Gerentology

I'm feeling especially heavy this evening. The weights are criss-crossed across my shoulders. The weight of my children, the dead weight of several thousand individual bodies, the bright spots in my eyes after camera flashes. The word "carion" keeps passing through my head, but I can't remember what it means. And so of course I looked it up. Carion is not a word. But carrion means something to the effect of rotten flesh, or anything else similarly vile. I haven't been able to use it in a sentence since it started popping up...so here goes.

We all feed on the carrion of our ancestors.

Or less vulgar, perhaps:

I tripped over a pile of fishy carrion, lost my balance, and landed in the arms of a young man of twenty-something. He set me up, told me to watch my feet when I walk, and got back on his cell phone. He's a bit of fishy carrion himself. He had stepped on my toe.

British faces are indefinable, as of yet. I could not tell you the difference between a Brit, and Irishman, and a Scot, or a Welshman for that matter, by just looking at them. As far as I can tell, all four have particularly straw-like hair, fairly massive foreheads, and indistinct eyes, noses, and mouths. They aren't smilers, so I can't include teeth, even if I wanted to.

The greatest piece of carrion alive, Mr. Tom Waits, has joined me for tea thirteen times in the last seven days. He likes his tea without sugar, half-full with Old Dan Tucker, and on ice. His advice is to chew and swallow gravel until you sound like you're gurgling it all the time, find a girl who cares about you for your hands, and start painting the moon once a day, every day, for six months. If by that time you can't tell the difference between a Brit and an Irishman, you'll at least have a grasp on love.

To be new to a place, any place, makes the crack in my toes that much louder. My mother's toes crack. I can crack my wrists, my knuckles, and my index finger as well. My neck I have cracked before, and a six year old girl was so appalled that she told her mother immediately. I haven't cracked it since...and I stay away from six year old girls unless I have something to read.

I'd like to be able to finish things much better than I can now. Glasses of water, mostly, but also sketches and ability-training and books and fruit. I seem obsessed with keeping those things in my life that ought to be impermanent. When I want peace, I go out and buy a kiwi and peel it at the table and leave half of it on accident, and when I come back I'm afraid of fermentation and I throw it away, not knowing, anyway, what could possibly be good for me in a kiwi. Tom Waits doesn't eat kiwi because his teeth are too soft now. He drinks paste and shakes and astronaut food, and has found all the secrets to love, having lived on the moon for a few months in 1997. He says its easy, except that you both have to know that its easy, and so often only one of two knows. He says that the first step is to break something. Give yourself a sense of immediacy. This will make her think that you have a good grasp on what it takes to be in a family.

I'm the very worst picture taker in the world. And here, it is especially difficult to take a good picture, because everything is so close together. And I never know what looks good in a picture. But I have enough sense to take pictures of a boy doing yoga on top of a museum pillar. He was brilliant. He started with his shirt on, but then looked down and saw that he was wearing a shirt, and so he took it off.