Standing On the Brake

Like no one has experienced aging before, but it's new to me. It's proof positive that anyone's self-hood, including mine, dominates. Everyone else's perception be damned. It took me a few decades to “get” Neil Young's line in Mr. Soul. “For the thought that I caught, that my head is the event of the season.” Translation? Your current view of the world is all that matters, other's are dead and do not matter. 

There once was an English college professor I had at RIC, Paul Anghinetti, who said there was only one poem that ever mattered and he wrote it. He loved saying it at the beginning of the semester of whatever class he was teaching.

I,I,I

Me,Me,Me

Now,Now,Now

Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie

Mine, Mine, Mine.

Ok, I've hammered the fact we're all self interested and how aging and time matter ONLY to ME. No one else has written about it! Right?

**

Remember when you were eight and you saw it was “Just only Wednesday!” You thought the weekend was decades away and during your youth, and it was. Weeks went by like months. Your next birthday where you turned nine was in the year 2402. You had so much time and the fact it crawled enabled you to complain to your parents, “I'm BORED!” Well, you would be wouldn't you if your perception of time is molasses. How are you to fill up all that time and make it entertaining?

That's why “fun” is the antidote. It makes you forget the passage of time at whatever speed it's at. Young boys, like myself, would go to heroic lengths to find or invent fun. Gary McClintock, a kid I knew then, provided lots of fun one day by setting fire to reams of old carbon paper behind the loading docks of Cherry & Webb on Armistice blvd, on a very windy day. The wind sucked the flaming paper into the open warehouse door and started a fire in there, bringing half of Pawtucket's fire apparatus to the scene. That's a hell of an accomplishment for a 7 year old. It created great amusement for us all, except Gary when the arson detective figured it out and told his Mom.

Fun is still the antidote to time and boring day to day adult life. Just don't engage in things that make 7 year olds wide eyed with amazement.

Poor Gary is gone now. An adult's leg thrombosis took him away a decade ago. In heaven, I hope he gets to burn all the Cherry & Webbs he wants and gets away scott free this time around.

About a decade ago, I was cleaning out my car of a winter's worth of filth when my neighbor, Leonard Knight, an 80 year old across the street, came over to talk and watch. It was a very warm late March day and the elderly tend to leave their hibernation caves when tempted on days like that.

I was commenting to Leonard that the past winter seemed to shoot by me, here it was, spring already. I then confessed I thought time was going “quicker” because I was in my late 40's.

“HA!” Leonard shouts. “Just wait till you're MY age, it goes by even quicker no matter what!”

I looked at him, probably with a snarky look on my face.

Ah, he was right. I'm in my very late 50's and time's speed limit is much faster.

There were times in my life where I had everything on my plate and each hour was accounted for. Was I bored? Nope, I was stressed, which isn't the preferred antidote to boredom. Weeks and months shot by me w/o noticing it. Well, I would notice it, when the calendar was flipped and I remarked to myself, “June...already?”

And there were times when I have ample freedom and could take all damn day to accomplish a small thing.

Know what the speed of time was like during those empty days? The same. It goes by just as fast.

I listen to various radio stations from around the world and and pipe them through my computer to the stereo. Weirdly enough, some station in Denmark played The Motel's Suddenly, Last Summer. I was 19 when it came out and it basically tells of massive life changes when Martha Davis, the singer, tells of a romance that forever ended her childhood and the death of her mother from suicide when she was 19.

I time warped back to 1983 with all it's fun and ugliness like every year has and then noticed that that age, 19, took forever to get to 20. In my mind at least it did then. Now, the day I turned 50 felt like a few weeks ago.

And it's going to speed up, whether I'm busy or not. And that's new to me... as I enter this new age. I'm sure I'll keep telling stories with new facts that sort of startle me as I move up into my 60's, facts I've never experienced at all when younger and couldn't have fathomed. 

 

 Geddy was 33 and complaining about time lost. He's 68 now and Neil Pert has gone to the Choir Invisible. That blonde chick with the rat tail is Aimee Mann, the singer of Till Tuesday's "Voices Carry." 

 

I Just Had to Let It Go, For a Bit Anyway.

This is a first draft so there is no tightening of the grammar, style, placement and flow. And I guarantee this story will wander. It may just plain suck but so what.

There used to be a commercial for a mini-van showing a very busy Mom dropping the kids off at school, going to work, picking the kids up, dropping them off at their after-school activities, grocery shopping, get the kids again and then finally getting home. She gets out of her car and happily remarks to the camera lens on how wonderful her Dodge MiniVan improves on her “full life.”

I then yelped at the TV, “Lady, your life SUCKS!”

Since when was being busy to the point you crash in bed every night from exhaustion living the full life? Getting everything done with seconds to spare isn't my idea of a life well lived. I am fully aware of those families that have to work constantly for the $ and try to give their kids a decent life, but in no way can you convince me that's a life dreamed for. For some, that trap of low pay and no prospects is an economic jail sentence. It's devilishly hard to escape from. If you had the decent job, it was probably a eye opener to you to discover you had only so many hours in a day to raise kids and try to live a larger, more expensive life than your parents did. There is a reason why the axiom "Biting off more than you can chew" was invented.

Though I'm one to bitch about this as I have done it for several times in my past. Once was in college as a full time student and working full time. That was fun. Weeks shot by w/o my realizing they were it was going so fast.  The second was again in a school getting another degree, full time, while also working, full time. It was seven days a week for two years as the school's program was twelve hours long on the weekends. I chose to do that!

The third, was due to my stupid loyalty to others. There are times I can thank my parents for instilling that Edwardian etiquette in my. It keeps me civil. Think of the English soldier throwing himself on a live grenade while storming Normandy, so the others can advance up the beach. Wow, what honor...bravery...thoughtfulness. Well, he's still dead. And any parades or Veteran's days people honor are for all of them, en masse. There is no singling out of any poor schlub who took a bullet for their nation.

Anyways, the third time. I had been working for a corp that didn't care if you lived or died, just so long as they could fill that schedule due to all the mismanagement, call outs, covid expulsions and what not. I worked and on my fewer days off I stared at the wall or did laundry. Since I was doing little else, and since my bills were small due to not having to heat the house when I was at work, not using electricity while I was at work, not eating at home...you get the point, I banked my check, again and again with that added bonus of “here's more money, please don't quit during covid!” After a year and a half of doing that, I noticed I could walk out the door and skate for months and months on the savings. Plus, I was done with the corp and it's merry go round of managers and a host of other reasons. Note that I live alone with no kids, no college tuition to pay, no expensive gambling or cocaine habits and a mean ol' witch who dropped a house on me back in 1996 (Old story, I was that last one left standing in a family of terminal cases). At the end of the day, I just have to support “me.”

The first few weeks I was out was a great relief. I just slept, ate and rolled around on the couch like some elephant seal you'd see at a beach. A giant pile of blubber barely moving on the sand, too fat and satiated to go back to sea to get more fish to stuff down it's gullet. The inactivity was necessary and I thought it was healthy, and it was.

However it's very easy to slide on that slope. I became a slug, far too quickly. Damn, it's either feast or famine for me. Though slug-life has it's advantages...for a while. The problem occurs is that inactivity makes u lose muscle mass, impairs your heart and decreases bone density. You actually feel it eventually. I'm glad I didn't turn into “My 600lb Pound Life” but I think I know something of it now. You literally have to do “nothing” to accomplish that goal.

So the trick is moderation. Christ, you'd think at my age I'd keep that in action, since I know it full well. Well, even at this older age, you still fuck up. Perhaps not as dramatically as you would when you are 22 but you still do in a classier and more mature, slower way. So, I'll keep active as I can but not insanely so to aggravate that one day dis-abling pelvic arthritis nor over pushing those hardening arteries that stresses the heart, but just enough. (Gotta love parental/grand parental genetics! Brick hard arteries coming up!) I'll be active for a bit till I become that old guy taking tickets at the movie theater. That may be coming faster than I thought. Is that a demotion? A kick to any career self esteem? Hell no, at this age, you don't give a shit about that anymore. “You're a 35 year old CEO of a start up cloud based financial firm...that's nice..can you pass the pepper please? After this lunch, I plan to nap!”

God...I really have dropped a lot of that Keeping Up with the Jones's stuff. Ah, as you age, no one expects you to put on a show of success, gleaming moral hygiene nor any other public show of how great the Golden Years are. They ain't. I've had many of that age laughingly say it was a god damn lie. Those commercials of the happy, healthy gray hairs sharing wine during sunset at Cabo San Lucas isn't what day to day life really is. What it is is just a moment. It ain't 24/7!

So great, as I age, society expects less of me and I'll give that to them! Know why? Because I'll say it again, as you grow older you really do not care what others think of you. That's the liberation of aging.

So, no minvan life for me. No desperate approval seeking from the family, friends or neighbors is needed. They can all adjudge me slothful due to not filling every minute with that seemingly good life of the overstuffed full plate. Been there, done that. I'll annoy the rest of society by driving my life at 20mph in a 30mph zone. IF I can manage it barring Russian warheads or God-Knows_What. It's what we oldies do, get in the way of your busy life. 

 

"Don't you miss the Big Time boy? You're no longer on the ball!"

 

I "get this" now after all these years. And no, I don't miss all of it.