The fact that I can remember fifteen years ago still trips me up. Remembering twenty is more sobering still. Luckily one thing I've learned by this age is how to avoid sobriety.
Tuesday, I got to fuck off. My roomie had taken the week off of work so we could get some stuff done around the apartment we'd been neglecting for a while, straighten up for my demon's visit and getting ready for the arrival of a dear friend of mine, who is moving to the area. This is also very exciting, but more on it later. But I got up on Tuesday afternoon, like I do, and she hadn't really done what she'd planned to do in the morning, which means that still had to get done before anything else got done so we both thought about it for a moment and decided the best course of action would be to call the day a bust, and fuck off for the next three. So we went out for dinner instead and got our favorite waitress at our favorite place. Good times.
Wednesday was The Day.
We took a road trip down to CT to see this carousel museum (it's about a two hour drive, give or take) which ended up being... well. It was an experience. It wasn't an exciting or riveting experience. It wasn't something I felt compelled to ever do again. It was actually pretty damn boring. I mean the displays were beautiful and they had a bunch of art on the walls in this one section, I guess the master carver (or some guy, I dunno, she talked really fast) picks them every month.
This month they'd chosen a Running of the Bulls theme and there was a lot of portraits and abstracts that resembled bulls, some relating to the bull fighters. There was this one that was so amazing, though I don't remember the name just now or the artist, though I think I have both somewhere on a photo. It was depicting a bull's shape (I think it was done completely with a palette knife, too, no brushes - I always wanted to try that!) in the foreground emerging from the doors of its pen at the bullfighting ring. And there was a conquistador in the background waiting to tease and torment him. And in the background still, shapes of faces were obscured but there was a presence of them there. The colors were muted but contrasted each other nicely and looking at it called forth a very strong mood.
I got a real sense of what it must be like for the animal to be walking that walk, strutting from the pen and expecting freedom but finding just this: an enormous room with a man in black ready to piss you off to a breaking point. Below, hard sand. Above, hot sun. Noise and heat and smells and just utter chaos and cacophony. It's confusing, infuriating, upsetting. It makes my stomach turn.
Then I lift my gaze to the fighter, the one holding this cape and wearing this ridiculously fabulous hat. And just as strongly I get this feeling of intense courage and power, unrivaled bravery and absolute pride. He is a strong and capable man, a warrior in this bloodsport.
"Maybe he's a woman?"
Shh. Could be a woman, but probably not. I don't honestly think there was an added political statement for feminism here.
It was moving. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about the concept of bullfighting or the intelligence or morality in enraging an animal to the point of wanting to gore you. As far as sports go, I'm not really into any of them. I can participate in the watching of baseball but it's not an interest of mine alone, but more the tolerance and appreciation for the passions of others in something that doesn't completely bore me to tears. Don't ask me about football, though. But I digress, you see, because what I'm trying to say is I neither approve or disapprove of the sport. It's not really my place to, anyway. But I love art that makes me think about things I don't normally think about, and this piece was so simple and it was so perfectly constructed. I really felt it. I would have taken it home if I could have.
This is why I need to be sick rich, see? Art collections like this.
Anyway there was a whole other room of art too by a woman named (and you'll see why I could remember this one) Glo Sessions. Her art was fabulous, too. A collection of watercolors and charcoal drawings. I'm thinking of some but I want to get out the rest of my story so I'll just leave it to say it was just totally amazing. The best part about the museum.
OR SO I THOUGHT.
This woman that worked there and showed us around, who was darling and lovely and very excited to have guests there, could not let us leave without showing us the, for lack of better word, Thingie. I seriously cannot remember the name of it so I'll just describe it and eventually get up a photo of the device, along with the lady who was so enamored with it.
It's like those old time pianos that didn't need players, they just ran on air bellows and played through rolls of paper where bits had been cut out long ago to produce a sound when the air blows through it. This is how music is produced from the Thingie. Only the Thingie is not shaped like a piano at all but in fact it is a big cart what spews carousel music out. This lady turns it on and the music literally smacks us in the faces twenty feet away. Next thing I know this woman is clapping and bending her knees in time and jerking to either side in some kind of happy dance to whatever tune was coming out. I didn't recognize it. But man did she have a good time standing there three feet from the source of such noise. I took some pictures.
Finally we got the hell out of there and went to check into the hotel. I got my own room so I'd be able to dick around online with the laptop after she went to bed, since I can't sleep in hotels anyway and wasn't really tired. Plus my demon was gonna be around all night so I could talk dirty to him somewhere besides home for a change. ;)
There was a Famous Dave's BBQ connected to the hotel and it's a pretty decent place to eat. Pretty decent place to drink, too, and we figured we'd never get closer than attached so there we walked for dinner and booze.
The food was awesome, as always. The service was AWFUL. Our waitress had zero personality, though that's no reason to dock someone's tip. What gave us a reason was that she was S--L----O------W! I had to wait fifteen minutes between the end of my first drink and the start of my second. The third was slow too and I have no idea what she thought we were going to do with two to-go containers of food and two half empty drinks for the twenty. five. minutes. it took her to return to the table to ask if we wanted dessert. I could have, and would have, had another two or three drinks in that time and left a much happier birthday girl with a much larger bill to over-tip on. But she didn't get her ass in gear and not only did we leave with a smaller bill, we left a smaller percentage tip than we would have, had her service been at all reasonable.
But we went back upstairs and watched TV, giggled, pillow-fought in nighties ( Sure. ;) ), and I hung out online and talked dirty to my demon. Good stuff.
Next day, not enough sleep. But it's all good, I'm only thirty. I can run on fumes. We get up and out and visit this working carousel and get ourselves tickets to ri-ide. It's really beautiful, the lights are gorgeous and all the horses are real wood, real horsehair tails.
The roommate is old so she needed a low one. Of course, not riding this ride together would have been a crime of epic proportions, yes? And what's right next to the low horse on any stopped carousel?
The high one.
I look at it. It looks at me. Its saddle is about shoulder level to me. I hearken back to the Days of Yore, and I recall the merry-go-round at the Paramus mall in New Jersey, the ones along the boardwalk at the shore. I recall a couple of rungs below the horse on the pole for stepping, climbing. I also recall, on some, a leather strap someone made into a stirrup, which always helped as well. This horse has no such apparatus, merely an iron peg just under the horse's body for someone to assist themselves with.
Suddenly I hear this laughter and I look at my roommate, who is already seated comfortably on her low, low, looooowwwww horse and looking up at me and my horse. Now we've talked about this some and she swears on everything in sight that what she said was, "Yeah right!" In my memory, though, it sounded a lot more like, "You're THIRTY!"
Thirty? Am I really too old at thirty to haul myself up onto a carousel horse? Just because it's a little higher than the one my old, lazy roommate managed to squeeze her leg over?
So my response to her derision was "Hell. No." or something less delicate and I grabbed the pole. I hoiked* my foot up on the peg. I gave a little hop and I fucking pulled myself up and up and hand over hand and swinging and squeaking and yes, my dear friends, I made it onto that god damn infernal wooden animal.
* the sound I made when I did it.
And she was a grand horse, white and perpetually throwing her head back and up with pride. Pink and blues on her saddle and bridle and flowers around her tail. We had a great time together, spinning around to this terrible calliope music and feeling the wind in our respective manes.
The carousel finally stopped and instead of being opposite now my roommate and I were about even with each other, mid-air. I had to peel myself off it but she got to use a step stool, the damn cheater! But I help her anyway and I step down off the circle and suddenly my knee is reminding me of what I just did.
The details are fuzzy but I'm pretty sure I bashed it on the flank on the way over. And again just to one side, and then again at the shin. I guess I probably hit the shin first. The knee is the worst, though, there's a big swollen spot on the side and below and it looks like it's wanting to bruise. It might not, though.
And me? I am SO. COOL. I haven't injured myself by being a dumbass prideful child in a long time and I am damn proud that I still can. There should be no time in life when we are too old to be goaded into pushing ourselves for the sake of knowing that we can. If injury is to be had, then wear your scrapes and scars and bruises like the badges they are.
We caught Rein's Deli on the way home and it was amazing. When we got back, I went over to my dad's place to let him cook me dinner for my birthday, since I'd been away the night before. He made burgers and they were really good. Dad's burgers always are. There's a care he puts into his cooking that he doesn't really apply everywhere, I think. Girls aren't the only ones who can cook with love, after all. And then he brought out a brownie from Mrs. Fields with a candle in it, because he knows they're my favorite brownies and that I never get them because I hate going to the mall. This was extra special because I had not gotten a real birthday dessert yet with a candle in it. The restaurant had been so bad the night before that we didn't want to wait another half an hour for her to bring us a cold dessert. My roomie bought me a piece of fudge cake from Rein's that I had planned on having but didn't need to after that. It was really sweet. Past and present issues aside, sometimes he's a real good dad.
So here I am, two days after my thirtieth and I'm reflecting. I have a dear friend who is twenty three and her life pretty much sucks for it. I remember being twenty three, my whole life sucked too. It wasn't just circumstance but state of mind, as well. I was easily dissatisfied and impatient, felt I'd paid my dues and I deserved a break already. Seven years later I am looking at this world and thinking I am so, so small. My potential is huge, as are all of our potentials, maybe in quiet ways and maybe not, but personally I am a very, very small space in this universe. There is so much behind me and still so very much ahead of me still. With any luck - the only luck I believe in at all - I'll make it long enough that this will not be half my life over.
But if it is... if it is half my life, if I have only another thirty years left in this world or less, I am confident I will do more with where I have to go than I have with where I have been. This is not to diminish or second-guess what I have accomplished as a person, an artist, a woman, a terrified and shivering child, whatever else I am or have been. It is to say that whatever it is that I have seen and done and been, I know that whatever is coming next can only get bigger.
I have a comfortable life. I could make more money but I don't go hungry or cold, we maintain steady internet access and the electricity to run it. I love my apartment and my roommate is fantastic. My circle of friends is full, finally, of people that I can love and trust and count on for love, support and comfort. What family I have contact with is in decent terms, which seems to be saying a lot for the common family unit these days. The guy I call boyfriend is unlike anyone I've ever known and I see mutually enriching times ahead for us. I don't hate my work and I manage a comfortable regime of recreation. My Pengi is coming to live out here. And there is not a regulation carousel horse that is too high for me to mount.
I am thirty, and I rule.
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