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Kumbaya and Its Discontents
Nov. 16th, 2015 10:00 amStill grappling with the time change: When it gets dark, I want to go to sleep. Invariably, this means I wake up in the middle of the night for three or four hours, too wasted to do anything productive. Which means I’m watching an awful lot of classic movies.
Classic movies for me means movies that were made before I was born or during the 1950s before the dawning of nascent consciousness.
###
Part of it also is that since it’s pitch black by 5pm in these parts, I have to go out and exercise around 3pm or turn into a slug. That’s way too early for me to break off everything, but I'm so used to thinking of exercise as a bookend at the end of my day that it's impossible for me to pick up the threads. And I hate gyms. Though I suppose I may have to bite the bullet on that one.
###
Part of it also is that I am immensely fatigued by information overload. I’m fuckin’ sick of Paris. I hate Paris. I wish the world would blur our at the edges of the Hudson Valley. Nothing quite as sharp as a boundary patrolled by monsters like in those antique maps, but maybe a kind of translucent colored haze – purple, maybe, or green – on the other side of which there’s just a vague understanding that something exists, but you’re not quite sure what, and anyway, it's not important. The only thing that's important is the seasonal shift: now-bare trees, carpet of dead leaves, views of the blue river, diminishment of light.
###
Max sent me a FitBit, which is a pretty cool little gadget. These days, nothing electronic comes with a manual, so I went over to Pat and Ed’s to figure out how to use it since Pat has one, too.
“What a nice gift!” said Pat.
“Yeah. Max is nice to me,” I said. “Max is gonna lobby hard for a nice Alzheimer’s home when it’s time to put me away. Robin, I’m not so sure about.”
Pat laughed. “Yeah. It’s better not to live too close to them, isn’t it? So there’s not around constantly monitoring you for those cognitive lapses. I remember those last few years with my mother – she’s dead now – she’d tell me she had good days and bad days. And on the good days, she’d drive herself to the supermarket and to errands. And on the bad days, she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, so she wouldn’t leave the house.”
“How old was she then?”
“In her eighties. This is a good time. This, right now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I often feel mentally as though I’ve been transported back to being 12 years old. Before puberty hit, and I became so obsessed with coupling and sex. I was a precocious 12-year-old, and I’m still at my core interested in the same things that I was interested in when I was 12. So, I guess, 20 more more-or-less good years. Did your mother have dementia?”
“No,” Pat said. “But you know, atherosclerosis in the brain blood circulation. Some degree of it is unavoidable. You do start to get fuzzy around the edges no matter how healthy you are. It’s inevitable.”
“Damn!” I said. “So what’s the point of living a healthy life anyway? We should all be smoking, drinking, and taking drugs! Because why would anyone want to live past 85?”
Pat laughed. “There is that. But the next 20 years will be good.”
###
L sez I’m doing much, much better with the Seasonal Affective Disorder thang this year than I was last. I didn’t ask her to elaborate, though I was curious. I know I’m continually fighting off the impulse to pick fights with people, tell them to ram their various forms of political piousness down their fucking throats. Facebook was invented just for this! So I am cheerfully insulting random strangers on various message threads who are posting the Kumbaya message: No, shitheads; we can’t all just get along. Obviously.
Classic movies for me means movies that were made before I was born or during the 1950s before the dawning of nascent consciousness.
###
Part of it also is that since it’s pitch black by 5pm in these parts, I have to go out and exercise around 3pm or turn into a slug. That’s way too early for me to break off everything, but I'm so used to thinking of exercise as a bookend at the end of my day that it's impossible for me to pick up the threads. And I hate gyms. Though I suppose I may have to bite the bullet on that one.
###
Part of it also is that I am immensely fatigued by information overload. I’m fuckin’ sick of Paris. I hate Paris. I wish the world would blur our at the edges of the Hudson Valley. Nothing quite as sharp as a boundary patrolled by monsters like in those antique maps, but maybe a kind of translucent colored haze – purple, maybe, or green – on the other side of which there’s just a vague understanding that something exists, but you’re not quite sure what, and anyway, it's not important. The only thing that's important is the seasonal shift: now-bare trees, carpet of dead leaves, views of the blue river, diminishment of light.
###
Max sent me a FitBit, which is a pretty cool little gadget. These days, nothing electronic comes with a manual, so I went over to Pat and Ed’s to figure out how to use it since Pat has one, too.
“What a nice gift!” said Pat.
“Yeah. Max is nice to me,” I said. “Max is gonna lobby hard for a nice Alzheimer’s home when it’s time to put me away. Robin, I’m not so sure about.”
Pat laughed. “Yeah. It’s better not to live too close to them, isn’t it? So there’s not around constantly monitoring you for those cognitive lapses. I remember those last few years with my mother – she’s dead now – she’d tell me she had good days and bad days. And on the good days, she’d drive herself to the supermarket and to errands. And on the bad days, she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, so she wouldn’t leave the house.”
“How old was she then?”
“In her eighties. This is a good time. This, right now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I often feel mentally as though I’ve been transported back to being 12 years old. Before puberty hit, and I became so obsessed with coupling and sex. I was a precocious 12-year-old, and I’m still at my core interested in the same things that I was interested in when I was 12. So, I guess, 20 more more-or-less good years. Did your mother have dementia?”
“No,” Pat said. “But you know, atherosclerosis in the brain blood circulation. Some degree of it is unavoidable. You do start to get fuzzy around the edges no matter how healthy you are. It’s inevitable.”
“Damn!” I said. “So what’s the point of living a healthy life anyway? We should all be smoking, drinking, and taking drugs! Because why would anyone want to live past 85?”
Pat laughed. “There is that. But the next 20 years will be good.”
###
L sez I’m doing much, much better with the Seasonal Affective Disorder thang this year than I was last. I didn’t ask her to elaborate, though I was curious. I know I’m continually fighting off the impulse to pick fights with people, tell them to ram their various forms of political piousness down their fucking throats. Facebook was invented just for this! So I am cheerfully insulting random strangers on various message threads who are posting the Kumbaya message: No, shitheads; we can’t all just get along. Obviously.
