When I come to write a new blog I review all kinds of things in my mind, hoping to choose a viable theme or a topic that will make me commit myself to writing something of some worth. Unlike other bloggers, I have no “followers.” I just write my merry heart out and post it to cyberspace which really means it is an essay written by myself to myself, because no one gives a damn about what I am writing on this blog. So blogging for me is just a weekly attempt to keep my pen in the inkwell, if you will. [I have lived so long I recall dipping a pen into an inkwell.]I pay homage to myself without any need whatsoever for having my little essay read. The only solace I have attained from all this is that some of my essays here have been published in online magazines as well as serving for the content of my latest book, This Mobius Strip of Ifs.
As I wander into old age and decreptitude, the undiscovered territory, I have dark and depressed thoughts, the usual, given my age — illness, death, dying and denying patent realities, reminiscences, regrets and rueful thoughts, the what-could-have-beens. Quite tiresome at that. I often get fed up with it myself, repeating the historically Jewish oy. One must laugh at oneself or collapse into a morass of self-sorrowing pity, the molasses of life misspent. At odd moments while sitting or lazing about my comfortable couch I discover myself tearing up about a lost wife, a lost daughter, of stupidities I have wallowed in as a young adult, as a man. I become easily touched and maudlin if you will. I self-observe the return of the repressed, decades old anxieties and characterological issues which never seem to extinguish themselves, like homo sapient zebra stripes that never disappear. My capacity to repeat old stuff in my much older body and mind just gives so much credence to Freud’s repetition compulsion. Has any classical author ever written about that in us — perhaps Faulkner? For the past is the present and the present is the past if we see into that.
I play out with my wife old shit that I have played out in earlier marriages, just different permutations. I see all that and it is bothersome. I no longer try to stop it. I just watch it. I see it. I am too weary at 73 to work on it other than try to ameliorate it in terms of cutting some of the shit out. It is tiring, is it not? to keep working on oneself into the seventies. Clearly I am a nettle of burrs for those about me, for I am a difficult man to know, to get close to, to understand at least on the surface level. I am the Cheshire cat. I secrete ambiguity which keeps people at a distance from me. I have been sending out a smoke screen for so long that it is more than second nature. I play games. Being passive-aggressive is the maraschino cherry on top of this charlotte russe. Close contact with me can drive you to distraction.
As the days go by like the rustle of a great lady’s silken gown, in one grand movement with no differentiation, I awake grateful for the new day but still perplexed as to where it will take me. Much of my day is made up of mundane things to do – buy – busy myself with – while all the time I feel the passage of time like soapsuds through my hands. You must understand that I am always observing myself without reaching any conclusions, although sometimes I reach determinations which I sometimes share in these essays, this being one example. I am moving ineluctably to my end and yet I am trying or struggling to somehow channel it all into some fervid last orchestral cymbal clash. Much of life, my life, is aimless, thoughtless, without meaning or direction beneath the hurly burly of everyday empty living which we all do to avoid serious seeing into our idiosyncratic dilemmas.
To wit: I write this blog to myself and for myself, no one reads it. I go to physical therapy for a bone spur situation on the spine and go through exercises to prevent a re-occurrence of severe pain; I practice exercises at home, often not doing them because I resist doing them. I resist authority. I watch too much TV, a dying man’s palliative. I stay indoors because of the horrid Nevada heat, what a fucking state to live in. Rarely do you see a human being on the street because of the heat. I’ve forgotten the smell of rain and the different kinds of rain I had growing up in the East Coast. I dimly recall the smell of snow and what good packing was, or what it took to shift gears to get out of a snow-packed parking spot. In Nevada I rarely if ever have to parallel park. Would you believe that? I shamble through my experience knowing better and trying to reach out for solutions, futile all that is. I miss a good kibitzing or the raconteur-ways of urban street living. [Is the lox fresh?…What, I should sell it to you stale?]I live in a desert and a metaphorical desert. I am thought out. I am psyched out.
I am “cursed” by a need to express myself, the unheard scream I have lived since a child. At times I wish I were a Pepsi-Cola empty glass bottle. Alas, I am compelled to untangle my complexities or at least tease out the different threads among the many different skeins I own. What troubles me is that I see much, side-step much, but I know that time is passing in a very fleeting way and I want to hitch myself to that horse in some way so that I am not left at some rest stop waiting for the next bus. I would like to hitch myself to a star. All that passes before me can often be the last. The last time I saw my wife on that fateful 3 July 1999 as she said goodbye and left with Brett on the way to her death. The Honda Civic I drive may very well be my final car. The last pizza I chowed through may be my last. All of life is separation except that when you are my age you savor the “last” of anything as it may be your final goodbye. Curious to experience. Age gives you that — the last feel of a tit, the last great fuck you had, the last smell of her perfume, the rich greasy fat of a hot New York knish or the crackling skin of a frank, kraut and mustard with Hire’s root beer to swallow down and the last good shower.
What would you do, reader, if all your senses were aware and alert to all that I have said? How would you grab on to the essentials that are left to you in the time remaining? Thoreau nailed it — can you live “deliberately.” In fact, I was contaminated early. I did not wait until old age to sense the passing of self in the evolving passage of time. I have sensed that since a young man I have asked questions philosophically about all this but it is in old age that I can taste the gristle of the bone in my mouth. So, unlike others, it is not new to me, therefore fearful and filled with dread. Oh, “miracle” person that I am, I dread and I fear but not so much as others for the asking and posing of questions, for me at least, assuages the angst.The observing of my life running down to the last wheeze of a cosmic bike pump, at least keeps me flitting about, like the good hummingbird, the wonderful driven machine that visits my porch daily, filled with life, and destined to die.
