Category: celebrities

It Ain’t Me, Babe

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 5 Comments

Fotolia_17392440_Subscription_Monthly_XXLStrange thoughts have been passing through this middle-age mind lately.

My household is back to “normal” (whatever that is)…I have the evenings and my house back to myself; I am back into writing, walking in the early evening (well…just tonight…but hey…it’s a start); and am letting the sparkles tickle my toes now and then.

But beneath that, deep in the shadows of my heart and psyche, lurks the fiend known as mortality.

When I heard that Patty Duke died today, it stuck yet another eety beety needle into my heart. She was 69 — just 69. She was a part of my childhood. Patty and Cathy, England and America. Dumb, obvious, silly…that is the state of most people’s childhood.

But I can’t help but notice that that icky word is creeping closer and closer to me. And I don’t like it.

The Reaper is starting to pick off my generation. My music idols, my television idols, my friend idols. And they all are not much older than I am. Just in the last few months:

Gary Shandling 66

Patty Duke – 69

Vanity – 57

Glen Frey – 67

Davis Bowie – 69

Alan Rickman – 69

Natalie Cole – 65

Keith Emerson – 71

People that shaped my youth. My music. People whose styles and ideas I didn’t care for, along with styles and ideas I loved. People who were larger than life. People who were my age.

I know the routine — death comes for us all, it’s how you live your life, what you leave behind that counts, blah blah blah. I’m not making fun of it — on the contrary, I’m breathing it every morning, noon, and night.

And all of that positive thinking isn’t doing one thing to stop my train of thought.

I look at those who have gone before. I tell myself maybe it was due to their taking a lot of drugs in their youth or they were alcoholics or they laid in the sun one too many years. Of course, I know that’s making excuses for reality.

And I’m okay with that.

I believe that as long as your deep psyche knows the truth, whatever blabber you tell yourself is okay. It’s like looking for ghosts or unicorns. You can believe in them with gusto, but the little voice in your psyche says only when you see them in 3D will they really be real.

Maybe that’s a lesson for all of us. Make up stories so that you can cope with whatever is going on with you, but always hold onto the truth. For the truth never changes. It’s like I’ve always said. We are all intuitive. We all can sense the future, the path, what’s right and wrong. It’s the mind chatter and self abuse we do to ourselves that makes us lose the thread of truth and make up all kinds of excuses and stories for our mistakes and bad behavior.

Somehow in all of this I find myself making up reasons for people’s deaths so that I don’t have to look at my own eventual demise. People die every day. People of all ages, races, and gender cross that rainbow bridge. The reasons are more chatter. It doesn’t matter. They have gone and we can’t bring them back.

So the next best thing we can do is honor their memory. Talk about them. Tell stories that involve them. Make it as if they were just over in the next town. Love carries farther than any celestial glider.

Back to the Baby Boomer celebrities.

The number of those passing through the golden gates will continue to increase as our generation ages. There was a reason we were called the Boomers — we boomed in abundance into this world. So it’s kinda a fact that we will cease and desist in the same booming manner.

Maybe I should not worry so much about my own demise and start doing something to build my own legacy. Something that will be my truth.

Maybe I’ll start a singing career….

Ahhmmm…too sexy for my shirt…too sexy for my shirt …..

Scared Straight

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 9 Comments

scaredA beautiful Sunday morning — a bit cloudy, a bit cool, but quiet, romantic, inspirational. The younger side of me says I should go for a walk, clean out the basement, do all sorts of “active” things on my one full day off. My creative side says it’s a great day to sit and write. You can imagine which one I am going to listen to.

I was all pumped up this morning to write about an article I just wrote for Retirement and Good Living (http://retirementandgoodliving.com/retirement-is-a-10-letter-word/) which is about retirement and the doors that open once you say sayonara to punching a time clock or being a slave to an alarm clock. (It’s really a great article…check it out!)

But on my way here I had to pass through Yahoo, and couldn’t help but stop and peek at the news headlines.  A singer demands a wheelchair-bound member of the audience stand before he continued his concert. Another singer asked the world to “Forget My Weird Butt — Check out my Underboob!”   This sports figure beat his 4-year-old with a switch and this other knocked his girlfriend out. And I begin to wonder — what’s the point?

We struggle all our lives to make it to the golden grounds, only to find it’s polluted with nonsense and outrageous behavior. I know show business has been show business since the first caveman bopped another on the head and a third thought it funny. But I also am seeing how it takes more and more to get a rise out of an audience these days. Things that were off-color years ago are the rage today, and being a close-to-senior makes it even more difficult to fathom where entertainment will go next.

I myself am a parody of the media of today. One of my favorite television shows has turned gruesomely violent this year, and some part of me still wants to watch what “happens” to all of them in the end. As if my moral compass ticks and says, “they’re all so bad something bad HAS to happen to them.” Another show I started to watch has turned into such a screwed up mess that all I want to do is see what the alien baby looks like. I could care less about the drama surrounding the main characters. Just let me see the end product. One of my favorite chefs is a pillar of manners in one show and a cursing madman in another.

The world has become a frightening place of voyeurs watching, not doing. I myself am squirmy at blood and guts. I abhor violence and am a fraidy cat when it comes to people yelling or losing their temper and throwing things (or worse). Yet I find myself sitting on the edge of the entertainment world, watching it from afar, uncomfortable and nightmarish, looking for a silver lining amongst the blood and gore.

Even the writing world has broken its limits as to what is readable and what is not. Everyone around me has read this entertaining novel about a man who murders a family and the girl survivor who unknowingly hitches a ride with him in his camper. I freaked out about half way through the novel, tried to read it again and again, but just couldn’t get passed the kid who was killed and stitched up in the window.

What makes the world rotate like this? Why is humanity such a violent place?

I know this topic is way off the retirement mark. But it’s like I pretend that once I “retire” I can cut off the horror of the world and live in my own antiseptic version of reality. That I can wake up and write and clean a little and go watch my grandson play soccer and the world will be a safe one to fall asleep in.

Which, of course, is a fantasy in itself.

My solution is a naive one, yet I believe it will help me keep what little innocence I still have. Stop watching TV shows that butcher anything but a chicken, let the entertainment world entertain itself, and stick by the simple things in life that make me happy. I don’t need to be involved with the parts of the world I can’t do anything about — I should stick with those parts where what I do DOES matter. Work with disabled children, walk for the Cure, be a shoulder to cry on for friends who are having a hard time of things.  Go to charity events that benefit those I love, help those less fortunate get back on their feet.

Life is too short to be worrying about entertainer’s wardrobe malfunctions or their asinine antics in front of an audience.  Let them live in their world, and I’ll live in mine.

Besides — how funny would it be if MY wardrobe malfunctioned?