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.