A couple days after my sixty-ninth birthday, a few days before the new year, a thought blew through my head, like out one ear and in the other, then dropped like a lead turd. Do you ever feel like you lived your whole life wrong? And do you feel that way right now?
Moments after I had that thought, waiting for my wife’s biopsy results, I read an interview with the real-life inspiration for that lesbian poet on Transparent.
Eileen Miles said, “It used to be the beatnik was like the Jughead character, the Maynard G. Krebs character, the joker—and it’s still sort of like that today—but I think that it should be more like a kind of royalty. The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we’re standing, we’re doing stand-up. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
You rang? I was always a jughead, always the joker. I can still hear Bob Denver: “Work?! Marriage?! Police?!” I would much rather watch them tear down the Endicott Building than do what I’m told. But I spent most of my life trying to live like I was supposed to. Or thought I was supposed to.
That didn’t really work so good for me. For anybody.
But here we are….