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."
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