Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

On the cusp between Leo and Virgo…

On the cusp of the half-century mark…

On the cusp of the cusp of something more…

Today I turn 49 years old. I don’t quite know what to do with that, other than to play this song, and to pray. Yes – I pray. Every night. At every moment of doubt, at every moment of worry. Little prayers, little offerings, little exercises in superstition or faith and what’s the goddamn difference?

You wake to greet the brand new day
Wake up, realize you’re late
Rush out to make your plane
Can’t find your keys again…

You need to reawake, now
Listen to the words
I’m saying in this line, and
That your life will be just fine, and
Your troubles do not stay
They get replaced with good times
Now you’ve got a great life
Smile as you walk by
Thinkin’ ’bout the day

Born of fear, born of trauma, born of need and desire and survival – we all come into this world in such similar ways – messy and wet and crying out of lonely desperation, clinging to whatever is immediately around us, grasping at something or someone to take care of us – for protection, for security, for comfort, for love. Some of us never learn how to stop crying. Some of us never learn how to start again. 

This body, the only body I have ever known, the only body I will ever know, this shell of my physical existence, breaks down a little more with each passing year. The lithe and limber days of carefree, flexible, quick-to-bounce-back forgiveness calcify and become brittle at the turn of an almost-half-century. This body – it cracks and crinkles now, it whispers and laughs and collapses – it betrays this mind, disconnecting from what I think I can do, what I once could do, what I lost the ability to do… and today of all days I can barely formulate a coherent sentence. 

It’s late, your legs won’t rest today
Your body seems to ache
Your mind will win the race
Burnin’ by your sleep again

The light blooms from the sun
The long dark night undone
Another day of fun
Waiting for some luck to come

Should I fear this year then? This final year of my forties, death knell to any far-fetched and barely-feasible semblance or pretending of youth? Maybe… maybe. Strangely it’s not fear I feel, nor the rush to get on with it. It’s really just another day, just another year, and the way we mark the days and years is just some silly system of numeric designation, as if 49 means something more than 48 or less than 50. There is nothing at all different today from yesterday – even if nothing is at all the same. 

You keep hoping for a day
When things will go your way
When all decisions have been made
And karma’s finally found its way

The drinks, they pass the time
They help me to unwind
The guilt is killing me
Inside your eyes

It’s gray, the rain pours down my face
The tears become erased
A cleansing of my face
Splashing down into my grin

My eyes become alive
A feeling left behind
A hidden world untied
Creating all you see today

The clouds, they went away
Forever, did I wait
And karma finally found my plate
And now I’m smiling by the sun

And so I step gingerly back into the river of life, the banks on which I have probably paused more than most – shy and skittish, scared and scarred from that moment of birth, and never quite having been able to get completely over it. I watched more of it go by than I ever took part in, and though it’s not regret I am experiencing, there is a sense of loss, even if I can’t be mad about it. It’s never helpful to be angry at who you used to be. Instead, I offer thanks, even for those days when I didn’t want to be part of it, when I swam to the shore, coughing and spitting out the anxiety, crying out the salty worry, spent and exhausted from trying to swim against the current. All these silly mixed metaphors have me feeling a little muddled, and what I originally wanted to be a contemplative birthday post has turned into something slightly different. The unexpected accident, the messy inconvenience of being human. What I most wanted life to be – something pretty, something perfect – is precisely what a human’s life can never be. 

We’ll meet again someday
We’ll smile and then I’ll say:
“When it rains, it pours all day
Until love can find its way”

Now, listen to the words I’m saying
In this line that your life will be just fine,
And troubles, they do not stay,
They get replaced with good times
Now you’ve got a great life,
Smile as you walk by
Need to reawake now
LIsten to these words that
I’m saying in this line
And your life will be just fine
Troubles, they do not stay
They get replaced with good times
Now you’ve got a great life
Smilin’ ’bout the day…

Our coquette summer rides giddily and mightily into its final month on a pink pony, with all the pink flowers and frills and trimmings that this glorious season has promised, and largely delivered. To buoy the impending hints of fall, here’s a fun and frivolous distraction, perhaps less moody than the typical coquette offering, and certainly no less joyful for that. Cue our Midwest Princess Chappell…

And I heard that there’s a special place
Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day…

In my daydreams and night-dreams, I can dance without the annoying tinge of a bothersome and aging back. I can sing without the heaviness of loss or lamentation. I can ride a pink pony into the summer dawn, bounding along shores of ocean and gliding over edges of sky. Summer is so largely imagined, so grandly envisioned. Summer… so much in my head.

I’m up and jaws are on the floor
Lovers in the bathroom and a line outside the door
Blacklights and a mirrored disco ball
Every night’s another reason why I left it all…

God, what have you done?
You’re a pink pony girl
And you dance at the club
Oh mama, I’m just having fun
On the stage in my heels
It’s where I belong down at the Pink Pony Club

All sparkle of sun and sea, all shine of dew and drops, all summer sweetness and soft sighs. A melancholic meter keeps steady time – the hollow cadence of minutes and hours droning on beneath the welcome heat of the sun, already different than it was in June, already less. And so we dance, and we keep on dancing, and the pink pony prances…

I’m gonna keep on dancing at the
Pink Pony Club
I’m gonna keep on dancing down in
West Hollywood
I’m gonna keep on dancing at the
Pink Pony Club, Pink Pony Club