May 2003

 

Drift is going on a diet. It plans to eat mostly nonfiction, plus a few “serious” novels.

 

A party is an excuse to drink too much. I don’t know why we think we need an excuse.

 

Somehow I feel the need, with puritans, to rub it in. To be thus is nothing but to be blatantly thus. I remember when we were young we felt that way about our sexuality. Perhaps when we’re old we will too.

 

I have this theory that rapidly alternating moods create an energy field around us. Like electromagnetism.

 

The enemy as we get older is inertia, the urge to just sit. Although a lot of people achieve that state while relatively young. Most of quickly get there mentally, once school stops pounding on our heads. I guess inertia plays a positive role in conservation of energy. Not sure what we’re conserving it for. The afterlife?

 

America has a huge army, to protect our privileged position in the world, and that of U.S. based international corporations. Such an army has to be regularly used, tested and trained in actual combat, or it becomes unreliable. One of the reasons for our frequent involvement in wars.

Also you have to justify the great expense of maintaining this army, so you make the people afraid and then “save” them. Build up nasty dictators – you never know when you might need one to be the designated enemy.

 

The Manor on PBS: Interesting, although I can’t understand about half of the dialogue. Those British accents and, I suspect, a little hearing loss. Somehow I identified with the butler. 

The program is a TV documentary about people living the English Edwardian life of around 100 years ago, rich people and servants in what looks like a huge mansion. Everyone trying to do it as it would have been done then, but none of them actors.

One of the points of The Manor, according to a review, is that life among the aristocracy in Edwardian times was, in many different ways, as limiting as that of their servants. Emotionally limited, always having to play a role, very little honest communication, not much love. Marriages for the rich were usually arranged, and infidelity was common.

I guess this would have been the period before the first World War. So a lot of these young men would have died young. And in those days, unlike our own, I believe the rich young men also went off to war.

“World war” sounds quaint now, even though we now have small wars going on around the world all the time. We are in the era of permanent war. What we don’t have are large-scale wars between large, evenly-matched opponents. No that was clearly bad for business. It seems we’re going back to the empire era.

The most amazing thing in The Manor was the butler, an architect in real life, admitting that his feelings were hurt when the master of the house criticized the table service. Gee, after all those interesting conversations. Later he said they were back on good terms, “But of course, if he did it once he’ll do it again.”

The Manor is about class conflict, but it’s also about the tension between the present and the past. The characters are living simultaneously in periods a hundred years apart, and constantly comparing the two, most finding the present better.

 

If you listen, you won’t think that other people are so quiet.

 

Retirement could actually be alright if one could relax and enjoy it. But the American way is to work and worry. If we no longer have responsibilities well, we’ll just invent some. I will.

Which is why I recommend marijuana. To find some of that famous amotivational syndrome. Allowing you to live in the present, to be fully here, for a few precious hours at a time.

 

Most rightwingers I encounter are not the upper crust, they’re the crust’s slaves. House slaves, as opposed to field slaves. Like English butlers who absorb their masters’ politics.

 

Right now America wants to be run by hard people. Fear does that.

 

… anger leads to radicalism and fear to conservatism. – Janet Burroway, in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg

 

Sooner or later people, usually young people, always reach for more freedom.

 

What is someone’s “real” age? Could you tell by measuring physical things, such as strength? There is such a wide variation among people the same age. Is a strong 40 year-old younger than someone that age who is not strong?

Is age a matter of mental habits, point of view? Are conservatives older than liberals or radicals? Do bohemians stay younger longer?

We measure age forward from birth. Perhaps it would make more sense to measure it, if we could, backwards from death.

 

That was what humans did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had. – John Connolly, The Killing Kind

 

The main problem with pornography is not its vulgarity, but its distance. The people we watch are just images on a screen, we don’t know them.

 

As I get older, physical attraction has much more to do with knowing, and much less with appearance.

 

We mask inequality, calling it something else. Eating at a restaurant, for example, is actually being waited on by servants.

 

Recently I’ve realized that great fun is to be had by introducing competitive people to each other and watching them go at it. Better them than me.

 

Someone just told me there is a statute of limitations on debt. Check it out.

 

Presence makes the heart grow fonder.

 

Someone told me recently that I’m a “stealth geezer.”

 

Anxious people make good citizens. Good workers, because we’re afraid of losing our jobs. Disposable people. Good consumers, because it relieves our anxiety.

 

Vitals, a science fiction novel by Greg Bear, suggests that one man’s life might be another man’s afterlife.

 

Plants and animals form ecologies; people form societies.

 

So, did we get Future Shocked?

 

It takes a lot of money to run a society, all that maintenance: water, sewage, electricity, gasoline, roads, jails, medical care for the unlucky and used up. And people don’t want to pay it. Even if there are potholes in the street, it probably won’t be the street they drive down.

Everyone thinks they’re going to be the exceptions.

Meanwhile the liberals are really tired and would rather spend their time on their personal interests than politics. The world is too crazy and they want to block it out.

 

In college in the early ‘60s, I remember reading that the baby boom would “move through society like a pig through a python”  straining social services all the way. Now the pig, what’s left of it, is about to pass through the medical section, which is already exploding. America was about youth in the ‘60s; in the 2000 teens it will be about old age.

 

I’m six years older than the baby boom, so I got here first.

Never mind. Carefully concealed location, antiaircraft guns on the roof. Swept for bugs every day.

 

Do you actually remember being a kid? I’m not sure. For me the past is like snapshots in a photo album.

 

Love is something like sympathy.

 

It is impossible to get older without being haunted.

 

After a little over a year of retirement, it seems that the main danger is not having nothing going on, as in the movie About Schmidt, but in filling up all my time with activity. So I have no time to listen to myself, which is part of creativity. The best preparation for retirement might be to learn how to withdraw from the world and sit.

Why is that so difficult? Because we are used to hiding from ourselves in frantic motion, and because we use activity to justify our lives, to make ourselves feel that we matter.

Also, I feel that political action is necessary for my survival and that of others.

If you would do a little, I wouldn’t have to do so much.

 

About Schmidt: Jack Nicholson plays a 66 year-old man who retires from a life as an insurance company executive and faces emptiness. Nicholson does a good job of being this bewildered nonentity most of the time, but every now and then the trademark Nicholson demonic smirk comes through, inappropriate to the character. Real enough to be painful to watch, relieved by humor.

Schmidt is the kind of guy we’re all afraid of turning into. He’s a man who wasted his life doing what you’re supposed to.

 

A female friend, 50, just told me that menopause lasts for about 17 years.

 

Invention is the highest form of play.

 

Perhaps the main thing I get from my dreams is just more contact with the dark side of my mind.

 

Romance is about finding a volunteer. Someone who needs romance and guesses you’ll do. And you guess they’ll do. So you start spending a lot of time together and sleeping together. And after a while you feel very attached to them, which is what we call “love.” But it doesn’t start that way. You have to start without it.

It isn’t about compatibility or suitability, it’s about availability.

It’s about, for a man, who is willing to sleep with you after a reasonable period of getting acquainted. I think it’s impossible for a man to feel a strong emotional attachment to a woman if there isn’t something physical happening between them. Talking is essential, but you’ll never get there if all you’ve got going is conversation.

Truth is, after a few months of talking we’ve mostly said it all. You’ve heard all our stories, what happened last time, etc., now can we go to bed?

It’s not just, or even primarily, about lust, it’s about communicating through touch, getting past the physical barrier. No touch, no “love.”

 

Late May – I no longer need to wear socks to bed.

 

When the U.S. corporate press rants about the lack of “democracy” in some other country, they’re really talking about the failure of that country’s government to conform to U.S. corporate wishes.

Whenever we send the wrecking crew into another country to provide “democracy,” we kill thousands of that country’s people. Dead people are unable to enjoy the fruits of U.S. supplied “democracy.”

 

Ah May. The first roses. The first fucking power lawn tools buzzing in my neighbors’ yards.

 

When I was younger, and not much younger, I saw “old” people as aliens, fundamentally different from myself. Even people I loved, such as my mother. It was as if they had moved into a different world than the one I lived in. I believed that old people should be treated with respect and compassion, as long as they weren’t being too ornery, but I felt nothing in common with them.

Since I retired, and after working with activists in their 70s and 80s, my attitude has changed. Now I’m seeing them as just people, maybe a little slower than I am, but not all that different.

Ageism is about evaluating people according to their speed – how fast they move and think – with the assumption that faster is better. It’s also about looks.

One thing that has separated me from older people is the difficulty many of them have in hearing. I kept wondering, why don’t they just get a hearing aid, or a better one? Recently I’ve found out that hearing aids are expensive. I don’t know if Medicare covers them.

 

Culture is like smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. – Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon

 

The problem I’m having lately with activism is, there’s not much point in trying to save the world if the world isn’t going to save me. Better I should concentrate on saving myself.

 

… wage labor, which was considered hardly better than slavery in mainstream American thought through much of the nineteenth century, not only by the rising labor movement but also by such figures as Abraham Lincoln, the Republican party, and the establishment media. – Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People, p. 97

 

Romance doesn’t make a bit of sense, and we should never take it personally if it doesn’t work. Most of the time it isn’t about anything you could put your finger on. It’s about fantasies.

 

Family income for the richest Oregonians grew by 34 percent from the late ‘80s to the ‘90s, while the poorest saw their incomes slide 6 percent. – Willamette Week

 

And then I go to Safeway to buy food and compete with all those have more money. I would be better off if I could lower the incomes of everyone else. I read today that the Federal Reserve is concerned about deflation, a mass reduction in prices. Best thing that could happen for people like me.

 

Running the whole world is very tiring.

 

A man in Boston has dedicated himself

to telling about injustice.

For three thousand dollars he will

come to your town and tell you about it.

– William Stafford, Things I Learned Last Week

 

I’ve wondered, listening to others’ cell phone conversations in public places, how much of America’s troubles might be related to our simple inability to ever shut up, to sit still, to leave the world alone for even a minute.

I don’t remember, when I was younger, feeling so besieged by the world around me, wanting to seal it out, reduce input. The social world becoming an intruder. Is this an ageing thing? We need more silence and aloneness?

A long time ago someone wrote that we should spend half our time in the city and half in the country. The city is interesting/irritating and the country is peaceful/boring. I wish I had that much control over where/how I live.

 

I usually fuss about a problem for a few years and then move on, depending on who is willing to fuss with me.

 

If only I could write all my own dialogue.

 

I think I’m clever, but what I wanted to be was wise. Only about small things. Mostly I’ve found you can’t get there from here.

 

In U.S. electoral politics … the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans make 80 percent of all individual political contributions and corporations outspend labor by a margin of 10-1. – Robert W. McChesney, introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People, 1999

 

Bumper sticker: “God was my copilot but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.”

 

Recently I attended a wedding and realized afterwards that it was the first wedding I’ve been to since my own in 1971. People I know, mostly middle-aged, are divorced, like me, and not remarrying, most of them not even dating. The final solution to the romance problem.

No, we seem to be saying to ourselves, we will not put ourselves through that again, with our ageing faces and bodies, will not go out and try to sell ourselves, risk rejection.

This is not what I want to be saying.

We have retired. The women have cats which sleep on their beds. If I were to sleep with them I would disturb the cats.

 

I had thought when I retired that I would read more thoughtful books, get into more interesting ideas, make connections, to satisfy my curiosity. I did not expect to be organizing, to be constantly up to my neck in politics. I didn’t expect an all-out assault by the rich and powerful on the rest of us, the huge drive to eliminate what little liberalism exists in America, our tiny resistance to the corporate state. I didn’t expect a fight for survival.

 

The essence of American culture is that it is too damn much trouble.

 

An article in The Oregonian says the civilian death toll in the Iraq war may be as high as 10,000.

 

Did you hear that we finally found the weapons of mass destruction? They’re in the White House.

 

Politics, like advertising, has become a form of harassment. We have to take any opportunity we can find to bang people over the head with our message. It’s not so much that people are immoral or indifferent as that they’ve become highly compartmentalized. They focus only on issues that affect them personally, and try to seal everything else out. Because it’s too much. So we have to be burglars, and break into their heads.

 

Community and privacy are conflicting values. You can’t have both.

 

I’m worried that the only way I can stand to live in this brain-dead country is to drink a lot.