Swimming with the sharks Sept. 21, 2012

  

She has a never-ending need for affirmation, casting out lines as if to catch someone, maybe the only one, who can fill that need, someone who can fit into her life, someone who will neither cling nor run away – as one of her poems from early this year pointed out.

In a later poem, she bemoaned her fate at having short term relationships.

The pattern of her life also determines where she works and what career she will pursue.

What a disappointment life must be having once sung before an audience of 23 million people to end up in an office filled with balding old men, clawing her way up a constantly shrinking ladder of success to find herself with fewer and fewer options, and even here, she sees her passage up blocked by someone she believes is trying to derail her.

For a time before I began to understand her better, I was indeed jealous at the fact she could get whatever she wanted – as The Eagles once said – with just smile.

In the past, she had more choice, more options, but as several of her poems point out, she is fighting just to not fall back into the pit which many women fall into as they age – the pit my one time love, Peggy fell into when she aged out of the strip club business, the same pit some of the groupies from the bands fell into.

If this doesn’t work, what are her options?

She is incredibly talented in art, dance, music, cooking and now writing. She sees herself as a player, a street savvy woman who fights to control her own destiny.

But this is the great fallacy of her life.

She swims with sharks, bares her teeth like a shark, but she’s really only a guppy, and yet needs to keep moving, to keep the illusion of being tough so as to not get eaten by real sharks.

She needs her paranoia as a survival tool, a kind of sonar to give her warning of approaching danger, so she can scoot beyond their reach.

She has no choice but to swim, unable to do anything but what she has always done, unable to steer too far from the sharks off whom she must feed, all the time trying not to get bitten when she has plenty of scars to show just how close she has come.

You have to wonder at what point will she be able to get into waters where the sharks cannot go, where she might find peace, and perhaps find a stream of success, able to use her immense talents without being used by others.

 

 2012 menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swimming with sharks Nov. 3, 2012

Image
  She’s personal, not political. So, this new arrangement is really all about strange bedfellows, that group of political opportunists that have aligned themselves with the virgin mayor, getting themselves well placed for later profits. She’s never played that game before and may be a little out of her depth when it comes to those kinds of maneuvers. They may also read her wrong as well. She puts on a good act, and they may actually think she’s better connected than she really is. No doubt, they want her to help them do their political dirty work and may be surprised to find she doesn’t know how. This may not be true for the mayor who is nearly as naïve as she is, someone who fell into office because his opponent last year was so unpopular – not just with the people but with other powers, such as the congressman, the little man and the neighboring mayor. Unfortunately, his ineptitude politically has alienated at least two of those three, possibly all of them. But he h...
Read more

Almost famous March 3, 2013

Image
    Her latest post on her personal Facebook page still bemoans her lack of fame., saying that she feels as if she has no place in this world. She expresses jealousy of those who have succeeded and get to live the luxurious life – as referred to in that 2003 poem about change of perspective. She wants to be one of the jet set, and get to shuffled ahead of the crowd, even though as that poem pointed out, she used to hate those kinds of people. The fact that she can’t get there (or perhaps back to it) despite all of her talent and how she had done to achieve really, really frustrates her. She just doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a formula for success. I feel sorry for her, partly because if she can’t get what she wants with all of the talent she has, and her ability to work her way up (trickle up) in whatever structure she finds herself in, it is possible she may never get there, having some fundamental flaw that keeps her from finding the right door and the ...
Read more

A man in a fog July 26, 2012

Image
  The male owner has picked up a new habit during the weekly staff meetings he hadn’t had previously, checking his cell phone’s messaging app -- more so this week and I wonder if it has anything to do with her not being at the meeting. She was out on some assignment she had discussed with him earlier and perhaps texted him to keep him apprised of her progress. Looking back to earlier this year, his behavior mirrors mine from back then, as if he’s anxious for the next message to arrive, regardless of what it says. He seemed very distracted by it, even to the point of missing what we reported and forcing him to have us repeat what we said. Having read the synopsis of my journal, he should have had fair warning and found a way to avoid the fog I walked around in – but clearly, he seems as out of touch as I was at that stage. A few times during the meeting, I found him staring hard at me, as if trying to read something from my expression, or perhaps he feels a bit threatened....
Read more