Stripped Down

 

Yes, it really is possible to have a kind of 6-pack when you’re wasting away.

Weighed myself today. 5’ 9”, 128 lbs. Let’s think about what this means. Not what you imagine. My whole life is contracting, and I tend to think of it in terms of focus not loss.

I have always been an Alpha.*  Now I am structurally a Gamma.* Physically crippled to the point where I have to take a hundred-year old cane to my cigarette and vodka runs in Delaware.

Have it down pretty well. I can do the cigarette outlet on my own two feet. At the liquor store I park the Jeep almost all the way to the next strip mall so I can use the cane to mount nothing tougher than a slope.

Oh gee. Vodka?! Hell yeah. You don’t want to hear this? You wouldn’t without the vodka. Why it’s still a part of the regimen. Being Anonymous was never a part of my destiny. Sorry, Bill.

Things you would never know. Like, I drank in all kinds of bars, white and black, for 40 years and never got into a fight. I once stopped a cabbie in front of a black bar and he refused to let me out. “They’ll kill you,” he said. I got out anyway. We ended up all friends in that bar after my Harvard final club charm kicked in.

Not just a glib remark. The real solution to race relations is manners. We talk about gun control. We should be talking about mouth control. No reason for a weed-high teenager to call an incipient thug a “mufu.” But he does and he gets shot for having no civil tongue in his head. Seen it a few dozen times on all the cop shows.

What else? Watched all the Cop shows from a decade ago and now with Down Patrol peddled by Dan Abrams. Guess what. Marijuana in every fucking car they stop now. And old old friends still tell me it’s not a gateway drug to meth, heroin, and fentanyl. They’re just guilty as hell. Terrified their kids knew they were also blowing dope all their young lives in the faint belief they were already asleep before the bud smell tainted the family room.

All those cop shows. All the cars have dope in them. All of them. Weed, meth, heroin, needles, whenever the cops stop them, and nobody has a driver’s license.

Our country is so so fucked. And most of you think it’s just “in trouble.” Where are your kids, RIGHT NOW???

Thing is, here’s the thing. It’s not a new thing. I am a prisoner now, have been for years, because there’s no way to throw anything away. I am surrounded by junk I can’t throw away. Kind of like time itself.

We used to have landfills. Ways to bury our private discards, mistakes, and vices. No longer. Now we have recyclables. The real first sign of totalitarianism. When they know everything about you by pawing through your trash before and after your physical death.

My personal cell. Three dead air conditioners. A thousand empty beer cans. More than a dozen dead stereo computer components, including two state of the art speakers that used to weigh as much as I do. All concentrated in my one collapsing room, with no escape for any of the junk. I also have a collection of LPs and Laser Discs worth thousands I can't sell except I can’t afford the freight to send them anywhere. Or the physical strength to load them into a box and carry them downstairs to the Jeep for shipment.

Sorry, everybody. My mind works. My legs don’t.

But I’m NOT sorry. My political passions are momentary, just long enough to write the next thing you need to read or hear.

I coulda been rich and not the church mouse I am now. Wrote a thing a while back about my bucket list. The long and short of it, don’t have one. For years now there’s been a steady peeling away of everything. All the things that used to give me pleasure, desire, some kind of need are gone. Can’t read the great books anymore, can’t watch the great old movies, can’t pine for the great old places, don’t miss the great old friends. Does this make me lonely, lost, afraid? 

Have to tell you this part. You need to hear it. I am neither happy nor unhappy. I am quietly fulfilled and waiting. Already at peace about what will happen in the coming election. We will win or lose as a nation. But I’ve done my part. I gambled and paid everything in my life on fighting the good fight. In return I received the greatest gift possible, an infusion from beyond that made all the trades I made worthwhile.

I have been allowed to see, to see, what is going on with us. And that’s a dread specter. We don’t deserve a reprieve. We let it all slip away, slide away in some avalanche of instant gratification and fool sophistication that’s too ludicrous even for mockery, which for many years was my stock in trade. I have let that go too.

In my mind I have reconfigured time. I don’t have to write it down anymore. All I have to do is visit the times called now and before. The lefty intellectuals talk about gun control. But I can blink and see a time still present in the grand scheme of things when men wore coats and ties and women kept their legs together and identity was not tattoos but attainments. No one talks about mouth control. How many lives could be saved by not calling the irritating stranger a muhfuh and inciting him to pull his Saturday night special to put an end to the impolite one? What mothers did before everyone was a muhfuh. They kept a civil tongue in your head.

Why old men are supposed to reach the place I inhabit now. No fury that results in actual murder. Just bemusement and an imitation of passion about matters in which passion has become as impotent as a prostate-impaired testostergroine gland. How we’re supposed to be at this particular coordinate in the vast three dimensional space called time. Why I don’t need a million dollars. All the times of my life are still right here under my nose, which can actually smell them all, see them all as clear as the nasty T-shirts and experience them as keenly as the stink of bong water in the silly baked beans of Korean cars pretending to be Mercs. In my mind I can still put on the XKE and drive through the six cylinder heaven of a time sitting right next to our line that only I can hear.

Don’t know how long this December clarity is supposed to obtain before I finally leave the timeline that increasingly resembles a subway line with magnificent worlds on either side and before and aft of the urban bricks. Doesn’t matter really. All my dudgeon has been reduced to mere moods in the course of a day whose hours I count only in terms of my supply of cigarettes, Coca Cola, and vodka. My wife is taking a lead on me. She already knows that forgetting is as fruitful as remembering. And she is carving out her own coordinates that involve Russia, Hungary, and a reminiscent version of herself named Anna.

Here’s what happens. How you get the all-important focus on the life thing. There is no future. What you count on a deeply corrupt government for. We, the lucky ones, are no longer able to pretend that we can afford even another year of penury and no savings. So we exist for today only. I have a dog, abused in some earlier phase of his life, who attacks me when I go to the bathroom, a journey I have to plan ahead for because I can barely walk without losing my balance. So everything becomes this moment, right now, what I’m watching on TV or the Internet, which I now serenely accept as somehow God-given in what looks like randomness but isn’t.

Not random. Nothing is. Absolutely everything means something. How you recover a sense of immense joy about the smallest things. Which I have. I could list my personal privations. But that would be showing off, in that they have no impact on my emotional state. I am one of the luckiest men of my generation still breathing. You see, I know there is a God. He gave me a gift because I asked for it (I thought), and it was only afterwards that I realized it was a gift arranged way ahead of time, from the time of my birth and well before. How I eventually stumbled onto the true nature of time. 

I do ask myself why I don’t feel more, why my passions seem to be more habit than functions of fear and desire. Then I remember (time again) that my real emotional aspect is gratitude for the divine splinter that has blessed me with such a life and such a fine companion to close it out with. 

If I do not feel happy besides, that is only because we are not here to strive for happiness. We are here for other reasons. We are here to think, to learn, to value what lives beyond ourselves, and to try as hard as we can to leave a record of our contribution to the sum. Which brings me, inevitably, back to gratitude.

Against all odds, still here.

_________

*Alpha, Gamma. Look up Huxley. And me too.