Aged

My new best friend, the 80 year-old autodidact sage, Maroca (IIRC), counseled me that I am aging prematurely, as evidenced by my full head of gray hair.

I appreciate the concern, but I’m gonna push back a bit; as far as I can tell, at age 63, I’m aging right on schedule.  Granted, he’s got 17 years of experience on me and if I’m still hale enough in a couple decades to hang out with squid-jiggers on seaside dock to give unsolicited, albeit reasonable, advice to strangers, I’ll count it as a success.  

Still, it’s not all about quantity in my mind.  I can’t say that I’ll be satisfied with merely existing into my ninth decade if I’m not able to still ride my bike around at night to city parks in order to get asked impolitely to leave by angry dudes complaining that my friends and I are keeping his 83 year-old mom awake, even though it’s only 9:00 in the evening.

That’s the kind of fun that makes life worth living, right?

“When your heart's on fire…smoke gets in your eyes,” sang the Platters and they could have been talking about Seattle’s air quality of late, overlooking the part about it getting in your lungs, as well; surprisingly, the only thing that took my breath away was the fingers of lights extending into the void at the edge of the world; even if I hadn’t already been tripping the light fantastic, it would have been a sight worthy of a second look; as it was, aided by visual aids, I got to be mesmerized over and over with each shared observation.

These days, you take joy wherever you find it, and if that turns out to be a parking lot just outside a closed beach, so be it.  Who knows how many more chances you’ll have to do anything anywhere in the coming years; the older you get, the younger you should act; right Maroca?

Solace

 The West is on fire; the pandemic rages world-wide; economies everywhere are in free-fall; our country’s President is a liar and buffoon ranting crazily online while the nation suffers; the stupid professional football season has actually started with fans in the stands; and to top it off, I boiled over the milk making my coffee and covered the stove in a mess.

 

Everything is fucked.

 

Almost.

 

You can still ride your bike to more than one lake in the city and dive in the water to paddle around, lie on your back, and practice water yoga of a sort; you can still drink beer outside on a late summer’s evening; you can still listen to stories about nothing in particular from people you’ve known for a while; and there remains the entertainment of seeing familiar faces make spectacles of themselves in familiar ways.

 

We’re all going to die, perhaps sooner than later, so may as well enjoy whatever enjoyments are available while they’re available, and if that includes congregating at a small street-end park and talking a little louder than the nearby residents probably prefer, well, then, so be it, since, after all, it’s still early and you won’t be there longer than a beer or two anyway.

 

Responsibility looms for me in the coming week, so I was glad to be relatively irresponsible for at least one more time before the hammer comes down.  And it was delightful to see a good measure of less responsibility in operation as well.

 

I’m tired of being oppressed by the future; perhaps one antidote to that is to embrace the present, warts and all, and try to make the best of a bad situation.

 

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, as Beyoncé reminded us; if life gives you fire, may as well then make light; if life gives you pandemic, then there’s feeling better together; if life insists on being so crazy, may as well go crazier, too.

Paradise

The commonly-held conception of heaven has never held much appeal for me: there you are, up in the clouds, surrounded by all your relatives, with, as far as I can see, nothing really to do besides hanging out in each others’ divine presence; it’s always struck me as the worst version of a Thanksgiving holiday, without even football, beer, or mashed potatoes.

In Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel, Gilead, the aged Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Boughton, surmises that to conceptualize heaven, we need simply imagine all the pleasures in life times two; and while that’s sort of like a Doublemint gum version of paradise, it’s easier for me to make sense of, mainly since it’s not unlike actual experiences a person can actually have, simply by cycling to a lakeside park on a clear and warm late summer evening in the Pacific Northwest.

When the moon rises like an orange mushroom cloud behind the tree-lined hills of wealthy suburbs and paints an amber racing stripe over the surface of the region’s largest freshwater lake, and you can lie back in the water and see constellations of stars from one end of the celestial sphere to another, and the temperature of the air and that of the liquid in which you lie are so close that two of the four traditional elements merge into one; meanwhile, the third of that quartet dances merrily in a wading pool turned firepit so that summer’s holy grail combination of warmth and wet is achieved, well, then, it surely seems like all the pleasures available to a person living on planet Earth have been doubled already.

If heaven means “it doesn’t get any better than this,” then, all right then, mission accomplished..

In Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, Lucifer famously declare, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”  To each their own, I guess. 

If you ask me: “Better to bike on Earth than sit around in Heaven;” paradise found, right here.