I don't miss the constant pressure of having to worry about what I say like I did when I was teaching. You never know how something you say will affect those listening. How shall I say this carefully... I've been to Patpong and Soi Cowboy in Bangkok, Walking Street in Pattaya, Geylang in Singapore, 588 in Seoul, and Kabukicho in Tokyo and it looked like a lot of the girls there were on their way to the gym to work out. No? Still doesn't get Shane Gillis off the hook?
I had my first Sunday of the NFL season off this week too so I watched as much football as I could and I found myself getting cheer shy. Yup, I may have come up with that right here right now. Cheer shy. Go ahead and use it. It's yours. It's that feeling we get when the team we're voting for makes a great play; scores a touchdown; catches a long pass; sacks the QB; and we WANT to jump out of our seats and cheer... but there might be a flag.
How many times have goals in the NHL been scored then 5 minutes later after a lengthy review to find a skate lace on the wrong side of the blue line, crease, or the fucking TRAPEZOID, called back? What are the fans to do then? Take back our erroneous cheers? Exchange negative high fives? Maybe LOW fives to erase the high ones?
Muppets don't get wrinkles but they do die. The drummer and lyricist who most likely wrote the words to "Time Stand Still" where those lines come from, could have better explained what I am hoping to convey in this post today. But, like experience, he slipped away. I suspect sooner than he would have if he hadn't learned what that song and this post so insufficiently describe.
I think as people get older, and not necessarily but sometimes wiser, myself included, they give less of a shit about the past or future and tend to try to make more of the present. This may at least partially be because we don't know how many more "presents" we will get. "Like some pilgrim who learns to transcend; learns to live as if each step was the end."
There's a little book that I think a lot of people would really dig if it were just written as a poem with no author and no religious affiliation. It opens with a man called the teacher or the preacher making a very Taoist statement. Everything is hevel. It's word that means vapour, breath, mist. Basically everything is meaningless. This teacher is speaking from experience having had a wealth of it, having accrued riches, achievements, power, wisdom, and knowledge he says it all slipped through his fingers and amounted to nothing. Pleasure, success, money, accomplishments, he's had them all and determined that the greatest king is no greater than the lowest beast because everything is hevel. For everything there is a season and we are all just dust in the wind. No matter what you love, no amount of it will satisfy you. We are all just chasing the wind. The only hope offered in this little book is joy. The teacher says that there is no rhyme or reason in this world as to our individual fates save the certainty of death, so we had best eat, drink, and be merry; forget the past or the future - find as much joy as you can in what you have right now.
When I think of my own life I believe that more than anything what I sought was justice. I believed that surely justice was at the heart of our world and exposing those who profited through injustice was all one needed to do to end it. I realize now what an idiot I was. Not in the modern sense of having a deficiency in knowledge or intelligence. In fact I would consider myself above average in both. I am a Dostoevskian Idiot. A prince Myshkin. While I'm not sure yet to what extent I should have participated in the hypocrisy of life, I realize I should have just said, "Fuck it," and found my joy where I could. I was just chasing the wind. No matter what we find in our hearts to chase, we'll never catch it. The key is taking joy in the humiliation of defeat. And then we die.
I think this might be a nugget of wisdom that comes with age, i.e. proximity to death. Maybe it's what causes wrinkles, sickness, and hastens death. The little book, if you haven't guessed, was Ecclesiastes. At one point in his ravings the teacher comments that death is actually preferable to life. Maybe his purpose for writing it was to ease its certainty somewhat. Maybe there will come a time in my life when I can't find enough joy in living to make the alternative preferable. I haven't reached that point but I can feel it getting closer with every one of the simple pleasures of life becoming less pleasurable.
Eating and drinking used to make me merry - now I have to watch out for cholesterol, sugar, alcohol, caffeine... Sports was the greatest hobby in my life - now I'm too old to play them and I get pissed off every time I watch them... I loved joking, comedy, humour - but now everything funny seems to offend someone... world events/politics/news - it's just professional wrestling... love - it's for the young and foolish... People - sometimes I could do without them... I'm running out of things from which to derive joy! It's all becoming hevel. Is this what happens when we get old?
However, when I "pass an evening with a drink and a friend" I wish the moment could last a little bit longer and the sensation could be a little bit stronger. That's the stuff that makes life joyful enough to get outta bed in the morning.
Leastaways, that's what I reckon.
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