THE GLORY OF YOU

As I grow older I find that my perception of time is changing at a most spectacular rate, as if time itself is changing autonomously by the imperceptible and immeasurable tick tock second.  

When you are young, time is money, the equivalent of a self-entitled, rich man’s inheritance which you lavish on the immediate pleasures and whims of your underdeveloped, impulsive, Pavlovian, click-and-buy-it-now button heart which as a whole takes on the persona of a terrible life coach at The University of Hedonism who encourages you from the sidelines to break every moral compass rule, which when you arrive at the more significant intersections of your life, causes you to recklessly barrel headlong into it, without any thought to the consequences.  The pain that you might inflict including to yourself.

Once you graduate from good ol’ U of H, you continue to do colossally stupid things, like climb risky, jagged precipices or fall in love with the wrong boy or girl, which, when you think about it, is pretty much the same thing.  

After you have broken enough brain bones and smashed enough Bonomo Turkish Taffy hearts, including your own, the story of who you are might remain forever if you make the common human mistake of believing that you are smarter than your own history.  

How many centuries ago did Shakespeare and Montaigne forewarn you about this?  And look what you did. 

Bad dog.  Bad, bad, dog.

Most of us simply don’t want to act our age and think that we can become the supreme, all-knowing autocrats of time.

Well knock, knock: no you can’t.  When you finally embrace the reality of your years, it slowly begins to dawn on you that the treasure that you are searching for, is no longer buried in the future.   

The treasure is the overflowing chest of doubloons that is your past and present.

I no longer find myself feeling the pull of trendy restaurants or being captivated by the hot new fashion trends, the worst of which is the undersized blazer for men which is the very same look once fancied by ventriloquist dummy/legends Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smif.

Knowing that my non-renewable prescription for immortality is quickly running out, I find that without thought or earned degree, I have become a kind of archeologist whose digs are the many levels of me.

The whole idea I think, is to search for artifacts, those seemingly extinct pearls of wisdom and the life lesson diamonds whose inestimable value just might turn me into a teacher, a mentor or both.

I am currently experiencing the deconstruction period of my life whose theme is radical simplicity.  

When we are tiny baby humans, we are enchanted by the magic of sound, light and the gentility of mobiles.

And now I am too.  

My turntable has become this baby’s mobile.  

Light, especially the early morning right-outside-my-window variety arrives with quiet dignity, as it should for something that old and wise.

Sound being a rather selective thing engages me through the pleasure of things like my old school/new school mechanical keyboard which, when I type as quickly as I am right now, sounds like the entire cast of Footlights on Parade tapping up a fevered storm.

Spotify has become a kind of personal and dependable time travel agency for me that  which favors The Beatles, my forever band of brothers, who forever ago air lifted us out of the funeral despair of 1963, just as they had  cured all of Europe of the stupefying malaise of the World War II which to this day still lingers in the sad faces of military statues and in the invisible ghost plumes of concentration camps which to this day still casts a pall over the cities and the small towns which scamper up and down the countrysides. 

When I find myself in times of trouble especially,  The Beatles remain irresistible and compel me to sing at the top of my lungs with them whether I’m in the bathroom or in the aisle of CVS.   Just the other day I was belting out the tender harmony part of And I Love Her while I was reading the directions for suppositories.

Their melodies, harmonies and psychedelic productions continue to make me feel, in the moment, that I’m Bob, the fifth Beatle who can disarm the universe with cheeky wit, radiant charm and the near ruthless desire to entertain. In an illogical world, they are my one and only logical choice, my alternative to the preposterous here and now. 

The thing about heroes, from any world, from music to sports, is that they will never age.  it’s like their entire being has been shot in Peter Panavision.

The Beatles, Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle will never know gray hair or profound lumbar pain.   

They are our idealized self, which is why, when we tout an old timer like Kirk Douglas or Charlie Chaplin at the Oscars, it is such a shock when they see what the 100-year-old version looks like.   

The reality is, we have little need for reality in our fantasy universe, which, when you think about it, is what takes up most of our conscious and unconscious un-real estate.

We are a civilization where job one is daydreaming which we do when we are not praying or actively seeking miracles, especially on those days when you get a letter from the IRS or when your car engine suddenly sounds like a dying elephant.

I’ve also, thanks to my friend Sheryl, rediscovered the delights and addiction of reading.   That is yet another way to manipulate time and space.

By co-opting someone else’s eloquently described experience,  I find myself often moved far beyond the point of empathy into the realm of shared spiritually and mirrored feelings,  which can move me to tears.

For hours at a time, my presence is sublimely unaccountable.

We spend most of our lives cast far out to sea, battling one Perfect Storm after another, perhaps foolishly intoxicated by the belief that the shores of Valhalla are reachable and has faster WiFi.

When we are young we chase time like a surfer and his dream wave and when we get older time the dream waves quickly seems unreachable and blessedly insignificant.

In the rearview mirror of life, things seem much smaller than they appear.

Instead of chasing storms and surf, we choose, instead to casually drift and at times ambitiously deep dive into the lily pond of our most many layered daydreams whose colors swirl as if Matisse himself was personally conducting the palette of the current.

I rarely if ever, miss being the hang ten, Don Quixote of the ocean.

We…relax.  Even in workout clothes, we don’t sweat the small stuff.

We become disproportionately unselfconscious and the world, wherever we go, feels like one massive Toys-Were-Us which you can be a galavanting fool in without fear of gossip, reprisals or recriminations.   We start wearing bold, colorful colors, which seems to express the very vibrancy that is stirring in our souls.

Eventually, it all goes to your head and you even think that you could fall insanely in love again, whether you actually do or not.  It’s like the Forrest Gump feather is swirling in and out of your arteries.

If you stop and really think about it, what you are feeling is an inexpressible love for life, which as the sunsets come and go,  you find yourself audaciously yearning for.  If there was only a lute nearby for me to sing pity songs with right now, I would consider my work for today done.

Living alone, as I do now, a favorite pastime of mine has become watching TCM as much as possible.  Beyond the fact that it makes me feel cinematically illiterate (how many films have I never of?  Evidently 40 million), I love being distracted and entertained by the parade of mostly black and white ghosts who flow in and out of my living room on star-laden comet trails that is the only observable evidence of the golden days of Hollywood.  

Armed with the TCM app, while I watch, for example, the next obscure and so bad it’s car crash captivating Bette Davis movie, I research the biographies of everyone involved in the production.  including the directors, writers, and producers.

I read about their humble beginnings, their movie making middles and their tragic, emphysema or cancer lung ends.

And there it is, all laid out before me. 

Life.   

The stories behind the stories that are to this observer by trade, far more inspiring and enlightening than the movie I’m barely watching.

As for my own civilian story, that ones that are written and re-written in the trenches of the wars of the heart,  I have discovered that I have, for years,  become quite the manipulator whose goal is to intimidate and directly influence the details of my past until it becomes an unreliable witness account of who I wish I was or pretend to be.

It takes a lifetime of ups and downs to be courageous enough to be willing to stop plagiarizing everyone else’s stories so that you can leave the world with the authentic version of your life firmly intact.

Your worst editor will be your self-judgment who you will have to get through plenty of drunken brawls with until you let your inner Max Perkins out that he can do what he does best: show the real you.

We may feel like we are diminishing in size and scope.  Most of the time. 

We may feel invisible in the public sector.   

We may feel dismissed, unloved and rejected.  Hey, that is like Tuesday for a writer.

But the reality is we all have work to do.

We all, each and every one of us, have stories to write that are worth telling.

Feel free to visit the past and don’t forget to bring cake.

And sure, go forth and imagine the future.  Just know that you are making every single moment up which makes the future yet another unreliable witness.

Save your time and energy for your present, which is just another word for gift.

Write your truth and you will become your truth.

In the moment that is reserved for the glory that is you.