OF A GOLDEN AGE

the function landmarks serve in our lives changes as we age, meaning the things i thought were momentous when i was eight or eleven are amusing now. they are significant in context but not in objectivity — getting dropped off at the roller rink without parents, watching an r-rated movie, switching from a banana-seat to a “grown-up” bike. maybe landmarks are like fractals: within any given time period, there are smaller and smaller landmarks happening until almost everything in life is a landmark of sorts. every new job, every new relationship, nothing is ever a true duplicate event.

if someone said this is a great time to be alive, i would wholeheartedly agree. if someone said this was the BEST time to be alive, that would be more difficult. i’m not getting behind the “simpler times” side because i think that simpler often just means more local friends and less longevity. dying of tuberculosis or losing my legs to polio are not high on my list of idyllic situations. at the same time, there is something to be said for face-to-face communication, writing letters then paying visits. more personal, more relaxed, though probably a bumpier ride.

it is so easy to never stop worrying, to be consumed by what ails the world and your friends and yourself until there is no time left. i walk down a set of awkward stairs, vaguely fearing that i’ll fall and break my leg. i talk to a close friend about a desperate situation and my heart turns to brick. every day is an obstacle course, and i fare better when i have nonhuman dilemmas to solve: papers to write, meetings to organize. in this regard, summer almost becomes more stressful. abundant free time translates to abundant worry time, apparently!

i hate the phrase MAKING LOVE, which builds a picture in my mind of a rube goldberg machine made of human bodies, like hieronymus bosch on sexual prozac. isn’t making love what people do when they talk over dinner or take walks through a darkened vacation spot? to imply that sexual intercourse produces love seems, ironically, perverted to me. we are trained to believe that sex and love are separate, that sex leads to feelings of artificial attachment and boggles the mind into believing it loves. let’s call a screw a screw and leave love for the before and after.

last night i played scrabble with ed and nathan. it was fun and everything but the best part was nathan’s continuous questions about which words were valid:

“is vag a word?”

“i can just add -eth and make a new word, right?”

“how do you feel about making plurals using -z?”

“can i just put e- in front of something to make a new word? e-quarrel?”

“i was thinking ipox, like ipod.”

( * from the oed.)

i only smirk when the other person knows that i don’t mean it. sometimes my friend gets into a mood where he takes everything i say too seriously, when i am so infrequently serious: this is the worst affliction for a friend of mine to have. “you’re biting today,” he says, looking a little wounded, looking downcast. “i’m at the top of my game,” i say, and laugh. “ha, i wouldn’t go THAT far,” he says. i breathe, relieved, glad things are taken lightly again in place of accidental gravity. i fear opposing body tides that will never fully coincide.

some of my friends make movies and often ask me if i want to appear in things. no. i don’t. it is a kneejerk response because it is so natural. of course i do not want to be on film. but why is that? part of me is afraid that i will come off like a complete idiot when captured on film. a bigger part of me is scared that, when faced with visual evidence of the way i carry myself and act in public, i will not like myself anymore — too much room for scrutiny, too much mirror effect.

when i rejoined the band during my junior year of high school, i met a variety of freshmen whom i wouldn’t have met otherwise. one of these was jeff, a sweet, effeminate kid who liked to design clothes and sang in the choir. at some point that year, jeff declared that he was gay, and the surprise wasn’t in the fact itself but that he had chosen to be open about it. (statistically, i figured there were fifteen or twenty or more gay kids in the school, all closeted.) later, jeff’s religious friends convinced him he wasn’t gay. still isn’t.

when i was twelve or thirteen, the piano lesson appointment before mine was two brothers a grade apart. they were sixteen and seventeen at the time, i think. the younger one was generally a creep and i didn’t care for him much. the older, though, was a sarcastic and darkly funny kid. he was fat and had a beard — a beard! — and i thought he was so great. tim played tuba, which suited him perfectly. he drove me home after a football game once and i felt like i was doing something wrong, even though there wasn’t actually anything wrong.

MY CELL PHONE TAUGHT ME A WORD.

andy a. texted asking if i had quarters. i answered: tons! after i typed TONS the phone helpfully supplied “tonsorial.” i had to look it up in the oed.

tonsorial: adj. of or pertaining to a barber or his work; often used humorously, as ‘a tonsorial artist.’