Stuck

It's like she woke up from a dream and started writing.

Someone had taken my life and my diaries and written a book: Truth-isms and In-Your-Faces by Crazy Coppertop, edited by So-and-So.

Chapter One

In this time of economic woe, nothing makes you feel better than remembering the good times, when your friends actually liked you and put their arms around you and told you how awesome you are on a daily basis.  That doesn't happen these days at work where a commonly heard phrase is "Night of the Long Knives." And in this time of mortgages and kids and SUVs and car seats and food permanently stuck under the table, it helps to go back to those wide-eyed days when your friends dropped these Buddha-like bombs and uttered truisms about the world, so certain that they were the first to see it and everyone slaving away at their muckity-muck jobs were blind sheep.

"The world cannot support more mouths, therefore it is my ethical duty - hee, hee, she said dootie - to forebear procreation."

We walked in the rain because it was brave and romantic and we had fucking hours to kill. Hours. Every day.

"A great artist is one who can transform herself, over and over again, to reflect the time in her life and the art the world needs for the moment."

And we had hours to pontificate and read poetry and ascribe meaning to the latest song from Third Eye Blind.

I want something else
to get me through this
semi-charmed kinda life
baby
baby

And what consequences to any of this? A vague sense that at some point our choices were going to matter but more of a sense that life was happening to us and there was nothing we could do about it.

"Don't get a tattoo. You'll never get a job with a tattoo."

Love was cruel in the way that since we couldn't control the world we were aware that we'd better have all the sex and the long talks we could before the real world sucked us far away from each other, and we used it as an excuse to make no promises other than non-binding blither.

"To thine own self be true. Always. No matter what happens between us."

The unequivocal laughing acceptance of me, the pleasure of seeing each other. Scorn. Unadulterated scorn of where I come from, like a soft nest I could settle into, the pet names designed to love and belittle. The rare moments of serious shared life.

And then blindly we trade one language for another and we learn the acronyms at work just so that we can be blindly accepted, and we invent other truisms about life and love and motherhood and we stop questioning because frankly with car seats and a mortgage questioning becomes dangerous, and there's too much at stake.

"No. We tried that before."
"It doesn't fit the rules."
"Motherhood is full of joy and disappointment, but I wouldn't trade it for anything."
"I am a worker bee, infinitely replaceable, therefore I must behave."

And thirty-five becomes old, and we look back at fucking milestones, like a fucking project timeline where the next 50 years consist of gray projections.

"A great artist is one who can transform herself, over and over again, to reflect the time in her life and the art the world needs for the moment."