On Growing Old

Thinking about growing old. That I have no real models for how to deal with this. I've know some awesome, inspiring older people... but they didn't talk to me about what that meant for them. So there's a kind of void there.

I think about the posts that Kelly Coviello has been leaving. Old age is not a disease. But it shares at least as few elements... the absorption of the body into something increasingly foreign, while having to continue defining yourself by something that it both denies that, and insists on asserting its reality.

I mean, resisting the clichés.. the "age is only a number"... the youth cult crap that thinks that telling you that you look younger must be a compliment.

This is tough... cause I look in the mirror at my naked body, and I am not turned on. So I can't imagine anyone else being turned on by seeing what I see. And I am still a sexual being... so I dress to cover it over.

And when when someone says, "age is only a number" ... I think, when's the last time you wanted to fuck an old man/woman? The disconnect, on the level of sexual desire... total cognitive dissonance. And that's the least of it.

I don't think this is new...certainly when it comes to sexual desire, and being open about it. But there's so much more, and we are so cut off, generation to generation. We are not at 30 who we were at 13. We are not at 50, who we were at 30. We are not at 70, who we were at 50. This matters. This is not just personal...if you look at political history, there are generational transformations. Being able to talk about this.. cogently, critically... this matters. As what Kelley has been saying about experiencing illness, matters.

Let's try to be honest with one another about this experience of being human ... the whole range of if. Thank you, Freud, for being the first to really open up what it means to be honest, self reflectively honest.

If we can't manage it on this most intimate level, we'll never be able to make a world from our better imaginings.