Chagal4's Blog

I will admit that as the years came up and mugged me the thought of holding the wrinkles and sags at bay with a little body filler and maybe a stitch or two crossed my mind. generally speaking for about three hundred days a year I feel just about the way I did when I was fifty or so. Which isn’t so bad when you’re seventy or so. The other sixty five days of the year are what I call the “age tax”…that’s when you feel like a truck ran over you while you were sleeping…or one of the millions of viruses or bacterias that cling to every surface in the world decides to cling to me.In those sixty five days i’m either sick or sore or convinced that the end is near enough that I should be in bed with tea and cookies. Leaving all of that aside, when I look in the mirror I know that fifty was quite a while ago.

Every now and then though I’m brought up short in my idle reflections on the possibility of knocking a couple dozen years off my face and body. I understand that it is supposed to do wonders for the creeping stain of depression that lurks when younger folks give you that “Hello grand-dad” look. Happened just the other day at the local coffee bar. No tip that day.

I can bear the depression and god knows here are far too many other things to be depressed about than getting older. No…what really drives all thoughts of this stuff from my mind is the forlorn despair I feel when I read that yet another gang of young women has been convinced to go off to a seedy motel where some ghastly creature will charge them thousands of dollars to inject industrial strength silicone or artificial fat into their bodies…in the interests of getting an ass that might be difficult to fit through a doorway sideways. I’ve seen a lot of those asses both real and imagined and honestly even if I wasn’t this age…I’d find the prospect of getting next to it after dark…daunting. Lots of people love them and I say hooray for them…what concerns me is not the desire to enhance the back of the pants…but the lunacy of thinking that a couple of hours in a low down motel is going to do the trick. And I cannot yet decide which particular ring of Hell the silicone injecting fake doctors deserve. I think maybe they belong alongside the creeps that rip off old people with Alzheimer’s. As for the foolish people who get the “work” done I used to think that there was a kind of celestial dome of protection over people that dumb. You know the ones…they step out of their cars into traffic without looking…They take drugs that a total stranger sells them in an alley…they think jumping off a roof into a swimming pool will impress the chicks…man. The celestial dome is extremely selective I find.

So whenever I look in the mirror and think “what if?” I just do a quick data search in the corner of my mind where I keep crazy shit…and pull out the latest news report of yet another bunch of people rushing off to hospitals to to have their brand new lopsided ass repaired or restored.

We should have been Charlie sooner… but how were we to know? They’d been dancing for years…out on the edge of the floor. Listening to music of their own. Laughing in the corners, drawing pictures on the walls. Sometimes they were funny, sometimes they were scary. They laughed at everybody and cried about the crazies. There was a madness loose in the world and some of us took it too seriously…stared at our hands…ranted at the darkness spreading like a stain. Charlie laughed with a pen and ink…We wondered, was that wise? How were we to know?

Can three assholes kill a country…by shooting cartoonists…What? Is that even sane? When I was six years old all I wanted to do was be a cartoonist. They were my heroes…they invented my heroes…they drew my heroes so that I could see them. Their heroes battled evil. I couldn’t imagine anything more honourable…It seemed such a…gentle…profession. Sitting with a pen and ink, at a table, inventing worlds. I drew on school books, on my bedroom wall, on scrap paper. I thought Prince Valiant was real. I was amazed about Wonder Woman’s glass plane. Mandrake the Magician and the Green Hornet guarded the door to my sleep. One day I woke up and I wasn’t a kid anymore. Damn! They were gone.

I kept drawing of course. And I wondered where they went…the cartoonists. When I found them again they were a different tribe. Oh, there were lots of gentle souls…cute little pieces of cleverness tucked into nooks in magazines…smiles. The New Yorker is full of them. I can always find a smile there. But out there on the edge there were ravers and ranters…Artist cartoonists, exploring, searching, driving their work into far out fantasy worlds and France had the best of them. A magazine called Heavy Metal. These people took the same drugs as me…ate the same food…loved the same music. And they had a culture…knew each other, shared work, competed.

Flat out political?…Hell, I don’t know…maybe some. Charlie was…is.

Out there on the edge…dancing…dancing…spinning…laughing and dying. Cartoonists are still my heroes.

We should have been Charlie sooner.

We should have known.