I am going to do a full-on Kardashian, talking about how I have changed my appearance and the feed back loop. I would, but won’t include a series of photographs, inundating Instagram Land, following it with responses from Kanye, Kim, Kris and the minions they have slept with, want to sleep with, or don’t remember sleeping with. Before I finish belly crawling under this microscopically, low bar, there would have to be a tweet from the President of the United States. Having read any of my posts, I am certain he would have a mean nickname, like the Jewish Pirate, with big nostrils and cheap gold earing, stupidly misspelled, closing with an innuendo that I’m secretly gay and a Communist.
I am back now and just want to say that after yet another professional twist a matter of several months ago, I decided to grow a closely-cropped beard and let my luxuriously, wavy silver hair grow longer, eventually resembling a Sikh turban. I was genetically lucky and innocently inherited some serious hair genes. I have had my hair a long time and have always felt weird about compliments, because I haven’t done a fucken thing to deserve them. I have so many things to thank my mother for.
I have an unbelievably diverse resume, navigating through a labyrinth of professions and situations that would blow your mind, but that is not what I am up to at the moment. At 73, I found myself in yet another completely new professional circumstance, with fascinating possibilities. It simply didn’t work out and there is no one at fault, but what it did do is completely rupture my routine. Imagine you are right handed and one morning, you wake up and find that you have to do everything with your left? You wake up on a Monday morning and everything you have done, you no longer have to do, absolutely nothing.
Faced with yet another change, I decided it was an opportune time to change my face. Man, it has taken too much time to get to this part of the story! After I decided to alter my appearance, I was on the receiving end of some sweet compliments and that is the Kardashian thing, because it appears to be all the K’s actually care about. One of the very few cool things about being older is that you’d be a moron to let your ego run wild. It wasn’t being referred to as the Silver Fox that got me, it was being told I didn’t act my age.
The idea of not acting my age had to be next in my disjointed progression of stories. The very first time you are confronted with expectation is when you are subtly pressured to stop shitting yourself. While I don’t remember, I’ll bet it felt just wonderful to be sitting in a warm, soft bed of my own making. We are all forced to give that up and the climb for acceptance begins.
As we grow up, it is important to show signs that we are maturing and becoming more self aware. It is always about acting older until you get older then what the hell do you do? I have been around myself a very long time and I actually understand what it means when I am told I don’t act my age. I don’t think mathematics and behavior are strait jacketed together.
God Bless Ida, my mother would always use the threat of “what will the neighbors think?” as the deterrent to any abhorrent behavior. The governor on all freedom of expression is, you guessed it, “What will the neighbors think?” I am not some wild, crazy guy, who got Maori tattoos on his face. Please keep in mind I don’t give a shit if you do that, even if you’re not Maori.
I think my first forty-two years in NYC had everything to do with acting my age. In the very beginning of so-called adulthood, I liked being a suit wearing, attache carrying, upwardly mobile, newlywed in the cool world of broadcast advertising. The years moved so quickly.
It all changed when I left that world of expectation and mysteriously landed in northern New Mexico in ’87. I dropped the mirror out the window of my blue, Dodge Colt and that was many years ago. It is such a long story. I wanted so badly to be Larry and it began to feel like I was strangling him in a world I inherited, but didn’t own. I moved to a little adobe home in the middle of no where. I bought a pick up truck and fell in love with a hybrid wolf and gave him a Navajo name. I simply decided to live my life and never look in the mirror of measurement.
Let me ask you guys, what does it feel like to act your age? I think so often we focus on acting who we are, rather than simply being who we are.
Much Love.