THE GRAYTER GOOD

There are those random afternoons when you are suddenly hit with deep insightful thoughts and seemingly wise realizations out of nowhere, instead of those usual “is my butt too flat or is it falling” or “did I lose more hair than the tufts reluctantly left in the sink not counting the few I willfully lost while toiling in the kitchen” or that “am I simply bloated or am I just fat” monkey mind self doubting chatter. No, these slivers of sudden wisdom just appear out of nowhere leaving you to ruminate deeply and before you know it you have put all your LV and Chanel purses and shoes along with your children on sale on Offerup, you are offering random cash to the pan handler holding a sign "Begging for Beer", googling communal properties in Himalayas and wiki-piding “Zen Buddhism for Pre-menopausal Mid Life Crisis” and Prime buying “Say NO TO SILICONE” and “LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO DIE ALONE, CALL ME” stickers.

The whole saga of my impending sober enlightenment started with a single text from Gertrude (well Kahlil sorry, about time you let go of her..) 

“I found it sprouting. A single one.”

Immediately my perversely poetic mind synapsed to …Wordsworth! Well right about that time I was revisiting Ginsberg’s HOWL  since I read somewhere in the news how a school had to publicly apologize for introducing high schoolers to sexually charged HOWL…my my…castrate castrate, back to Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper)

“Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass!

Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass!..

Will no one tell me what she sings?—

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again?..”

Vale profound, Gertrude had found her first gray pube. There was a brief pause in texting space and time followed by carpet bombing. 

G - Happy Friday. When you find them grays down there, you realize life is too short. Too short for mind games. Too short for over-thinking. Too short for putting your manhood into all cookie jars. 
Mic drop!

Sharon chimed in - Good point G. I think sometimes you think WAY TOO MUCH!

Me, thinking bloody hell, that’s exactly what Wordsworth was crooning about…
“Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again…” He was referring to pubes and polygamists! A forward thinker clearly, alluding to online dating apps and the resulting bane of too many options available easily and the curse of the NEXT BEST THING syndrome! OMG, MIC DROP! 

G  - When I saw it sprouting. Beautiful. One lone gray
Me - BEHOLD HER..but how did you exactly find her??
G – Shut up! Guys this whole dating is confusing me totally, one day sleep with someone, next day coffee with another, sleep with another, tea with someone, no can’t do…monogamy that’s the operating word. MONOGRAY.
Me – have you considered total annihilation through taser I mean laser?
G – no I haven’t considered anything but “WTF”. No need for anything rash, it’s not like men are flocking to the plantation.
Sharon – (crickets)
Me – hey on the bright side, you are addressing global warming and like Norway banning deforestation.
Sharon – (crickets)
G – I mean this is how the universe is telling me not to waste time, it’s a pretty strong sign directly from God.
Me - Gorillas…we inherited Phthirus pubis from Gorillas…
Sharon – (crickets)
Me – I prefer to be bald down there. Some realities don’t need to be faced. They just need to be deferred until death. Unfortunately, my balding is un-willful when it comes to my head. G, I would recommend snipping the lone grim reaper. Before you know it, it might become the chia pet face of the last inhabitant of your virgin island?
G – hmm, still with WTF…
Me – how about you stop yoga and grow a belly like them pot-bellied men flaunting their Dad bods at 40?
G – all these men out there, seem to know what they don’t want, oh wait, correction, they want : connection, compatibility but not commitment! That was the past life mistake, now it’s lust, wanderlust, and squanderawaylovelust…bah humbug!
Sharon – Catching up! Okay, you guys know me! I planned for grey pubes PTSD by the time I turned 18. Every day I counted diligently and came up with the golden mean growth algorithm. And when I figured the growth had reached its full potential I went with researching and adopting the best eradication nuking techniques in the market back then. Sorry guys, my kitty is like a purring Sphinx cat..am currently working on Turn your Sphinx Kitty into an Albino pussycat DIY lotion…
G – MEOW!
Me – Great S! We will market that lotion to all single women in their 40’s and 50’s as part of your cult swag! 
G – I don’t know why… *I see gray people*…
Sharon – (crickets)

And thus our intellectual conversation dissipated and then struck the precise moment of temporary enlightenment. Profundity in my shallow existence strikes seldom, folks. What mirage were we all chasing after? Isn’t aging an absolute reality unless death beats you to it?  Isn’t youth a state of mind? Aren’t we all punting to get us the best deal to survive the longest, shriveled up or not? Oh wait, let’s see, the average life expectancy in the developed world is over 80 years! Aren’t we all looking to not die alone with regrets? Isn’t beauty, as relative it is, transitory? And yet it is the first visual connection and visual gratification we seek when scouting for love, intimacy and fulfilling relationships? But aren’t men more inclined and normalized to seek younger women no matter how old they themselves get? If we were all dealt with the same odds of longevity and limited life and the absolute imperative of aging, why isn’t there common ground of respect and embracing? Do relationships matter or should life be a series of encounters? Is living in the moment commonly understood as hedonism and living to self gratify only? Is true fulfillment measured only against time, and if we took away time from the equation, what are we left with? It seems like we are in this circular loop of seeking and rejecting for survival, since social conditioning has such a strong choke-hold on our abilities to break free from our own fears and cliques.

What's #luv gotto do with it??

'The love song’ by 311 plays in the background. I see musicians one with the notes, the beats, the movements, synchronicity that softly brainwashes and sweeps you off your feet. Those boisterous tattoos over their arms and navels coming alive to conjoin, slowly swaying and jumping across onto others to infect, to touch, fleetingly. We are changed forever, for that one moment, the intoxication which cuts and unites the being…

“let the blue tent topple, stairs rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
In our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart”….

I can’t agree more with Plath on “Love is a parallax”, a madness that defies reasoning and logic. But ‘simple’?? I will have to drink more whiskey or kombucha to decipher simplicity in this context.

To write a post on ‘Mod Love’ is almost akin to divvying it up in a timeline construct. Perhaps the most logical way to do this is to measure abstraction against abstraction. My textbooks on ‘classical love’ are old and weary, ripping apart as I moisten my index finger with my tongue to flip through their ghost-like Erich Segal pages for wisdom. On the other hand, my new testament of love is rad touch screen and gratifies instantly, as I play fruit ninja with hearts. A rapid fast flowing gush of feelings that surges and plunges exuberant like waterfalls, unrestricted, unbridled by geographical latitudes and longitudes.
But the ‘science’ of love defines it much more dispassionately (I wonder if that is the 'simplistic' chemical breakdown which Plath alludes to)…adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin…sum up the four stages of euphoric orgasm. So I won’t bother with the feeling itself (that where did I lose my glasses, syndrome) but rather explore some intangible parameters of its ‘post-modern’ transgressions.

In a world where our interactions are a function of who we meet and date, or date and meet, within a myriad of social media choices, the dynamics of falling in love can be found on a buffet like platter served to you as breakfast in bed without having to spend much mullah. In pjs, with a ciggy or a joint dangling off the corners of our non-Marlboro mouths, unkempt hair and perhaps naked, we interact and meet potential lovers every day (hyperbole). The arms-length reach of the internet is far and beyond sight or sound and powerfully addictive. For once, repression has found an outlet with the screen savvy romantic, not guarded by religion or politics or marital status or gender biases, the world is one large melting cauldron of wants and desires that flowers into love or dies a quick death like desert ephemerals based on a click of the Block button. It’s all hunky dory until we find that virtuosity is also a cruel, wicked game of illusion and entrapment that makes loneliness more real and painful. It’s like being conscious within a nightmare without anesthesia and waking up to a reality of bruises that blacken with each passing minute. Perhaps I should call this love cancer "skinny laptops and fat fingers" ..oh sir, do you suffer from the skinny lappy fat fingers cancer?? Me too!! 

There may be many fishes in this endless expansive virtual seascape, but social dysfunction can drown one, nonetheless. Exactly what or who are we fighting? But the ghosts of our selves. When Tom Cruise grandiosely professed that ‘Every day I fall in love more with Katie Holmes’, she ran. Rightfully so.

I ran too, only this time without my laptop and phone. Catch me if you can...(love)..