Friday, March 1, 2013

Revisionist Lives-Double Jeopardy

Dedicated to all the women who are in this situation...you will crawl out of it...but we know 
how you feel...

Married 23 years, divorced, and middle aged. I call this state in life a kind of double jeopardy. So it goes.

In addition to being newly single, you are now heading into your "golden years" and I don't think any time since being a teenager can be more disconcerting, disquieting, and uncomfortable. What are we supposed to do now? Where is our place in the world now? Do we have one? It is only worse because I feel human relationships are in breakdown mode as compassion gives way to survival and no one wants to be bothered anymore with actually caring about anything, least of all, you. After all, you just got kicked in the...

Then there are your friends, if you even have any and if you even have any LEFT from your past. They are frittering away as well. Phone calls go un-returned. Letters are stamped "address unknown" even though you swear your friend from college still lives in Seattle. You make a feeble attempt to meet someone you don't particularly like for dinner and when they cancel at the last minute, you are secretly grateful because this means you can stay in bed with the dogs snuggled up against you (used to be a man), watch white-trash television, drink wine, and be perfectly contented. Then the fact that you are in bed at 8 p.m on a Friday night perfectly contented watching white-trash television bothers you...but then it doesn't. Fuck it you say as you turn to a Sex and the City rerun you have watched 32 times and the Cabernet isn't bad for $3.99. Shut up already. You have your health. Ok so you don't have health benefits (guess where THIS is?) and your husband--ex-husband--went parachuting with someone last weekend. Hope the bastard's parachute didn't open. "Oh you hit the ground just when it opened? You're paralyzed? I'm so sorry."


These are strange fucking times my friends. Bumper cars. We are like bumper cars, kind of slamming into one another with the perfunctory "sorry" but not really because we don't really give a shit anymore. We are treading water to do what? Die? Are we just killing time until we die?

Dating. Please. He'll have to knock your holey sock off or knock you out of your self-imposed lobotomy or knock on something because you don't really care anymore. It's all going to shit and it IS all going to shit. There are just too many of us now and we keep coming. We all know it's the end times. So enjoy that 3rd glass of wine and avoid Downton Abbey because they just killed off Matthew. Like I said, end times.