MY OWN PERSONAL MERMAID. BELIEVE IN HER.

THE ART OF GROWING UP

When I hit middle age I fully anticipated pain to become my roommate.  I mean it’s not like you can search for just the right pain free roommate on Craig’s list.  One day it arrives and you just learn to live with it until all the other roommates start moving in.  Suddenly your life starts to look like the filled-to-the-brim drawing room scene of Night of the Opera with people and manicurists who are carriers of the deadly pain virus.

The one roommate that I never saw coming was the special ops Navy Seal of me who forces you to grow up at the speed of where the hell have you been?

On this trek which we call life, we tend to make things a lot worse by carrying the oversized bricks of our memories stuffed inside our virtual Dora the Explorer backpacks.   

Despite our occasional inventory of it, most of us simply don’t get that we can, at a moment’s notice, dump those bricks out on the side of the road and head for the peak of Mt. Everest.

I mean they’re not like empathy bricks.  Empathy bricks are what we gladly carry for other people for the He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother Moving Company.

Our mates and children come with bricks attached too which can often mirror those loaded down diapers of years one into two.   Get into a fight with your wife and the bricks become the weapons thrown at you.  Be in a supermarket when your kid throws his first temper tantrum, trust me, that ain’t the only thing he or she is throwing.  And when our parents finally leave, often our inheritance is their assortment of hand me down bricks while resemble an extra large Whitman’s Sampler and trust me, there is not a chocolate covered cherry in the bunch.

It just seems that we go through life dealing with everyone else’s bricks but our own.

And today, given the political climate we are in, it’s a non-stop brickfest between a metaphorical red state Ignatz and a blue state Krazy Kat.   If you get that reference, please continue to the next paragraph.

Here I am, standing like a grizzled old blues man, at the crossroads with a soundtrack courtesy of Robert Johnson via Eric Clapton, where I suddenly find myself feeling weighed down and weary and realizing that this march of time drill that I have spent a lifetime doing, like a caged inmate in a four by four cell, has been compromised by the belief that being weighed down is God’s way of saying, you deserve it.  

Just try to escape that little cell.

Some of it is not God’s fault.  

Our parents are task masters of the universe of guilt who,  when we are little, pound and throw us around like casually dismissed pizza dough, until we are cooked, obedient or both.

We grow up agreeing with whatever crimes they have accused us of.  

The Manafort quality list includes:

Number one is being punished for making mistakes.  Number two is for not being good enough.  Number three is for being rebellious,. Number four is the most confusing: that’s the one where they insist that you are unique and special and should therefore be achieving things on the level of Einstein or at least the Dean Schwartz, the smartest kid in your class.

All in all those are just another brick in the wall.  And boy, do we have to carry that weight a long time.

I know.  Enough with the song metaphors.  

But music is part of what saves us.  Music is where we go when we need a vacation and can’t afford it, so we go to where most folks go: to the massive public beach of music.  Today the actual beach, as opposed to the ones of long ago, are silent given the new kinds of headphone music delivery devices which we listen to.  You can only hear Elvis or The Beatles via the DJ of your head which tumble back and forth like the waves that you are watching and wishing they would take you away, until you are a Calgon girl or boy.

As we continue to grow older and progressively more disillusioned and as baffled as the dumbest person on Jeopardy, we sign on for a tour of therapy duty, which can often be more maintenance than radical surgery (until you finally decide one day to become a surgeon and scrub in).  

But for the most part, we take on the credo which for many of us, was handed down by the great generation, whose permanently embroidered throw pillows read, Deal With It.”

One day then we find ourselves stunningly empty-nested, become fifty plus shades of no more dye gray and something remarkable happens.  

We find ourselves wanting to travel lighter, unwilling to carry the backpack anymore.  It suddenly seems old and useless.  

But the problem is, we confuse the backpack with ourselves and make the mistake of declaring ourselves old and useless instead.  And trust me, there are tons of people, rivals all, who will personally endorse those thoughts.

If you work in places that covet youth like the cartel covets cocaine, then those I’m not worth feelings will most definitely put you on the corner of Self and Indictment and when the Scud missiles of criticism come at you from all directions, Iran to Israel style, we find ourselves identifying with our enemy and trust me, that is how you end up not ending up well.

So my aging brethren,  it is imperative that you must literally and metaphorically separate yourself from your brick pack in order to learn how to fly without wings.

Now I have to admit that this is a process that is far more risky and painful than it seems.

The biggest problem is attachment.   

If you have hoarded your bricks for as long as I have, then you find that you have a kind of Siamese twin attachment to them which is what some think of as love.  We get deeply and dangerously attracted to anyone who resembles, even mildly,  your very own dusty old backpack of bricks.

So just wanting to divest yourself of your own, personal heavy load, while being admirable, does not mean that you are okay with it emotionally.

And that is where I find myself today.  

Because of my writing, I have gone deeper and deeper into the drowning whirlpool of the soul, for which there is no choice but to sink.  Part of that is largely due to the Virginia Woolf quality rocks that are swollen in my pocket and it becomes my natural instinct to panic, rather than swim my way to the top.

So at the moment I am the entire population of one in the dark and dusty town of Anxietyville.   I’m scared because I don’t know, yet, how to live without the weight that I have been carrying.  I do not believe yet, that I will not drown.  I do not, yet, trust what is beneath the visible surface and that makes me want to regress at the speed of tantrum and torture.

But the desire for depth is not entirely voluntary.  It literally has a magnetic pull which we just might find are the hands of angels who want to see you rest your weary head on the pillows of their My Pillow clouds rather than on the Game of Thrones spikes of self-manufactured despair.

Intellectually I got it all down.  I mean I am a pretty smart guy.

But emotionally, I can hear my mother in the other distant echo room of the dead, screaming at me:  

CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM.

And all I really want to do is play.