My birthday was Thursday. I’ve always embraced aging – intellectual and emotional growth are important experiences – both fun and terrifying in the same way hallucinogens are. My twenties felt like a long, slow burn – thank fuck that’s over. Personally, I was well-warned, in the strangest of ways, about adolescence: 70’s era instructional videos, much like the pornographic movies of that period, are relatively honest, yet go about displaying this honesty in the most contrived fashion imaginable. I was fully prepared to menstruate, but everyone failed to mention that time between my first legal drink and the end of my third decade, other than the whole one can't rent a car until the age of 25, thing.
I’ve always had plenty of adult advice at my disposal, and often take much of it to heart, so why didn’t anyway pull me aside and say: “Hey, guess what? Your twenties will suck: fear and loathing, and pain. You’ll be at the bottom of the ladder, you’ll be broke, you’ll make questionable decisions, one after the next, after the next, after the next and you will behave this way until you get so sick of yourself that something either implodes or explodes. Once the smoke clears and coals turn grey, you’ll be in a better place.”
It’s not the pain, though, that bothers me, it’s the primal fear I have, we all have, about time and its expiration. Do any of us use our time well? I suppose the only thing to say has already been said by the Faces:
Poor young grandson, there’s nothing I can say
You’ll have to learn, just like me
And that’s the hardest way Ooh la la
Back in the physical world, we have a new couch. This is a fabulous and welcome thing and we even bought it at a fair price, but it also makes me feel settled. And this is, deep down, a little unsettling. There’s always something in me that longs to purge my belongings and move on. I don’t believe in fresh starts, but am energized by the experience of unpacking my life in a new places, the learning process is filled with discoveries and longing. At least, this is what I tell myself, regardless of the fact that my last big move was very difficult. The grass? Yes, it’s always greener over there, thanks fer askin!
April is rapidly come to an end, so I’m long overdue in posting a poem for you to ponder or at least scan and discard, maybe?
A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead
by Kenneth Koch
Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.
Koch (L) and Ginsburg (R), 1977
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