Mother Knows Best

You know a car's seen better days when everything starts to break. Sometime in my twenties the truth that not all wounds heal sank in good, and I became at least somewhat safer in my athletic endeavors, etc. Even if you sit in a cube your whole life though, age happens, and these fancy tents for our souls start sagging, leaking, and becoming difficult to unzip. What I'm leading up to here is the doleful confession that these words hail from Self-pity City, USA, Population: 1, and that I lost another molar, last one on the bottom right. That valiant tooth held up half of an expensive but rickety bridge for the last few years, so it took the bridge with it, leaving me with just a bloody, aching, and sad looking socket. Lots of people have fucked up teeth, so my story's not remarkable I know, but self-expression takes many forms. I plan on replacing this pain & worry with another any moment, so must strike while the fever sweats.

Marquez writes from the perspective of a 90-year old man in his most recent (2005) novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores:

I became accustomed to waking every day with a different pain that kept changing location and form as the years passed. At times it seemed to be the clawing of death, and the next day it would disappear...it is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us. Cicero illustrated this with the stroke of a pen: "No old man forgets where he has hidden his treasure."

Marquez suits me well, because he'll say about any fucking thing, without apology. I read the man's personal growth and regression in his works, feel connected not only to him but to the distant lands of which he writes. I have adopted the deliberate practice of stealing other people's memories, ecspecially childhood memories, for my own. It makes for a much more fascinating and uplifting biography, and I'll be stealing memories from Marquez if I live long enough, so I'm not just pissing in the wind when I read these fantastical introspections. Keep telling myself that.

Oh yes, and that photo's of my dear mother enjoying a sweltering July day in her elf hat outside Bohemian Grove near the rural, economically depressed Russian River town of Monte Rio. She had one of her teeth out the day before I had mine out - what are the odds?