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March 2002 The Greens broke all the rules in the last election. With only three percent of the vote, they’re supposed to be able to ignore us. They can’t. They’re angry. Good. I read to keep my mind from contracting, which is the natural process. Maybe it isn’t contraction. Maybe it’s focus. Writing is more intelligent than conversation, a higher level process. Conversation is about affiliation. Writing is about truth. They say a liberal is someone who has never been mugged. I may be getting that way about tobacco. I’m losing tolerance, seeing members of my family killed off by smoking. I don’t believe prohibition would work for adults, but something drastic needs to be done to keep teenagers from smoking. I believe that one reason it’s so hard for smokers to quit is that smoking becomes part of their personality, their self. Take away smoking and you remove part of who they are. Like cutting out part of the brain. Also they depend on smoking to suppress enough of their anxiety so they can function in the world. We need a good replacement. The world has become too stressful for a lot of people to live in it. Stress tears down the body – like smoking – and leads to depression. Smoking killed my sister. Now I want to kill smoking. An interesting thought experiment relating to work: Make a list of essential services, those you can’t live without. How would we provide them without wage-slavery? Could we be happy without nonessential services? What would take the place of the little luxuries we now depend on to lift our spirits? What causes the 50 percent divorce rate? I think we’ve become an our-way-or-the-highway culture. Outside of work that is, where we calmly accept slavery. Maybe divorce is a reaction to work. At home, at least, we will have things our way. All by ourselves. Being nice on a personal basis is usually a good thing. Civility makes society work. Being nice in politics is stupid and self-defeating. Nothing changes except by the application of electoral force. Register and vote Green. One good feature of abolishing work is that we could uninvent time. Someone wrote that we eat so much meat “because it’s there.” I think the same is true for most of the goods and services we consume. Beyond basic food, shelter, clothing and medical care, what is essential to me are books and intelligent conversation. Ideas. Companionship. A friend has a theory that politically we’re like frogs
being boiled alive. If you put a frog in room temperature water and
then very slowly raise the temperature, she says, the frog will not
move. It will sit there until it dies. Found poem: Rule for adding Signed numbers Like signs Unlike signs Last will and testament: I leave “Teddy,” my teddy bear who has been with me since early childhood, to my younger sister, who made his clothes when she was 11. The political task of those of us in our 50s and up is to somehow make the state pay for our medical care. Because we need so much more of it than younger people, and depending on a job for medical insurance is just too chancy. I wonder if it’s overloading with detail that makes Americans so politically stupid? We can’t remember what happened, for example, during the Clinton years because so much daily detail prevented us from seeing the main patterns. We can’t see the forest for the crap. I think the most common experience in our culture, at this time, is that of being overwhelmed. When someone close to you dies it’s like divorce: You have to let go. It can take years. As we get older we have more practice at saying goodbye. In the movie The Sixth Sense a man was shot and killed, but it took a long time for him to realize that he was dead. I think old age is like that. There’s a lag before it sinks in. We forget we’re old. We’re in denial. I want to spend the rest of my life free associating. Everything is connected to everything else, the thighbone to the hipbone…. For proper mind maintenance, I require massive amounts of free time. Probably one reason I’m so down on materialism is that I just don’t get that much pleasure out of things. You have to allow people to be who they are. It has been a disappointment to me that the generation that went to college in the ’60s settled for business as usual. Well, no one ever meets anyone else’s expectations, do we? When the brain doesn’t work right we don’t become completely different people, just batty versions of ourselves. My sister had always been feisty, combative. After her stroke she became more so. She fought with people when there was no point to it and just made things worse. Irrational anger. Very demanding. Large blanks in her memory for recent events. I miss her, but I’m glad she doesn’t have to suffer any more. Before my sister died I kept trying to solve the problem. By the time I would get a plan made everything would have changed and my plan would be irrelevant. After she died I still felt like there was something I should do, but I didn’t know what. The problem had become permanently unsolvable. When someone is dying, in the final months and weeks, body systems start shutting down, as if the body were dissolving into sand, returning to the earth. At some point there is nothing you can do to stop it. At the end we run out of plans. Although my niece told me my sister was still making plans in her last few days. She had decided she was going to have her need for constant oxygen reevaluated, because she might meet a man and she didn’t think using oxygen was very attractive. My niece thinks that wherever my sister is now she’s really pissed, because she wasn’t planning on dying. When my sister was in the hospital last summer a doctor told the family that she was in the final stage of lung disease. I told her that a few months ago and she said, “Oh I am not!” George Harrison died at 58 from lung cancer. He smoked. He didn’t get to have an old age. The actor Dick Van Dyke, in his 70s, says that old age is not a disease it’s a gift, and one that is “not awarded on merit.” I’m looking forward to retirement, in a kind of desperate way. Like I’ll crawl gasping across the finish line. I picture everything just stopping, and I’m sitting in a chair in our back yard, my mind a total blank, watching the squirrels. I’m taking a break, leaving my computer off, searching for some peace. Maybe I should have a laptop. Happiness is a computer with no email, no Internet. Just write. I need to disconnect. The bargain the middle class has made is that they get to live in reasonable comfort and safety – if they follow all the rules. That’s got to hurt. Perversity – doing something you know is likely to cause you harm – may be a rebellion against a too constrictive life. Smokers, for example, act like they’re rebelling. “No one’s going to tell me I have to quit.” People who act in a self-destructive way may be trying to increase the amount of freedom in their lives. This might also explain why someone who normally seems sane and controlled would suddenly do something disastrously out of character. I don’t think psychology has considered the effects of a need for freedom. The apparent continuity of the self may be, in some part, an illusion. There may be significantly different selves operating in all of us from moment to moment, not just in those with multiple personality disorders. We may just be more subtle about it. “I’ve changed my mind.” Much better, thank you. Pretty soon the sky Is going to be Evil Once, years ago, I called up a woman I knew at work and asked, “Can you come out and play?” Nature didn’t design us to be regular. It’s not just politics we’re fleeing. We’re escaping the group for the personal, because only the personal makes any kind of sense. Everything in this country is run by a group, but we don’t know how to be democratic so the group is always hierarchical, with most of us taking orders. Or it tries to be democratic and degenerates into power struggles, everything gets too weird and people quit. The only volunteer groups I’ve been in that sort of work function like a loose network where each person who wants to takes on a particular job, and the others stay out of their hair and let them do it. Division of labor, like an old fashioned marriage: the man takes care of the car and mows the lawn, the woman does the cooking and house cleaning. Different territories. But that kind of group isn’t very efficient and it’s hard to get any large job done that way. Death is inarticulate. We can cover it up with words, but it just sits there, mute. I’m willing to live at the subsistence level, if that’s what it takes to survive. I just have to break my habit of buying little luxuries. But it doesn’t seem fair that I should have to do that and work. If we think working is so goddamned important, then we ought to pay people enough to make it worth their while. A frightening thought: Ten years from now, if I’m still around, will these be the good old days? Why is it mostly working-class people who smoke? I think it’s because we’re under more stress than anyone else. I’ve been the ghost at a lot of gatherings. That’s my idea of the afterlife: We all stand around and watch. I hope, in the afterlife, to be permanently stoned. Eleven years ago, after my mother died, my sister rented a plane and scattered Mother’s ashes over the rural area where she used to live. My sister said it was as if she did it in a dream. Last month we poured my sister’s ashes into a river in Washington. I could tell it was real. The ashes were very fine, a tan color, like something you would dig out of a furnace, and they blew in the wind. I need to see some more of Spaulding Gray’s monologs. Amazing how he can tell a story and hold your attention for the length of a movie. A cast of one. There are always a lot of levels, aren’t there? Except in sex, when the levels briefly collapse. I think it was Barbara Kingsolver who said, about book tours, that if readers love her books they should leave her alone and let her write more of them. I wonder what it feels like to write fiction? I remember college as being socially awkward, brittle. We didn’t know what we were doing. We are all temps. A friend used to say, “I think we’re all bozos on this bus.” After we die we become photos. Family is a story. I had a romantic view of marriage: I thought it meant growing old together. A book I read on middle age, in my early 40s, said that ageing doesn’t really hit people until they’re in their late 50s, because until then we don’t look different. So, it’s about how you look. Things have been really weird lately. Or every now and then I become more aware of the constant underlying weirdness. Only humor is eternal. No, I really can’t expand on that. First, because I don’t know what it means. Second, because it would lose so much in the translation. Engineers feel good, I read in a novel, when they can make something work. Intellectuals, when they can understand something, see it come together like a picture. Always imply more than you say. I saw James Garner on TV, looking impossibly old. When I look at the old I think, I don’t want to be one of those slow moving people. I’ve wondered if it’s dangerous to young people to tell them what older people know. A young man told me he felt like 20 going on 40 because older people kept burdening him with unwanted knowledge. About 30 years ago a therapist I knew said that therapists were the “occupational saviors” of our time. Maybe that’s too ambitious. I wonder about a lot of things, and it drives me crazy that I don’t know whether that’s a question or a statement. It comes down to motivation: Do I want an answer?
Or reading. That’s why I try to leave lots of space. A problem with listening is that a lot of what we fill in isn’t what the speaker intended. Tannen sees conversation as being about relationship. A man would probably see it as information exchange or mutual stimulation.
That goes with the territory, when the main thing you do is work. Probably I’ll get used to being old, if nothing physically drastic happens, as I got used to being middle-aged. I could never get used to working. I read that women feel the right time to go to bed with a man is about the 15th date. So that’s how long it takes to know someone. Also, I guess, from the woman’s point of view, a suitable investment. They have to find out whether we’re serious or merely being driven crazy by our hormones. Just passing through. I write better late at night, because it’s quiet. That may be one of the few advantages of being single: You can hear yourself think. Inner stillness is the hardest to come by. Tannen points out that control is a big issue for men, connectedness for women. Men are concerned about anyone trying to claim a higher status. Women worry about distance. And what did he mean by that? You can’t let someone else define you. I should get a laptop. It’s too much work to write longhand in a tablet, then type on the computer. 5:08 a.m. Up all night. I can hear the morning birds. Just a little marijuana lasts for hours. I feel like I’m waking up from a bad year. Writers are always looking for resonance. I like the expressiveness of women, they way their faces light up. Very human. What men are good for: analysis. Sitting back and looking at things. Seeing from a distance. The main problem I have with thinking is memory. The amount of detail I can hold in mind is quite limited. So I look for patterns. Trying to find a job in my 60s reminds me of a line from, I believe, Bob Dylan, something about people in New York don’t need you “and man they expect the same.” Get out of debt. Save money. This spring and summer I plan to visit people in Idaho and Colorado. It feels somehow difficult to travel such a distance, I don’t know why. Something to do with ageing. When I was younger, even in my mid 40s, it would have been an adventure. Trapped in a boring job, I used to daydream about traveling. That delicious moment when I got in the car, released the parking brake, and set off into the real world. One thing I would like out of retirement is revenge for years of shitwork and economic screwing. I want to stick it to the Democrats, since they’ve abandoned and betrayed their working-class roots. We’re having an early spring in Portland. Blue jay playing in the birdbath in our back yard. Roses growing leaves. Ornamental fruit trees downtown along the Willamette river are blooming. Sun, bright blue sky. It’s important to waste time. Otherwise you get overworked. Nothing Happened Again Today All family members older than myself have died. I’m sure there is a rational explanation for this. Jarring Juxtapositions In America, to be political is not merely unusual, it’s abnormal. I need to find a good book on ageing. I would like to know what changes are normal and what aren’t. I don’t know much about ageing, because this is the first time I’ve done it.
Yeah, wait till they see how tired they get.
How do you measure knowledge? The radical ideas about sexuality, such as “open marriage,” that a lot of us latched onto in the ’60s and ’70s were unworkable. Marriage is very confining. It was meant to be. Married people who want to screw around should admit to themselves what they’re trying to do – destroy the marriage – and have the decency to get divorced first. I also think this is a time-limited issue. Once you get into your 50s men’s testosterone levels go down and women look like grandmothers, so where’s the motivation? Marriages tend to wear out after about 20 years, but I don’t recommend divorce. The last thing you need is to grow old single. Besides loneliness, there are major financial considerations. I say all this as an older single outsider. The grass is always greener…. Rule of thumb as you get older: Time is probably a lot shorter than you think it is. We ought to acquire some wisdom as we get older, and show some class. Not just blindly repeat what we did when we were younger, because we want to be young. On the other hand … I know sometimes marriages can get unrewarding or destructive, and sometimes divorce is the only way out. I’m biased towards preservation, especially for older people – can you imagine dating in your 60s? – but no one should take their mate for granted. It’s just that I see everything falling apart, and it scares me. My tolerance for chaos seems to have declined. “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” – Carole King If being single in your 50s and 60s seems like a good idea, ask yourself this: When you go to the hospital – not “if,” “when” – who do you want there to talk to the doctors and nurses, and look after your interests? Who do you want to take care of you when you come home? As we get older life ceases to be a game of musical chairs, because most of the chairs have been taken away. We need more love. Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference between love and habit. Habit has a way of replacing life. We had a few days of spring, then cold winter again. I’m feeling tired, sluggish, and want to withdraw. What life is about: Making up for lost time. I wonder if men withdraw in middle age because life has failed them? They didn’t become who they wanted to be. Once you lose hope there isn’t much to say. Although I go on saying it anyway, as a protest. You should too. We grow more individualistic as we grow older, just when we need other people the most. My experience so far of ageing is loss. Shrinking. I’m hoping retirement will reverse the process, at least mentally. I need time. I could easily be wrong about long-term marriage – as being better than the alternative, especially as you get older. I was only married for five years. Maybe after 20 years or so people wear each other out, run out of anything new to say, forget how to share their lives. Maybe the mates we pick to raise families are not the ones we need to grow old with. I just can’t picture a marital reshuffling in our 50s and 60s. At this age we’re not very marketable. We’re too old. We make political decisions based on general impressions, rather than details, because we can’t remember details. I find that even intelligent people are very vague and uninformed about politics. Instead of knowledge, they have ideology. They vote Democrat or Republican. I come from a very restless family. We seem unable to settle down, even when age requires it. My older sister spent the last year of her life moving from place to place, jumping around like a bug on a hot skillet, as if she were trying to recapitulate her whole life at the end of it. I’ve never really had a home. I’ve spent years in the same city, but always eventually moved on. I see that same restlessness in the American character. We will not settle. Nothing is ever enough. Or maybe my sister was trying to outrun death. I want to learn how to sit. What I hate most about riding the bus is listening to other people run their mouths. If I ever go crazy, I’ll probably stand up in a bus and holler QUIET! I would like to have an electronic gadget that disables cell phones for about 50 feet around me. If you know how to do that, send me plans and I’ll build one. Perhaps a transmitter broadcasting static on cell phone frequencies? Spending money is easy. Not spending it takes a lot of self-discipline. We feel we owe it to ourselves to spend it, because we had to go through so much shit to make it. I wonder, if I repeated the same material at ten year intervals, would anyone notice? Would I? I’ve probably already done it. The higher the information density, the more random connections. This is not a good time to be sober. This is a book and bottle day. The book is Hit List by Lawrence Block. I’m at my best when I don’t have much to do. Just let me poke around the house, singing songs and scribbling in my notebook. I won’t be any trouble at all. You’ll hardly know I’m here. My life, like Seinfeld, should be about nothing. I’ll just write my humorous remarks about death, loss and the collapse of American politics. Really, I’ll be fine. Shoo. Just watch me and make sure I don’t turn on the computer and get sucked into the black hole of volunteer work. And coffee is bad for me. Got any? I should do no work at all. Water me once a day. Try to avoid criticism. I’m like, you know, sensitive? I’m trying to figure out how to grow old gracefully. I’ve seen the alternative, and I don’t want to go there. I’ve read that as we grow older our happiness depends on being physically and mentally active, and we need to keep making new friends. Because the old ones die. I don’t know how to write honestly about what is going on in America without being quite offensive. People want desperately to believe, and I don’t. It’s not personal. As we get older it gets harder to couple. We get used to loneliness – perhaps some part of the psyche becomes numb. We also become more assertive – that is, determined to have things our own way. And we are much less sexually driven. This may be a blessing, but it also feels like getting ready to die. The sun is shining and it’s snowing. One of nature’s little jokes. All we can do for the dead is remember them. Waiting for retirement, three weeks to go. I imagine myself on a stage, waiting, and retirement as a person, perhaps my long-dead father. This probably makes no sense at all. Let the play begin. The last act.
Yeah, employers ditto. Everyone wants you to just follow orders. Drift is nonutilitarian. At least I hope so. Drift is purely theoretical. It doesn’t actually exist. If you could magnify the screen you’re staring at, you’d find there’s nothing there but little squares of light. I’ve retreated to the world of ideas where there is still some pleasure to be had and I don’t have to deal with the enormous frustration of trying to actually do something in the so-called “real” world. Which has become increasingly false. Sometimes things just get too weird, in a bad way, and I need a little vacation. I notice a lot of others doing the same. Disconnect. It’s not real. I know you think it is but it isn’t. Just about every word out of Bush’s mouth is a lie. His purpose is to simulate reality. All the world will conspire to silence you, but you’ll be the one who does it. I’m much nicer in person. About college: I believe in The Wizard of Oz the wizard could not give the scarecrow a brain, so he gave him a diploma. Everyone should have a wild past, a stable present, and a future. Stoned guy at a bus stop asks me what kind of work I do. I tell him I take care of a quadriplegic. He starts gushing about “love.” No, I tell him, it doesn’t have anything to do with love. It’s just a job. I’m going to turn my back on time. In a recent article on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the author said the bad news is we don’t have tourist flights to the space station. The good news is we’re not all wearing leotards. The essence of professionalism is inflation: They try to make everything as complicated as possible. I’m not sure if I really am an old person, or if I’m just playing one on TV. When I was a young man my daydreams were about sports cars, motorcycles, scooters. Symbols of freedom. The Corvette on the TV program Route 66. Young men desperately want girlfriends, but I wonder if any of us are ready to settle down before age 30? Conversation is what keeps us human. Someone wrote that cities appeal mainly to business people and intellectuals. Now there’s an unholy alliance. The 50s are a paradox. On the one hand it’s a good time to seek stability before the storm: get out of debt, save money, improve the health of your marriage if you’re fortunate enough to still have one. On the other hand, if you’ve been stuck in a rut, playing it safe, and haven’t done the thing – you know, the thing – you’ve always wanted to do, now’s the time to do it while you still can. The 60s, I think, are going to be more of the same, with increasing physical risk and less energy, but also more freedom once I’m retired. Two weeks to go. There were a lot more stars when I was young. I’m tired of the city – TV and the endless roar of traffic. Mindless, no one at the wheel. A 58 year-old woman is about to climb Mt. Everest. So there. I still get mad when I go to work. |