Tag: social comment

What a Drag it is Getting Old … Not

Actually, I enjoy getting old, not because of the totally scary alternative but because it’s fun.  Old people get to do tons of neat stuff and get away with it.  It’s like being a child with porno and alcohol privileges.  First of all, you can bitch.  In fact, it’s almost expected.  When young people complain, there’s always some wiseacre who wants to talk about “changing the world” and “making a difference;” suddenly, the conversation goes from bad to boring.  However, when I complain, everybody just agrees with me and the conversation keeps on moving.  Nobody wants to provoke another old guy tirade.

You also get to wear comfortable clothes.  This is especially true for women who spend their formative years harnessed into those baby doll jeans that cut them in half.  At a certain age, both sexes can head for the uber-sized sweat (yoga) pants and nobody bats an eyeball.  Baggy shorts with polished dress shoes, evil colours, socks and sandals and those weird sweaters that old people never, ever button up — anything goes.  I’ve never tried it, but I’m sure you could go grocery shopping in your bathrobe if you wanted to.

Plus, and this is the coolest one, you’re never lazy.  You can spend all day eating cookies, drinking lattes and watching reruns of Bewitched on Netflix™ if you want, and nobody looks at you sideways.  If anybody under 30 tried that for very long, there’d be ki-yi-ing from here to Congress.  ‘Lazy bastard!  No wonder he hasn’t got a good job.”  But for people my age and older, it’s all about compassion, “Poor thing!  It must be hard for him now that he’s got nothing to do.”  Yeah, it’s tough.  Pass the Oreos™!”

And that’s the thing: when you start reaching into 60+, the rest of the world wants to drown you in sympathy.  It’s as if you magically caught an incurable disease.  Here’s a brilliant secret.  Leave a couple of Get Well Cards on the coffee table and you’ll never have to clean your house again.  Work it properly, and some of your younger relatives might even wash your dishes for you.  I’m not sure if this is true, but a friend of mine told me that once he left his lawnmower in the front yard to answer an important phone call, and before he could get back, the neighbours had made their kid finish cutting the lawn for him!  People open doors for you, you always get a seat on the bus and nobody complains when you’re late.  They’re probably just relieved that you made it at all, and they don’t have to go to the funeral.

Of course, like everything else in life, getting old has some downside, but trust me, it’s mostly minor.  For one thing, in casual conversation, you start sounding like your parents.  Making noises like your dad isn’t so bad until the stuff he said way back when begins to make sense to you: then you have to worry.

Another difficulty is contemporary music all sounds the same.  It’s like listening to Klingon.  Kanye West could be Kanye East, Snoop Dog (Lion?) is a jackass, and none of the women realize that breasts go on the inside of the dress.  So what?  There aren’t any ballads anymore, anyway and you can’t dance to the rest of it – so crack out the old CDs and carry on.

The only thing that actually is bothersome about being old is you keep getting outrun by technology.  This can be a serious problem, but if you remember that you’ve got the inside track on sympathy, you’ll be alright.  You’d be surprised how many people will make a special trip to reprogram your PVR for you, especially if you can pull a few tears.

The actual secret to getting old successfully is don’t take yourself too seriously.  Never forget that experience doesn’t always equal wisdom.  Even when it does, there’s no law that says you have to be wise every day.  Me?  I’m going to open another bag of Doritos™ and see what Darren and Samantha are up to this afternoon.

Entertainment is Us!

A very wise man once said, “The problem with doing nothing is you never know when you’re done.”  As we march further and further into the 21st century, our society is discovering that this is indeed true.  Idle time is infinite in its scope, and even though we are harvesting it at a furious pace, it literally goes on forever.  It is the ultimate renewable resource and perhaps the only one that can save us from devouring our planet raw and abandoning the carcass to the cosmos.

Ever since human beings figured out there was a concept called time, we’ve been trying to get away from it.  I’m certain our relentless pursuit of leisure started when Lucy and her sisters looked longingly back at the apes and thought, “Those were the good old days.”  Yet, for most of human history, leisure has been a rare commodity, traded only by the wealthy.  The vast majority of our ancestors simply worked every day until it was too dark to see anymore and eventually dropped dead of exhaustion.  It wasn’t until organized religion came along that anybody even thought of taking a day off.  However, once those floodgates were opened, people just naturally gravitated to sitting on their ass.  Soon the Lord’s Day had company when a few extra holidays got sprinkled into the year.  Then it was half a day off on Saturday, a shorter work day, long weekends, paid vacation, early retirement and the list goes on and on.

The idea, of course, was that people need time away from work in order to recharge their life spirit, enjoy the arts, relax and metaphorically take a moment to smell the flowers.  I suppose at some point, in the olden days, we did do some of that stuff, but in this century it’s all about entertainment.  Somewhere back in the mid 1950s, we sat down to watch television and now– sixty years later– most of us just aren’t getting up anymore.  In fact, between video games, cell phones and Smart TVs, some people never leave the world of entertainment.  We’re rapidly approaching the point where, at any given moment, more people in our society are passively doing nothing than actively doing anything.  The best we can hope for is a game of Wii tennis, but for most people, it’s only Season 3 of Everybody Loves Friends or Level 8 of Angry Birds™.  We’re wasting so much time we could build a parallel reality with the leftovers.

However, before you jump to the natural conclusion that we’re entering some kind of a slobbering, Trans Fat, sci-fi dystopia, there is a silver lining to this soulless dark cloud.  Our wall-to-wall lust for entertainment might just be the thing that saves our dying world.  Think about it!  The human species, who have been digging, chopping, burning, bullying and paving our planet for over 5,000 years, are now fully contained by all nine seasons of The Beverly Hillbillies – delivered directly to their homes or mobile devices.  All they have to do is keep their eyes open.  Likewise, the reckless ambitions of millions of people are being played out every hour as billions of harmless Black Ops mouse clicks that disappear instantaneously, without a trace.  The only casualty is Carpal Tunnel.  Rhetorically speaking, what’s wrong with a guy selling a million dollars worth of The Rainbow App he developed in his parent’s basement?  (The only resources he consumed were grilled cheese and Pepsi™.)  Especially if he sells it to the inert among us who prod the unicorn to do tricks for a day or two and then move on to The Flying Witch App, thus repeating the cycle of mythological abuse.  It’s all thin air, guys!  Without substance, it does no harm.  Plus, and here’s the beauty of it, it’s economically infinite.  Resurrected sit-coms from the 80s are selling just as often as 1st run movies, and nobody is getting tired of blasting the bad guy, the beast or the undead zombie warrior.  It’s capitalism at its finest – supply and demand meshed in perfect harmony.

The reality of our times is we are now massive passive consumers of inactivity.  We can rail all we want about the Dark Side, but– as with any drug – good luck taking it away!  Karl Marx may have been right in the 19th century when he almost said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses” but here in the 21st, God takes a back seat to Netflix, Warcraft and Facebook.

Murphy’s Law: An Update

They’re Their There are a number of variations of Murphy’s Law but for those of you who have never heard of it, stated quite simply, it says; “In any project, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”  It’s an absolute dictum in any professional world and a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free for people who are constantly screwing up.  Although I, like everyone else on this planet, have run into Murphy’s Law a lot, I’ve always thought that it was incomplete.  Murphy missed something.

Recently, after years of gathering data, over, what is now amounting to, a lifetime of observation I believe, I’ve discovered what Murphy missed.

Murphy’s explanation of the universe is essentially Existential in nature.  He postulates that there exists; a large number of catastrophes, they appear at random, bugger things up entirely and then happily return to the ethereal.  Although on the surface Murphy seems to have covered all bases he has forgotten the basic tenet of our existence – Mother Nature’s relentless pursuit of balance in the cosmos.  Thus, while Murphy is indeed correct: there are an infinite number of catastrophes just waiting to screw us personally and professionally.  He is incorrect when he suggests they act randomly.  They do not.  They are tied to our own actions and the actions of others as Mother Nature seeks to bring balance into a chaotic world.  Let me illustrate.

Unless you live on the bad streets of Orangutan Junction, Borneo you’ve used an ATM machine.  There’s nothing to it.  You stand in line, wait your time, step up with your plastic and get your money.   It’s a relatively simple operation and, in general, it works smoothly.  However, when you add just one variable to the mix all hell breaks loose.  For example, try going to an ATM when you’re late.  Suddenly, the IQ of every person in front of you drops dramatically.  Ordinary people who grew up catching money from a machine look at the thing likes it’s the Command Module on Babylon 5.  They have no clue which buttons to press and stand there scared skinny that the Cash Back option is going to vaporize their pension.  It’s a matter of checks and balances.  You see, Mother Nature knows that you can skate through being “just a bit” late to Uncle Chester’s funeral but you’re going to look like a jackass walking in after the hymn.  Basically, you didn’t take your mother’s brother’s death seriously in the first place, so Mother Nature had to step in and give you a rap on the snout.

This happens everywhere in our world.

The need to pee is directly proportional to the distance to the next toilet – the further the distance the greater the need.  Consuming liquids has nothing to do with it.  I once drove through the Sonora Desert without so much as a lukewarm Pepsi™ to keep me alive and never thought of a bathroom break — until the sign read “Next Services, 186 miles.”  For the next three hours (a little over two, actually) I drove the busiest highway in history searching for a bush that was more than six inches high.  I didn’t find one.

Likewise, the size of the leafy green vegetable that’s stuck to your front teeth is intimately connected to the person you’re talking to at the time.  If, for example, you’re talking to Rajinder (the guy you’ve known since third grade, who once brought you a new bathing suit during an unfortunate incident in Mexico) the size will be small, almost dainty.  He will point it out and you will both go about your business.  However, if you’ve finally gotten up enough courage to flirt with Alastair (the slightly conceited hunk in Marketing) over lunch, that last sprig of spinach will be the size of Jamaica.  It will be laser beam green and flutter when you talk.  You’ll discover it walking back to the office when you see its neon reflection in a store window.  Alastair will eventually end up with Sophie the slut from Accounting and you will die of humiliation.

The truth is there is no such thing as a random act of disaster.  Cheques do not get lost in the mail unless you’ve already spent the money.  The size of the rain storm depends entirely on the cost of your cashmere jacket.  The number of traffic cops; on the fight you’re having with the boyfriend.  In nature every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

When I was a child my mother used to tell us “Always wear clean underwear, you might get into an accident.”  She never explained things any further but it was a rule in our house.  Years passed and mom’s advice faded until one day I thought, to hell with it and pulled on what I had on the floor.  I never made it to work that day.  I was wiped out by a taxi before I got 500 yards.  It turns out clean underwear is actually some sort of talisman against vehicular misadventure.  Who knew?

Experience shows us that Murphy was right; “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”  However, in practical terms, experience also shows us, these disasters only come calling when you’re out of sync with the universe.  You can do the simplest task a million times without a hitch; but bring discord to the cosmos and you might as well paint a target on your back.  Murphy’s Law is just Mother Nature’s way of telling us all to fly right.