Tag: Life goes on

Stuff I Know

When you’ve travelled around the sun as many times as I have, you get a feeling for the universe and how things work.  It’s mostly a series of experiments (successful and otherwise) that lead to experience.  (Which is simply years of watching certain experiments go bust.)  The result, however, is an unfailing intuition – sort of an informed insight.  Basically, you know what’s actually going on — even though it seems as if everybody around you is caught up in something completely different.  Here are a few examples.

The world is always in a mess – The natural state of our planet is agitation.  There’s always somebody trying to be a dick to the rest of us.  (I’m looking at you, Vladimir.)  The problem is we tend to think this is the first and worst time it’s ever happened.  Nope!  It’s been going on since Lucy went for a walk in Ethiopia, 3 million years ago — so get used to it. 

There’s always a group of people who think they have the inside track to Enlightenment – Over the years, we’ve called them Puritans, Victorians, Christians, Communists, The Taliban, Jehovah’s Witnesses and, most recently, “Woke” – but their message is always the same: “We don’t give a shit about the truth: do it our way.”

You can’t legislate an idea – No matter how many times you make it illegal, people are still going to love and hate who they want to.  They’re going to get angry, cry, lie, cheat and probably eat too much when the opportunity presents itself.  Fundamentally, humans are governed by the laws of Mother Nature, not the wet dreams of lawyers.  Elected officials, tyrants and kings need to concentrate on the structure of society — not restructuring its soul.

And speaking of which:

This, too, shall pass – I remember a time when LSD was legal and being gay was a prison sentence.  Go figure!  But every generation (including mine) believes they have finally reached the pinnacle of human understanding and THEIR values will last until the end of – well – the end of everything.  Guess again!  Two hundred years ago, humans had no idea that dinosaurs, vitamins and germs existed.  Take a minute to imagine what we’ll know two hundred years from now!  Now, take another minute to realize what kind of beetle-browed barbarians we really are.

And finally:

Like it or not — the true road to enlightenment is warm socks, good sex and comfortable underwear.  

The Time When!

Whether you’re 25, 46, 71 or only 15, some days you wake up and just feel old.  You look at the world and realize today is not the day to play because the game of life has gotten too damn complicated.  You remember a simpler time when things were straightforward and you knew all the rules.  A time when the days were long and bright and the nights romantic.  I time when – well, you get the idea – a time when it didn’t seem like an endless fight just to be alive.  Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to turn back the clock.  The good old days are a myth propagated by grumpy old people who can’t figure out why they aren’t cool anymore.  (Maybe it’s cuz they use words like cool?)  However, on a bright autumn morning when the coffee’s really good and there’s jam for the toast, there’s nothing wrong with being nostalgic.

Here are a few things, from a more elegant age, that I remember.

When people dressed up for important events like wedding, funerals and court appearances.  Women wore their breasts inside their clothes, and men looked like they’d taken a bath – recently.

The days when you could see the pictures in an art gallery and not the backs of a bunch of cell phones and the half faces of morons taking selfies.

When the lyrics to popular songs didn’t prominently feature body parts, sexual positions, robbery, obscenities, weapons or murder — and you could actually sing them to children.

A time when people didn’t scold each other for the sport of it.

A time when young people had all the questions, not all the answers.

The sweet satisfaction of slamming the phone down in some asshole’s ear.

The days when the relationship between men and women was not adversarial.

Irony, satire and wit.

When you could order coffee without reciting the recipe, and you got to drink it out of a real cup.

A time when ladies and gentlemen acted that way.

Lunches that didn’t come wrapped in paper and look like they’d been run over by a truck.

When gluten wasn’t the scariest thing on the planet.

A time when you could ride public transportation without being forced to listen to somebody else’s one-sided telephone conversation – 7 or 8 times.

When the truth was not a moveable feast.

A time when transgender was real and not just trending on Twitter.

When people could disagree like reasonable human beings not rabid animals.

A time when Hallowe’en was for kids and adults had better things to do than hijack a child’s harmless fun to further their social/political agenda.

The days before Jell-o Journalism (I’m looking at you, Oprah Winfrey) when reporting the news was an honourable profession.   

A time when cheating in professional sports was retail, not wholesale, and the people who did it weren’t stupid enough to get caught.

And finally:

The days when you weren’t constantly looking over your shoulder for a politically correct ambush.

The Road To Hell Is Paved

The problem with life is bad decisions almost always make the best stories.  This is a fact that nobody feels all that comfortable with.  For example, the difference between “We made some tea and watched To Have and Have Not on PBS” and “We decided to open another bottle of wine” is massive.  One story ends with “We brushed our teeth and went to bed,’ and the other one gets lost somewhere around “After Tom passed out, we painted his ass orange and locked him in a row of grocery carts.”  See what I mean?

Both stories are actually true, BTW.  Obviously, nobody remembers the first one — like — who cares?  However, the second one is the stuff of legend.  It’s the kind of tale we tell at dinner parties.  It’s the one that is our public face.  The one that defines us as interesting.  And we all want to be interesting.

It’s not difficult to recognize the road to salvation.  It generally runs through tea, Netflix and conscientious oral hygiene.  However, the other road — the road to Hell — is paved.  It’s lined with ice cream shops and cheap alcohol, pretty girls and naughty boys.  It has hundreds of distracted side streets, secluded alleys and boisterous cafes, but never any toilets — anywhere.  It’s the perfect sexual moment interrupted by somebody’s mother, the wild ride to the wrong funeral and the time you passed out fell asleep behind Beverly Jenkins’ sofa.  In fact, the road to Hell is limited only by our innate ability to make mistakes.

Yet it is the road to Hell that protects us from being just another frump on the trudge to the grave.  It gives our lives curves, dents, depth and colour and lifts us above the relentless bureaucracy of everyday living.  And although the road to Hell doesn’t give life any true meaning, our adventures on it tell the world we showed up and got in the game.  And when we are old and gray and full of sleep, nodding by the fire, it’s the road to Hell we’ll remember, not the dental floss.

The trick is striking a balance between collecting enough uber-cool life stories to wow them in the Old Folks’ Home and staying out of jail.  (I’m still surprised Tom didn’t just call the cops!)

Originally written in 2015 (Yeah, I’ve been doing this for over 6 years!)