Echoes In The Braincase

One of the perks of a digital life is it is possible to present oneself to others neatly giftwrapped, and even add a rumpled bow of modesty and self-deprecation. One can think about it. Engineer it. Why, not too long ago one of you fine commenters here said I was "smart."

This is not so easy to pull off in person. And it's particularly hard to do in the presence of younger people. And I don't know what happened, but there are more and more of them around all the time.

I am well tolerated by the younger people in my life, all of whom I cherish. Now they are smart as hell. They have interesting opinions and different perspectives. I like to listen to them and every now and then I like to snap back with something witty. Problem is, a lot of the witty zone coincides with "things I just thought of five seconds ago." And things that happened five seconds ago live in a sort of quickly escaping vapor. I usually remember the first few words of my witty remark, but then I stick in placeholder grunts, hoping the rest of my thought will stroll by, but sometimes it doesn't, and then I have to say "I lost it there, but it'll come back."

The young people give me a fond and indulgent smile and assure me it will come back, even though it won't, and they know that by now. It's embarrassing. But they're so darn nice. "She's slipping," I see in their thought balloons, but you can see smiley emoticons in there too. I can't refute it. The whole thing has led me to be a better listener, or look just like one. I don't enjoy people witnessing my thoughts evaporate. Acting like I'm listening keeps me from looking as foolish, and is a good idea anyway.

I'm not actually listening. I am at first, but then I start thinking of something else altogether, usually a scene in a novel, or a reminiscence, or the state of the world, and my only connection to the conversation at that point is the attentive look on my face that I hope is still pointed in the correct direction. AND THIS IS WHEN I'M TALKING TO INTERESTING PEOPLE.

Authentic Old Person, With Bran

I'm not as embarrassed around people my own age. We're all kind of a mess. True, in my case some of them watch my neurons failing to connect and secretly put it down to the beer, but they understand anyway. If it wasn't the beer, it'd be something else.

There's a theory going around among older people that this phenomenon has something to do with having one's head so filled with wisdom that some of it needs to be off-loaded, and we have gained insight into what is important to keep and what is not. This is, of course, self-serving baldercookies. The fact is, if there were any more dead air in our brains our neurons wouldn't even touch each other.

Herewith a real dialog example:

     Me: "I'm trying to think of that word. You know, that word? That means, like, you really enjoy something, but it isn't anything you did yourself."

     Person: "Plagiarism?"

     Me: "No, no, more like something...vicarious." 

     Person: "Hmm. Vicarious?"

     Me: "Yeah! That's it! Thanks!" [bounces away]

     Person: [listens for head rattle]

Yes. That really happened. Probably. I do write fiction. It's either real or it's not, I don't remember.

The Decrepitator

Oh, you shiny young people! Yes, you can get up out of a chair without gruntulating. Yes, you can herd the Internet through the ether using only your retinas. Yes, you have tiny adorable pores. Good for you! But you know what you can't do? You can't age somebody fifty years just like that.

We can do that. We do it all the time. It's awesome. Just the other day I saw a picture of a little old man who turned out to be one of the Monkees. Not the cute one, or the other cute one, or the super cute one--the smart one. I happen to know exactly what he looks like, with his little knitted hat, because he's right there in my head. I'd recognize him anywhere. And he went straight from that little knitted hat to this little old man, the kind you'd see fumbling in the grocery line trying to swipe his card four different ways before the clerk does it for him, and not like a Daydream Believer at all.

Sometimes the rocker types continue, in their seventies, to dress in their underpants and eye makeup and scary hair like they're still twenty, and they look like twenty-year-old burn victims. And it's not as shocking. It's what you'd expect. If you're a kid in the '60s and you try to imagine your Monkee fifty years older, you'd give him a receding hairline and a saggy chin and draw some lines on his face, but somehow you'd miss the true picture. Ultimately, he was recognizable. Respectable, even.

I remember watching TV with my mom and dad when June Allison or somebody else I'd never heard of came on hawking diapers in a commercial and both my parents went Whoa, what happened to her, as though whatever it was hadn't happened to them too. I thought: Why would anyone be surprised by what a little old lady looks like? She looks like a little old lady. Naturally, I assumed little old ladies were born that way, so the process of transition was pretty theoretical to me. It was not, at any rate, something to take seriously.

It's thrilling to witness an abrupt fifty-year aging. It's the kind of thing high school reunions are famous for, and it's remarkable how fast you get used to it. You're all, Whoa, dudes, what happened to you? And then a minute later it's Oh Hi Steve Linda Gary Debbie, and everyone settles down. Somebody will show up looking like Jane Fonda does at eighty, which is not natural, and you're mature enough to shrug and not take it personally.

You young people can't do that. You can't suddenly see your friends transform into old people. Closest you can come is that age-progression thing you might see on a milk carton where they take some little kid who's been missing a while and try to computerate him into his current age, but it never looks right. It looks like weirdly artificial skin deterioration, as though the kid has aged for real and then gone in with a grade-B photo editor and tried to smudge himself up. But that's the best you can do. You know, unless your friends are on meth.

The thing young people don't quite get about us old ladies is that we still feel all fresh and new and spongey inside our old lady suits. And then we peer out our eye-holes and BAM our friends are suddenly fifty years older. It feels like having a superpower. We're, like, The Decrepitator!

It's a few minutes before we recognize the flaw in our outlook. That we're really more like Superman, tracking in a little Kryptonite on our booties. Uh-oh!

Paunch And Judy

Everything was fascinating and new when I was a little kid, and old-lady necks were no exception. They had variety. They wobbled. You couldn't not look. I tried to duplicate that movement on my own self by vigorously wagging my head from side to side, and nothing happened. That kind of activity would win you a trip to the neurologist these days, but my parents just had a glance and went back behind the newspaper, happy that I was occupied quietly. We kids were assured that old ladies had been young once, but that wasn't plausible. Old Lady Neck was just one of those puzzlements.  It wasn't natural; it was like an installation.

Now I know it's the dead giveaway for age. It's the first thing to go. The rest of the face has all those bones in it that can keep a secret for a while but there's nothing much instilling discipline in the neck. You've got that little string of knobby bones hooking up to the skull, but that's way in the back. The back of your neck usually looks just fine. So when the collagen takes a hike, your neck skin has all the integrity of a campaign promise. There might be a way of hitching it all back up again, but it would involve voluntarily presenting your neck to someone with a knife. I guess there are people who will sign up for that, but there's no real point as long as beer is still so affordable.

I've complained about my neck before, of course. I've been watching this particular story unwind for twenty years and it has had its startling plot twists, but I can only feel bad about things for so long. That initial pudding phase seems downright quaint now. And I can admit that the pleating development supplied needed tension. There was that adorable subplot wherein the main character vowed never to point her chin downward when someone else was around, but that never got traction. Now we're entering a new chapter. My neck has developed factions.

Factions. It's not all of a piece anymore. There are tuck areas and crease areas and a separate location where a sinkhole is beginning to emerge, and now I see an interesting pair of knobs at the base of the chin that sort of look like suitcase handles when I do a Grumpy Cat face, so that my entire frown appears to be holding up a duffle. Or, in a different light, it looks like stage rigging. The chin line is thus responsible for operating the set of curtains that billow and swing below. I don't know exactly what's coming next, but God, I hope it's going to be a puppet show.

The Poot Of Doom

It's odd, but true, that although any given segment of one's life seems to whip on by, and faster all the time, the life in its entirety seems like a long time to the proprietor. Even four-year-olds are being sincere when they say they've known something their "whole life." Our span of consciousness is all we've got, and with it we get to bite into our little morsel of the real universe, and it feels plenty substantial to us.

But that doesn't mean our relationship to our allotted time remains the same. Young people, who in theory have more future in front of them, tend to pay no attention to it, and wantonly endanger their bodies and fail to set anything aside for their dotage. Whereas older people have less future in front of them and are acutely aware of it. They can reach out and touch it on all its sides without lifting a butt cheek off the sofa.

As a child, I used to get strep throat every winter. Mommy presided over it and drove it away, but even when I was out on my own, lying in my disheveled sheets with a temperature of 115 and fever-dreaming about stacking up tiny important cubes on skinny scaffolds, it never occurred to me that I might die or something. That wasn't even a possibility.

When I was older, I could go to a party and methodically take in enough poison of various kinds to eliminate the bother of moral behavior and the burden of consciousness, and although the aftermath of it should have alerted me to the fragility of the human body, it didn't. I just picked myself up off the floor--you know, somebody's floor--with all the confidence in the world that my little allocation of skin and sinew would keep on truckin' more or less indefinitely.

Now I've packed away a lot more years. The boxes are starting to fill up the basement, and I don't even remember what's in a lot of them. I feel as good as I ever did, and in many ways even better. But these days, I think: something is going to take me out rather sooner than later, and what will it be? When I get a sore throat, and a little fever, I think: Houston, this is it. When I turn my head too fast and everything see-saws for a second, I think: here it comes. When I roll over at night, and my heart flops over a second later, just trying to get comfortable too, I think: Mayday! All systems shutting down!

And what is that kernel of discomfort that just staked out a square centimeter of my abdomen? What is that?

I don't know which perspective makes more sense. I might have remained unaware of a lot of things when I was young, but at least I could recognize a trapped fart when I felt one.

Boom Boom, Out Go The Lights

It's been a boom year so far for famous dead musicians, and not just the ones nobody has heard of unless they're under forty, but the real ones. Right out of the gate we lost David Bowie. He epitomized an era about as well as it can be epitomized. I can't listen to Starman without being transported to a small basement flat in London where I spent a year slowly losing my mind and also drinking Guinness (so, on average, a good year). I have an acquaintance who reportedly threw out all his Bowie albums when he found out the man might be gay, which raises several questions about my friend, including: how did that little tidbit sneak up on him? The point is, things are different now, at least I hope they are, and Bowie's been with us for all of it.  Then Glenn Frey keeled over. Then Jefferson Airplane lost two members on the same day. Then Dan Hicks. And all over the social media (or, at least, Facebook, which is the platform that gained legal custody of the old farts), people were wailing along with the equally dead Marvin Gaye: What's going on?

Sure, we lost some along the way. It happens. Especially when a generation is experimenting with a lot of drugs. The adults always called it that, "experimenting," but in reality a lot of us were way past the test ride and had bought the whole fleet. Hendrix, Joplin, Lowell George--there were so many great musicians, and also Jim Morrison. It almost seemed sort of exciting and exotic at the time. Actual cessation of life--bold move! We didn't expect people to just die. Like, ever. And there was that romantic notion of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. You know, if you ignore the vomit and stuff.

And some of it just wasn't fair. Zappa, Beefheart, Nyro? We wuz robbed. But now they're dropping like weighted flies. "It always comes in threes," you hear, which is true, because after the third one you start counting over, but we're getting into the serious multiples here. We feel betrayed. These people wrote the very soundtrack of our youth. They were our youth. And if they're dying, it means...wait a minute...it means...

[tension builds as the boomers begin to put the puzzle pieces together. Shark music commences, swells. There is a gasp, and, off stage, a scream.]

Who's next? we say, alarmed, as though we are in the presence of a stalker. Bulletin: we are. We're old, people. This isn't some cosmic plot. You start edging up on that three-score and ten, you're going to have to expect some attrition.

You're not really expecting The Eagles in my collection, are you?

It's not like we're wanting for evidence. The younger generation has started to mumble, and even when you can hear them, they don't make any sense. Remember when you could use nudity as both a political statement and a personal ad? Now look at you. You're completely covered in spots and speckles, little messages, like your skin has set up an informational picket. And that's just the organ you can see. Inside, all your moist, pink, baggy bits are trying to send you messages too. Your kidneys, your liver, your heroic heap of intestines have all been saving your ass for decades, and now, they've just about had it with you. They've put up with your bullshit all this time and now they're thinking it's time to send you to the Big Time-Out.

So don't ask who's next. You might not want to know. We've been on the downhill skid since John Lennon's Revolution was first used to sell shoes. Someday soon we're all going to be gone. Some of us might be able to buy a stairway to heaven, and the rest of us, grateful or not, will be friends of the devil. Keith Richards will spend a little time sweeping up after us, and then he's out, too.

Geriantics

"Oh shame, oh ignominy, oh shit." These are the words of frequent commenter Lo, who is a kick in the pants, on the eve of her 84th birthday. It isn't the birthday that bothers her. It's that she has to take a driver's license exam again. Several things come to mind. One, 84 isn't what it used to be. For much of my life, 84 was old. I knew 84-year-olds. They said "oh dear," and "oh my," and if they ever said "oh shit" it would trigger a fatal epizootic. My mother wouldn't have said "oh shit" if she were on fire, but she never made it to 84, so maybe she had it in her, after all, but it hadn't had a chance to ripen.

So I realized that Lo is not, in fact, of the same generation as the 84-year-olds of my youth. She is virtually my contemporary. Put another way, I'm old. There are differences. Lo is worried she might disgrace herself by failing the written exam, wherein you are expected to know things like how many feet before an intersection you need to put your blinker on. I used to know how many when I was sixteen, but it never meant anything to me. I could write "100 feet" like nobody's business, but I didn't have much of a feel for how far that really was. And now I just fling on the blinker to let people behind me know I'm pondering a move, and might slow down or speed up or slam on the brakes and crank it to the right at any time. Then I leave it blinking in case I might want to crank it again later.

They like to test old people for driver's licenses more often because they tend to take a more ecumenical view of the driving terrain, making fewer distinctions between, for instance, the brake, the accelerator, the correct lane, the oncoming lane, the sidewalk, and the path to rapture. One's just as good as another; some are louder.

Lo isn't worried about her actual driving. That's another difference. I am one shitty driver. I don't know if my shitty driving is a sign of age, because it's nothing new, but on the other hand I seem to be getting shittier. One of my problems is that while I'm driving somewhere, my mind is on an entirely different road trip. This leads me to spring out of my car with my hiking boots and binoculars only to discover I'm in the parking lot at Costco. I like to think that my problem is I have a more developed right-brain than most, and other people like to suggest that my problem might have a pharmaceutical solution. I've got a good sense of direction, modified by a bad sense of attention, so I've had to learn coping skills. I can locate any address, but I can't do it until I turn the radio down. Similarly, I can't drive in the dark without Valium.

The fact is, the highways are filled with honeybees doing the waggle-dance and arrowing to their destinations; while I drive with a moth's sensibility, my imagination providing the porchlights, adrift on a night-jasmine scent of confusion. If it's true that what's important is the journey and not the destination, I'm golden. I never get anywhere.

My reaction times are not a sign of age. They were always shitty. My strategy of being in poor shape at age twenty has served me well in that I rarely have cause to mourn my own deterioration. I don't drive much worse, either, although it used to take more alcohol to achieve the same degree of crappitude.

Beyond these limitations, there is the matter of my vision. It was never good, and when I was sixteen I got contact lenses that put galloping haloes on all oncoming headlights, so that it looked like Glinda the Good Witch was barreling down on me with her entire book group. Since then I have abandoned the contacts for glasses, but something has happened that has removed all objects from sight after sundown. Probably global warming. If it's raining, the world disappears even earlier. Dave once followed me back from picking up my car at the dealer, at night during a terrific downpour, and he straddled as many protective lanes as possible in my wake, with flashers, flares, klaxons and a case of panic diarrhea, as I slalomed over the road. He was attempting to communicate "CAUTION: STUDENT MONKEY DRIVER AHEAD." It was a major highway but as far as I could tell it had no stripes, no shoulders, and evidently no police presence. It takes a special kind of fearlessness to hurtle into the void at 55 miles per hour; mine is the terrified kind. At this point, if you invite me to dinner, you're best off making it an early one, unless you want to feed me breakfast too.

On some of the better roads, they've installed bumps on the shoulders to let you know how close you are to dead. They're there for folks who might have fallen asleep at the wheel, but I've found them helpful while I'm wide-eyed awake, to funnel me back into my lane. It might be time to hang up my license. Coping strategies for driving deficits are all fine and good, but Braille really shouldn't be one of them.

Remember your pants

Dave's childhood dentist was a butcher and a quack, and as a consequence Dave's teeth are mostly not original material. But only a few in the front are actually removable. We were headed out for a constitutional this morning when he remembered he should put them in. "Good idea," I agreed, and the next time I turned around, he had his teeth in, but wasn't wearing any pants. "I only have one rule, going forward," I told him. "We go out, you have your teeth in and your pants on."

Just as soon as words like that leave your mouth, you realize you have stepped over some kind of a line. You have entered new territory in your life. Things are going to be different from now on, and you might have to do some fancy stepping. It won't be for the faint of heart.

For Dave, the moment he became old happened a long time ago. He was pushing forty, or maybe had just started pulling it, and we had gotten our truck stuck in the snow in the driveway to our cabin. He fetched the square shovel and started trying to dig himself out enough that the back end wasn't hanging out into the road. He was a strong, tall man, and although there was a lot of snow to move, he seemed to me to be making fine progress. Just then a short convoy of Cherokees and Broncos and the like came up, unable to get by our pickup, and several young men hopped out to see what was happening. Dave leaned on the shovel for a moment while apologizing for blocking the road. "Here--let us get that for you, sir," the young men said, taking the shovel. It was the "sir" that blindsided Dave. Why, he was in his prime--or if not in his prime, at least prime-ish, or maybe more primate. That was it: for sure there was nothing about him that had ever gotten him called "sir" before. Dave stood by, spluttering a little, but neither of us could help but notice that the young men had the truck completely dug out in no time. They waved merrily, let fly with another "sir", and took off in their shiny red four-by-fours. Dave retreated to the cabin in a sullen silence and opened the first of a series of beers.

So we just had another episode requiring a lot of shoveling at the cabin, and Dave came through like a champ, methodically removing about a thousand cubic feet of snow. He hasn't lost any height, and he's still plenty strong for a 58-year-old man, but he does have a frozen shoulder and a few other complaints. "You can never find a whippersnapper when you need one," he observed, leaning on his shovel and recalling an earlier time. By cracky, he's right.