Too much trouble getting old

 

June 22, 2009

 

I slept fitfully last night – full of the old anxiety I used to feel when I lacked copy the day before production or when I had to face finishing donuts.

I still remember the nightmare from 1981 the night after my first shift working at Dunkin Donuts in Paterson – armies of flying donuts coming at me from every direction.

These days, however, I tend to work ahead of myself so I don’t have to panic on production day.

Perhaps my panic hasn’t anything to do with production.

The world has become a hairy place, filled with never ending possibilities for doom.

War in Iraq and Afghanistan. CIA agents kidnapping people for secret prisons. US military torturing people.

Now Korea intends to launch a missile attack on Hawaii.

While I never expected much from Obama, he’s proven he’s just another supporter of the system, doing all he can to make sure capitalism thrives.

Life isn’t going by quickly the way other people claim it does for them.

While I’m glad in some ways that it doesn’t, the slowness of life is what makes it unbearable at times.

I fear growing weary, unable to have enough energy to keep up with life.

Sometimes, when I read about or talk to some people, I realize their lives stretch back into a past I always thought of as ancient – such as the British gentleman, who at 113 years old – is considered the oldest man in the world, and the eldest survivor of World War I. America also have one last remaining World War I veteran, and it scares me to think that we shall hear the news sooner or later about the last survivor of that war.

I remember at a kid hearing the news of the death of the last known veteran of the American Civil War, a fifteen-year-old boy at the time who had either carried a drum or a flag (I don’t remember which).

We calculate history the wrong way, marking it out in decades, when it truth, some other measurement is needed.

My life is a series of clots, clumped years in which there are related events. Some clots overlap even. Such as life at the rooming house in the early 1970s, and life with the Garley Gang, yet are completely different existences as if each occurred in a separate universe.

I have fewer clots these days since I spend less time in the real world. Yet they mount up in me, groupings of memories that seem as heavy in my life as a millstone, and I carry them around with me, growing more and wearier as the years pass.

This year is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, a big event partly because many people do not want to risk waiting for the 50th because too few of us will be around to enjoy it. Some like Hank and Charlie barely made the 25th and have since departed this mortal coil.

Someday someone somewhere will mark history with the death of the last known survivor of Woodstock, the way we mark off survivors of war.

I won’t be alive to appreciate it unless by some strange fortune, I manage to become one of the longest living human beings on the planet.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle the baggage if I do. I already feel weary and I’m barely half as old as that gent in England.