Seventy

I turned seventy this week.  In keeping with my life of the past several months, I was alone.  My erstwhile friends and sometime hosts left last Friday to drive to Texas.  It was probably a much less stressful way to travel than those people who have left their journey for the past few freezing days.  I don't know about you but the last place I want to be over the holidays is in an airport crawling with thousands of others, all wondering if our flights have been cancelled -- yet.

I had covid the two weeks prior to my birthday.  I had been working but that ended with my illness.  Although they say you're not infectious after five days, the fact of the matter was, I was still very ill.  As my friends were leaving shortly, I quarantined in the basement for two weeks, and never came upstairs unless it was the middle of the night and my friends were in bed. And I wore gloves and a mask.  It worked.  They left healthy, fat and sassy.

I've since tested negative.  But I still don't feel quite up to snuff.  Regardless, I almost went back to my day job -- a crappy mandatory 12 hour day, six days a week with one day off.  As if I had nothing better to do.  And I live 45 miles away.  Not only that, on my birthday it snowed several inches, and then the arctic cold front came down from the north.  It's below zero and that's not counting the constant wind and therefore the windchill factor.  T'would freeze a witch's warts right off her nose.

I had a winter like this when I was sixteen.  It was 40 below zero for two weeks.  We got high-centered on a snow drift in the family car, all heading for school or work at six am one morning.  I had to walk a mile to a farmer's house for help, in that forty below zero weather, with ice-cold wind ripping through my ribs right to my bones, and me a stupid teenager in a windbreaker and tennis shoes.  It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and so remains.

Thus, I arose at 2:45 am on my birthday, hit the road at 3:30 am, a mile drive on a snow-packed gravel road to a two-lane highway, then a fifteen mile drive through rocks and rangeland with no houses or farms until one reaches the interstate and its perpetual herd of semis.  It was snowing and there was already 4-5 inches blanketing the road.  I got maybe half a mile down the flat on the state highway, thought about how the next two hours would be spent bent over the wheel driving 25 mph on compact snow and ice, with the chance that at any moment I might slide off the road -- which is raised by several feet above the surrounding fields -- and be stuck walking back several godforsaken miles in the freezing cold at 4 am.

"Fuck it," I said, as I turned around, drove home, and climbed back into my toasty warm bed.

I've been home ever since, what with the temperature well below zero in the brittle daylight, and who knows how cold under the night's chill and heartless stars.  Although I have the heat on in the house around the clock,  woke up this morning to a house that was 56 degrees inside.  I'm thankful that at least the electricity is still on because it almost blinked off last Sunday night.  Running the heater all day, I got the house up to balmy 62.  I have a space heater down in the dungeon room and it's the warmest place in the house right now.

I called my employer and said I wouldn't be in until the roads improved.  But truth be told, I've decided not to go back to that job.  Working mandatory 72 hour weeks is not my idea of how to live life at the sainted age of seventy.

You see, I've sighted mortality on my horizon.  Limited time means some hard choices.  I don't have time to waste on shit jobs, nor on people who have nothing to offer, but only want to take. Let them fritter their own time and life away -- not mine. 

I'm unburdened by the usual ubiquitous desires people have in life.  I was never acquisitive, beyond books.  I never wanted to be saddled with a house or to pay taxes on property.  I didn't want to tie myself down to the good earth in that way.  I never chased the sweet slime of success or the supposed debaucheries of the "good life."  I wasn't trying to keep up with the Joneses.  I decided long ago, when I was ten or so, that the adult world was completely fucking insane and nobody had the slightest idea why they were living the way they were.  I had no intention of emulating their stupidity in any way, shape, or form.  I'll create my own forms of fruitless endeavor, thank you very much.

Besides, I've been on a quest all my life.  A quest with several facets, to be sure, but one of the main purposes of my life has been to try to get a bird's eye view of the "big picture."   I've done that sufficiently, I think, despite the fact that if you keep learning -- if you continue to stay open to life as you age instead of shutting down -- then your "big picture" will forever be expanding beyond your current horizons.  

That seems to be the case with my horizons, which is quite alright with me.  I find it exciting.  The constant learning and the attempt to understand life more deeply, dearly or to hold a longer view or broader vision of life, is both engaging and enlivening,  Brisker than bat's teeth on a gnat's ass.  It gives life, however mundane,  an overall sense of meaning and purpose.

The question then becomes, well, where do I fit into this "big picture?"  

I've answered that question for myself and to my own satisfaction. "My" place is not center stage but somewhere on the far edge of the periphery where, I might add, I've never set eyes on the likes of you.  You might be even less relevant than me.  Hence, I don't feel the need to present that answer here nor to justify my existence to you or anyone else.  I'm content with my place in life.  I came with nothing; I'll leave with nothing, and I haven't wasted a wastrel's day of my solo sojourn in competing for who has the bigger, better, or  most expensive toys.  If you wasted your life in such pursuits, I pity your poor choices.  Better luck next lifetime, compadres.

I would like to write a book before I go.  Some biographical vignettes of my foil and folly, perhaps, and then my sense of that "big picture."  Where we in the West came from, where we went wrong, and where I see us going once we've exhausted all the myriad errors that life keeps offering us.  Human beings seem to be especially perverse in that way.  They never, ever try doing anything the right way unless they have attempted every possible short cut, wrong turn, or dead end first.  It's very strange.  Anyway, I'm going to paint that picture.  The picture that I see.  The canvas of our confusion.  It may help another sorry soul cut down on their futile pursuits and karmic toil and trouble.

And if not, if it's all simply a vain pretense on my part, well, may it be so.  It's still how I choose to spend the time left to me.  And when my time's up, I'll be happy to go, no second thoughts and no second guesses.  Until then, then......