I began to think that men and women are not able to understand each other directly.  Women may  think that might be possible, but men know otherwise.  Just the way it is.  The only thing that allows them to understand each other are noble indirect ways, in the context provided by larger causes, social cooperation, communal health, spiritual life, literature.  An animal cooperation can come about, as in penguins raising their own, but otherwise man and woman might as well be speaking to each other in mutually foreign languages.

And ultimately, women, like men, will, reluctantly, realize this to be true, women being accepting, as men must be too.  Fathers.  Brothers.  Friends,  People who have to deal with the difficult, the enemy they would rather love, all the people they have missed knowing in history with no chance but a smell of their ghosts in the time space of the imagination.

Men who seem able to speak to women are doing so by employing a language of commercialism and market savvy.  And as a consequence of this particular focus, which is largely away from the human experience, they make themselves more attractive to women, by their economic smarts.  Men who find this ability will then have be less able to find their own authentic selves, and they will have a harder time speaking with other men.  Other men will regard them as shrewd, but lacking as far as good company.  The men gifted at women talking will have cooperated themselves into a corner, making a bargain to gain the things they want, houses, children, careers, etc.

And this is how society works.  Those who speak with authenticity are left with a hard row to hoe.  The clever continue on with their genetic natural selection as shaped by the economy.

The truest forms of communication are those that welcome a kind of third party into the room that has been agreed upon, a belief in a higher power, most likely and most effectively.  God's plan is for men to do men's work, and for women to do women's work.  Whatever that may be, springing naturally from the two quite different creatures.

It would be cliché to say that women may be patterned in their own way by the economy.   Perhaps their maternal instinct predisposes them to speak of fairness.  Which sounds good.  On paper.  But all creatures are not created equal on an equal plane.  A cat is a cat, a dog, a dog, and a bird is a bird, as the inner genies of their DNA, shaped in an agreement between the inner and the outer, have created, by the divine powers that make such things so.


Only in moments of great retrospect are the vast differences in male and female communications understood.   By then it's probably way too late for the individuals, now separated by time and space, to ever be reconciled.

And so the man is left looking for, basically, a pious and God-fearing woman, devoted to her own powers and the powers of the male.   Old School.



After she'd express her displeasure, for whatever I'd done, or hadn't done, or done clumsily, or done something she might have found embarrassing, after a curt dismissal, then she would appear, passively, at a distance, like a hawk in a tree, or a cat, as if to watch or surveil, as if to express some strange kind of animal kinship that crossed the species, unable to express herself in words or in any other way but a kind of acknowledgment, a show of creaturely respect.  She was up in the tree, a falcon or an owl, and I was on the ground, unable to reach or tame, having as I saw it failed at it.

Good material, is about all you can say.  Take Shane MacGowan, The Pogues, "The Curse of Love."

I can take 'solemn pride' in the fact that never imposed, that I did not overextend my own will, my own language, my own forces, my own understandings upon her, that different creature.   Perhaps there is truth to the old adage, that if you love something the instinct is to set it free.

Anyway, as you get older, you realize mortality, old age, the difficulty of doing the laundry and going out to buy toilet paper and wine, green tea, immodium, dinner, depending on energy.  No wonder, the painkillers found in Tom Petty's system.  Perhaps the restaurant business is merely realistic, that it will beat you down, and leave you with Saturday night, not to party, nor to socialize, but for basic errands.

When I go out to grocery shop, out upon the avenue, I think of Shane MacGowan, think of him wandering, distant, observant, songs in his head, Irish, a drinker, not feeling well, but the songs in his head, like rain falling.  The lights of the avenue, the cold, the windows of shops, the faces, things being there, things closing, smell of steak in passageways.


But there are, at the bottom, all of us, and we respond, as a creature, to stimuli, to art.  This is the rather unexpected popularity of the music of the people, pop, blues, rock, Irish, skiffle, Beatles, jazz.  Art takes us back to a common conversation.


Each of us is a different creature from the rest, a separate species almost.  We all try to get along, but it's 100,000 different species of howler monkeys, whales, dolphins, orcas, cows, rats, birds big and small.  For us not to accept that about the next human being, how complicatedly different he or she must be from our own selves, well, this could be the subject of Singing In The Rain, or anything really.


My mom tells me she can deal with winter, because her boys go out and play in it, dig in the drifts, remembering winters past.