We don't recognize the flexible beauty of age in this superficially encouraged world we rock out upon. I passed a simple scene where I work the other week - an office with a hefty but attractive woman sitting at her desk and a thick-glassed man talking to her. Neither was textbook beautiful according to glossy magazine pictures - her a little chunky but round in all the best places, and with a sweet southern smile; him a little nerded out looking but with gentle eyes and a non-threatening demeanor, yet sturdy and not submissive in stature. They were talking and sharing googly smiles at each other, and I only caught a flash of it as the door was cracked open in passing, but it was beautiful.
There's a natural beauty in age, more flesh and less tautness of the forms we lusted after in our youth, but that's a natural flexibility that has come with use, that has been earned not condemned upon the body. Vaginas that have gave birth and penises that take a little longer for round two than they used to, softness between two people who want to savor those soft moments, not stab at each other with sharp figures and jolting epileptic frenzies. Makes me think of tomatoes on the vine, because green tomatoes are hard bodies but taste terrible. And them older tomatoes, all soft and red ripe, dripping juice, might have a bad edge you have to slice off for the compost bucket, but it's good and perfect and messy and doesn't look like the ones in the supermarket that they take pictures of for circulars, but damn if it don't taste thirty times better.
Don't hate age. I'm getting on close to wrapping up my fourth decade in a couple years, and I ain't the same as I was, but I'm a goddamned beautiful motherfucker. Not sharp-edged pretty like a 20-year-old girl sucking at the tit of pop culture would gawk at, but hey, I can't help that. I don't want to help that. I feel sad when I see older women running themselves to death to try and keep their sharp-edged magazine mirror "beauty", all gaunt and Ms. Skeletor-looking and needing a sandwich. And I feel sad when I see old dudes brow beaten into hiding their scuffs and scars and ink-stained skin, hair chopped into an business appropriate coif, fighting to hold their imagined spot as the younger, firmer, less savvy dudes roll into the overall picture.
I say all this knowing my hair has gotten shaggy and I work a job where responsibilities hover over everything like storm clouds, and there has been no thunder from up the ladder, but I know I need to cut it shorter again. And whenever I get to that point, and look in the mirror and know my shaggy hair looks stupid when I comb it (because that's not it's nature) but looks perfect when I've driven 49 miles with my window down on the truck because the AC's broken, and it's all over the place on my head, looking like a European basketball player but with an Al-Qaeda beard, and I realize I should probably just run in the opposite direction instead of trying to keep making the storm clouds happy, because the storm clouds come from the same place those hard-edged threatening stabbity images of beauty come from - a sad and worried place never quite comfortable with what it is and always wanting to look a little bit more like something it ain't.
That being said, I'll cut it. Light bill don't pay itself. I know. I've been waiting three months, and it ain't done it yet.
STEAL "Don't Do It"
NEXT: A summer ass jam that I swear was on a J.J. Krupert countdown before but doesn't show up as so in my secret J.J. Krupert master database of dork sciences!
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