, it has something to do with the idea of a life filled with creative balance and beauty...or maybe it's listening to hot guys in harmony.
I love music, it's true.
But I am no artistic purist.
I am also partial to men who are good with their tongues and fingers.
No such thing as an ugly muso.
Just sayin'.
I think Bill expressed it best.
If music be the food of love, play on.


Classical Gas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeHgNqbdBKs