Vanity Scare
Fucking boo
I’ve been doing a lot of walking and therefore very little writing so I have far too much in my head and I’ll try to get it down nicely so it won’t be a pain in the assl to read and I don’t know what’s with that extra l but it makes for a nice apostropheless contraction although it’s a little more anatomically specific than I had originally intended.
How’m I doing so far?
Hunter is Charlie’s lovely girlfriend and she lives with us or more specifically with him in the basement and the two of them do some pretty hippie things, you know, like listen to 70s records and buy vintage furniture that is the nicest stuff in the house and because they both really have an eye, you know, as well as an ear, their space looks nicely far-out but it also gives a cozy nod backwards because they have deadeye marksmanship in a thrift store. Anyway. They have good taste. She’s a photographer and he’s a musician. First and foremost anyway. They are also lots of other things including two kids in their early twenties who do shit just like we did, you know, before the responsibilities kick in and the hangovers get worse.
They also burn sage which smells amazing but sometimes they overdo it like the other night when they needed smoke for a photoshoot
So that same night Hunter was fine until she wasn’t. I didn’t know how sick she was until the ambulance came and I heard her on the steps outside having all sorts of trouble. She was barfed out and breathless and she was a little numb in her hands and legs and nobody knew what was wrong with her.
The only thing that crossed my (sleeping) mind was that she had recently dyed her hair and I’ve heard horrible things about hair dye so I got up and fell over climbing both legs into the same pant leg and then I put on a shirt, or at least I think I did, and went outside in bare feet on a mission like Doctor fucking House.
I didn’t have a cane but it must have looked like I needed one what with all the little stones on the driveway and they’d already slid her in the ambulance by this time and I could hear her having trouble and I told them maybe it was the hair dye and the guy was as polite as could be.
I think he felt sorry for me for being such an idiot
Anyway it got pretty fucking hairy but it turned out ok. She was released in the morning and now we all know that sage can be poisonous.
They slept almost all day and later, pale and fragile, she told me this little story
So image this. There she is in the ambulance, flat fucking out, scared to death, and feeling just horrible – a strong ten on the dire scale – and the guy of course had to ask her some questions, you know, was she on any medication, when was her last meal, etc. The usual stuff. Age. Height. Weight. But she didn’t know her weight so he took a wild guess and his guess was low and in the realm of her dreams and in spite of thinking she was dying and feeling extremely awful, she had a gut reaction to the number he came up with and she recognized, with an appropriate splash of horror, that she was flattered.
She remembers the “He thinks I’m tiny!!” involuntary rush of pleasure in spite of all the other horrible rushes she was experiencing
I suspect the lust for admiration is built in and is part of our human race strategy but the race has been fucked with, amped up, and we are bombarded with images to which we compare ourselves.
We interpret these ideas of perfection as an ask to please do better
It does become less intense with age, you know, once mating season – which lasts around 40 years – is over and we learn to say fuck it more, but it’s still there, the fucking beast, not dormant yet, which is why when I search for thesaurus.com google anticipates my needs and strongly suggests I go to thebay.com instead.
And google learned that little trick from me
Just went for a walk thinking maybe I’d come up with an appropriate conclusion to this piece, which I think is important. I wanted a happy, hopeful ending, and I got a flicker of it when I was way down on the cliffs so I sort of did the crow back, you know, mostly diagonal zigzags that totally threw Daisy off and on my way I had a short chat with my friendly neighbourhood scientist who always inspires, and then down my street I was thinking how you can’t hold your stomach in and your pee in at the same time and you sort of have to choose.
And that’s the idea here
Go ahead and be beautiful, please, it’s your privilege and enjoy the fuck out of it but also love and nurture your other assets like your killer punchlines, your sideburns, the way your eyes go when you laugh, how good you are at math, what the stars think your real name is, the weird pictures you paint.
