Ramblings On Not a Ton of Sleep

19 minute voice messages, the electric dimensionality that comes with age, a red suit from the thrift store and...my trainer's contact info

I’ve been exchanging really long voice messages with friends; 19 minutes is my longest so far. We call them “podcasts” and use them the same way, listening while we clean, put on make up, etc. (Is everyone doing this?) Sometimes I get long messages from friends in NY and listen first thing when I wake up, just lying there and soaking up the coziness of hearing my friend’s thoughts on Love On The Spectrum, various dates, her dog’s pee, my issues and decisions, etc. Sounds boring but it isn’t. (Ok, the part about the dog’s pee is boring but I understand that I’m a monster and my punishment for being a monster is to endure a near-constant stream of information and songs¹ about the pets of my favorite people.)

I’ve been wondering if these recordings work out of context. Does anyone listen to audio on Substack? Here’s a test, this is from a message left for a friend while taking a walk, most of my messages are recorded while walking:

Before having a baby I would see mothers pushing strollers and think, There's a mom, a different kind of person from me. Not realizing that if the baby was small enough to fit in a stroller than this woman had very recently been just like me and pushing the stroller could not possibly feel familiar to her. She could see that I didn’t understand how much she was just like me. Which added to her loneliness. I also vaguely imagined that she would push the stroller forever; this was who she was – again not realizing that the stroller-stage is relatively brief. You get rid of the stroller and never see or think about it again.

That’s one thing about youth in general: you think each stage will last forever, even in your own life. But once you have many stages behind you, you begin to pick up what life is putting down. You start to catch on: This is just for now. This time where my teen and I live together like roommates, wearing each others clothes and watching our shows and saying, “I’m going to do a hair mask,” before stepping into the shower: this is just for now. And the time when me and my boyfriend would meet up after work and eat popsicles while walking around the neighborhood: that was just for then. A few years later we would be parents and some more years after that we’d be texting each other about our baby from separate houses, because we didn’t live together anymore.

Bittersweet, yes, but there’s a kind of electric dimensionality that comes with it that feels Very Alive. Less calcified. My girlfriend and I, having met at 49 and 51, don’t have the illusion of everything lasting forever; we know from experience that if we break up, the odds are we will find other people to be with² and those relationships will also be meaningful and important, as they all have been. And even if we stay together until one of us drops dead, it won’t always be like this. I won’t always have a child at home, she won’t always be unemployed…already we have both moved since we met and when we drive through our old neighborhoods we say Remember when we used to walk to Grocery Outlet? Remember when you³ used to work out with James in the driveway? So the present, our time together, feels very creamy, sort leavened with reality. Funny that it’s reality that leavens and fantasy that packs a life tight and inert. I guess because all change happens in reality and fantasy is just a loop. The gayness helps, as does the fact that we don’t live together and are tech open (using that phrase like “tech avail” is used about an actor who doesn’t have a conflict. Tech, technically, is there so you don’t get the idea that they are just sitting around doing nothing; they aren’t avail in many, many other ways. I’m tech avail every day of my life.)

Every romantic relationship is like this, fluffed and aerated (I’m loving these words! Feel them in my spine!) by reality, you just don’t know it when you’re younger (or ever, if you’re like my parents and stay together for sixty years and counting.)

This shiver of dimensionality really brings other people into focus – just to curl this back around to my walks. I often pass an ancient-looking woman and I always study the details of how she’s dressed, her black sneakers, her webby hat, looking for clues of what else she is. Today she happens to be old, but she’s not “an old woman,” just as the woman pushing the baby carriage isn’t “a mom.” Both of them are slightly surprised to find themselves here. Then you can obviously keep spending this dime on anything you want: that man who just called isn’t “a telemarketer,” that woman ringing you up isn’t “a cashier,” even the little girl next door who is constantly shouting her head off — she’s not “a child.” I also like to look at babies and divest them of the word cute. Also trees: not pure, not innocent. Full of motives and maybe even morally questionable manipulation. I mean what do I know? Am I a tree expert? Can I read trees’ minds? I stare out the window at this avocado tree all day long – is it staring back at me going: Try to see her not as “a human” but as a tree that’s really bad at being a tree, constantly careening around when everything is she needs is right here.

In closing and for no reason, here is an Albert Nipon suit I got at a thrift store the other day, $20.

I took the jacket to the tailor, but in the meantime I wore the skirt on its own:

And I just got the jacket back, voila — the whole suit:

(Actually, I’m putting it behind a paywall because I’m just as manipulative as my avocado tree.)

xo, good luck,

mj