The Gero-Punk Project

Yes, even dreams can be brought back and revised.

And sometimes the slightest change in a dream can be the difference that matters.

A few weeks back, upon the occasion of giving a workshop on cultivating truly inter-generational relationships that simultaneously account for and forget generational differences, I took another look at the Gero-Punk Dream essay I published awhile ago, suspecting it might be a keen piece to perform at the beginning of the workshop, which I was co-facilitating with two high-school students. When I composed this two-part essay a few years back, I included two references to age and life-course stage, but this time around I decided to strip away the age references altogether. I also changed some of the gero-punk graffiti artist’s mottos (Thanks for inspiring me, Ashton Applewhite!).

Here’s the result.  I quite like it.

What do you think?

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I am jogging around the city, slow and loose, fully occupying my body. I am alert and aware. I have to be–it is daytime (the angle of the sunlight suggests an early autumn afternoon). There are humans of all ages (and many dogs) doing what creatures do on a beautiful day.

So. I have an audience.

There’s a satchel slung diagonally across by back. Inside the satchel are cans of spray paint: red, black, and silver. I am tagging buildings, spans of pavement, even park benches and the sides of buses. I am leaving my mark with panache and impunity, defacing whatever surface calls out to me.

***

Life is short! Act now!

Aging: Every Body’s Doing It!

Aging is inevitable. Ageism ins’t.

You are an age, all ages, and no age at once. Embrace this mystery.

I am a gero-punk graffiti artist. Only I know that my spray paint is impermanent and will wash away when it rains.

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I am a gero-punk graffiti artist. Only I know that my spray paint is impermanent and will wash away with it rains.

There is a person striding toward me– look at them frown and fume! – as I begin to spray

AGING….

on the sidewalk in front of the playground at the park.  They ask me what I think I am doing. I respond by asking them what they think they are doing.

We look at each other, eye-to-eye, for what seems like a long time. They have really lovely eyes: We share silver hair though I have peacock-blue streaks in mine. We are about the same size and height, it seems to me, though what do I know—I always feel like I am the same size and shape, even the same age, and like I am similarly embodied, in relationship to whatever creature I happen to be observing.

Enough already. I have surfaces to deface.

I tilt my head to the right and hold up a can of silver spray paint.

They tilt their head to the left (are they mimicking me?) and hold up their splendidly ornamented walking stick.

I say: Care to come closer and take a look?

They are frozen at first. Then they shuffle side-to-side in a dance of indecision.

So I shrug my shoulders in response. I return to my work, finishing the gero-punk inscription

…EVERY BODY’S DOING IT!

My peripheral vision sucks but I feel movement and energy originating from behind me, arcing wide to home in at my right side.

I keep at my project until it is complete.

AGING: EVERY BODY’S DOING IT!

I turn to look at the stranger beside me. They are sussing. And either they have intensely bad hyperopia or they are about to kick my ass.

Left hand on my hip, can of silver spray paint in my right hand,

I ask: So? What do you think?

They say: What the hell do you know?

I say: I am not sure what the hell I know. What the hell do you know?

Then I offer them the can of red spray paint.

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Revised for the Multnomah County Library In-service day, 11/27/16, Age ain’t nothing but a number (?).

Greetings to you!  Those of you who are local or close to the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area, please accept this invitation to participate in a Gero-Punk play-date!

When: Sunday, December 11, 2:30-4:30 p.m.

Where: Multnomah County Library Sellwood-Moreland Branch. 

What’s up?: We’ll be engaging in a playful collaborative writing project.  Here’s an example–

As the convener of the Gero-Punk Project, I shall be supplying the prompts for our collaborative writing process.

And: You should feel free to bring your own Gero-Punk prompts to offer up to all of us who gather.

Play and collaboration and mutual respect and creativity and defiance are at the heart of the Gero-Punk Project.

Will you join us?

Love,

Jenny

I am a gero-punk (and a practitioner of Gerontological Anarchy).

This is my manifesto.

What is a “gero-punk,” you ask?

Well, far be it from me to claim to have a definitive answer, but I will say this: to be a punk of any sort is to live experimentally, to live in love with emergence, with the unexpected, the chaotic, the improvisatory, to live with your arms wide open to complexity, guided by your own star, fueled by a good measure of playfulness and well-intentioned rebellion.

To be a gero-punk is to bravely and critically reflect upon, interrogate, and create new ways of thinking about and experiencing the aging journey.

A gero-punk sees through and resists normative aging ideology, and challenges others to do so as well, or at least to understand the implications of normative aging ideology before living by its rules.

Gero-punks resist “simple states of consciousness” about aging and later life. We choose, instead, to dwell in the messiness, the undeniable complexity, of deep human development and aging.

To be a gero-punk is to explore the art of time-travel, to learn how to be grounded simultaneously in the present while respecting (and learning from) the past and dreaming the future.

To be a gero-punk is to engage in ongoing embodied praxis – experiential, contemplative, and creative practices.  We promise sometimes to stop moving, to stand still and just breathe….and ask: where does age and aging reside? What is it, this thing we call age?

We behold the mystery: we are a particular age, all ages, and no age at the same time.

To be a gero-punk is to possess the audacious belief that we are, each and every one of us, legitimate makers of meaning, and so too are all other creatures. Our own precious lives provide the grounds from which understandings emerge.

What this also means is that we acknowledge what we can’t possibly know prior to lived experience.

I may have been a gerontologist for more than half my life, but I’m yet to be an old gerontologist. I have no expertise on old age, so I best rely on the old experts themselves.  But what I can do as a gero-punk is to try on different ways of moving through the world so as to develop empathy and imagination about old age  – and other — experiences I’ve yet to (or may never) encounter.

As gero-punks, we place our attention and awareness upon odd, unexpected, flummoxing, and contradictory aging experiences; we accept our own experiences and those of others as sacred and real, if yet (or perhaps always) unexplainable. We celebrate the way life always finds a way to spill over the edges of our attempts to simplify, categorize, and contain its wildness.

As gero-punks, we are willing to let ourselves and others experience and express  “outlaw emotions”: disillusionment and despair and resentment and fear – fear of our own and others’ aging, fear of our own and others’ ends.

As gero-punks we are committed to taking Gerontological anarchy to the streets, to pursuing brave and bold conversations, and meaningful, transformative learning with persons experiencing all ages and phases of the life course.

And- as gero-punks- we engage in the seemingly contradictory practice of asking questions about the meanings of all of this, of this wild and fantastic and unfolding aging journey, without immediately engaging in analysis and jumping to solving problems.

Rather, we rejoice in the spilling-forth of yet more questions.

We let the questions carry us away.

Our research is living. Our data is life.