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My Profile
Gift from Hil Part 2 - 2014-12-30
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10:40 a.m. - 2010-04-30
I know I've sounded like a grump these last few entries, I'm in a lot of physical pain and it's taking a toll on my usual sunny disposition (heh). Not much to do about my idiot bod but soldier on and do my best with the meds and help available to me. I don't say much about it, this pain, something that mystifies Mick to no end. The man is incapable of getting through the agonies of a mosquito bite without bitching about it constantly for days and days, so my lack of complaint is beyond weird to him. At first he even accused me of hiding it from him, as if I were trying to pull a fast one or something, but he's coming to understand that for me talking about it makes it worse. The older I get the more close-mouthed I become. Not just about troubles, but darn near everything. Doesn't mean I still can't get my talk on when the occasion is right. Sit me down on the Couch of Infinite Time Suck� (copyright: the glorious Deb) with a good friend and a glass of spirits and I'll talk your damn face off. Come Sunday we're scooping up my darling Miss Steph and tootling off to the car show in Rhinebeck. While Mick and Wolf drool over the show cars, I expect Steph and I will park it on a shady bench somewhere and yammer until our tongues are as exhausted as if we'd been at a lesbian orgy for three days. (Oh pshaw, don't even get huffy with me about the metaphor, like cunnilingus is a bad thing.) But my days as a chatterbox about all things large, small and sundry are at an end. Something I'm certain would astound folks who knew me Then. Back in the day I could NOT shut up. Part cluelessness, part defense, part passion for ideas and isms, I had my mouth going all the damn time. I must have been as annoying as hell. In fact I know I was. My excellent high school boyfriend Richard had broken the geek vow of celibacy and taken up with chatty, dippy me much to the chagrin of his nerd posse who'd convinced themselves they were above all things female and their own needs of the flesh. Eventually the other dorks slowly gave into the Dark Side and found women of their own. The coolest of the nerds, Kevin, took up with a prototype hipster named Eva. Pale, scrawny, bug eyed and as world weary as a 16 year old can get, Eva had spent most of her artsy, bohemian, black turtleneck life shuttling between her mom's place on the local ashram, her grandmother's staid clapboard house in a forgotten corner of Rockland County, and her father's place which, when I knew her, was a fairytale thatched roofed, half-timbered cottage parked in the middle of an overgrown garden where flowers, vegetables, herbs (medicinal and seasoning) and marijuana ran riot on a large lot that abutted some state parkland. His fourth wife, an ostentatiously unshaven Earth mother type who went topless so to give better access to the three kids (an infant, a toddler, and a pre-schooler) who wanted to nurse on demand, had invited Eva and any of her friends who wanted to join her over for lentil stew and an afternoon discussing the Meaning of Life. I don't know what they fed those bushy redolent pot plants, but the joint passed to me sent me to another place. I remember the world had gone wonderfully bright, animated like cartoons are, and after several tokes my endlessly working mouth fell still. Lost to everything but the input of my overly stimulated retinas and the delicious (and at that time- unknown) feeling of being safe and at peace, I sat and listened to the talk swirling around me without saying a word. Blissed out. Utterly and completely blissed out. Marveling at this new peace I felt no need to distract and forestall the inevitable criticisms and pain that would be slammed at me without the body armor of my distracting chatter. I had no desire to make others notice me lest I be abandoned again. I didn't have to prove my worth with a glurt of 50 cent words and the startling in-your-face proof that this Barbie with the humongus boobs and the sweetly pedophilic pouty lipped, blow-up doll baby face did, in fact, own a powerful brain that revved constantly on a steady diet of knowledge and theory. To the casual observer I was just cosmically stoned, but to me it was a revelation. My silence was unnerving to the others. Richard snapped his fingers in front of my face and I smiled at him. I answered Kevin's caustic barbs with the same contented smile. Eva's father, who might have been lining me up for a trial as Wife #5 for all I knew, blew me a kiss that I acknowledged with a small nod. Eva, who had never been shy about her opinion that I was a vacuous bimbo with all the intellectual worth of a pet rock, was the most frightened. She goaded me, taunted, and did her best to draw me out into saying something. Anything. To please, please reestablish my place as the group's resident dimwit, if for no other reason than to solidify her place as The Coolest One of All. And I said nothing. Not out of vindictiveness. Not out of spite. But because I was, for the first time ever, okay with myself. It was wonderful. That lesson, the one about being okay with myself, took another 30 years to grow root and flourish. But it was planted that day. The day, that very first day, when I could finally, happily, willingly Shut The Fuck Up.
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