That Which Remains

When I was very young, I had a toy prospecting tool. It was really just a plastic pan, about the size of a paper plate, with a grated bottom that allowed for filtering dirt, sand, etc. My mom explained to me that prospector's used this tool (well, the real kind anyway) to sift through piles of dirt in order to find gold. The useless material would fall through the cracks and be lost and forgotten, while the gold, or some other valuable mineral, would be large enough to stay in the pan and thus be visible to the prospector.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have one of these toys to apply to my life.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was worrying a little about finances. I'm not broke by a long stretch, but I'm not getting any younger either and I don't really make a lot of money. Plus the prospects (no pun intended) for substantial advancement at my present job are almost nil. So I guess it's only natural that I would think of how and when I could ever retire, what my health concerns will be by that time and how and if I will be able to pay for them. The way things are going with our economy, most people my age that haven't either made a killing on the stock market or been lucky enough to have a pension plan will be working well into their seventies. It's scary, particularly when you are in your forties, single and have health issues.

Then after a customary period of near panic, I calmed down and came to a kind of peace. I decided that for all my fear about the future, I didn't want to be one of those people who lived in constant concern about some distant "someday" while doggedly ignoring their day to day reality. Maybe that's just a nice cover for being less than responsible about preparing for the future, but it just seems that so many of these prepared people are sacrificing so much of their present for a future that, truth be told, is always in doubt anyway. It doesn't matter how much you save, how healthy you live, or how well you chart your career course; we're all going to get old, develop health problems and die.

Now of course, it makes sense not to spend irresponsibly and chow down on fatty foods. It's nice to think you won't have to work until old age, and will be able to enjoy some nice amenities afterward. And it's also nice to have an old age that is reasonably active and free of constant doctor trips and medical treatment. But, that said, one really need to strike a balance. No amount of financial or health responsibility can guarantee happiness, now or in the future. Maybe a steady diet of KFC will kill you off early, but to deprive yourself of EVER eating it is really kind of masochistic. What's the use in living to 100 if the path that gets you there is nothing but a joyless, colorless trudge? And what real good is having a million dollars to work with in your old age if you saved it by a lifetime of delayed (and often cancelled) gratification? Life needs to be lived, and if you only concentrate on "someday" you're really banking on a big "maybe" anyway.

I don't eat out as much as I used to, but I do still treat myself to doing so once a week. And I try to budget my money more, too. If I REALLY want something, I'll probably buy it, but I don't make many impulse buys and I'm looking into the stock market for investment opportunities. I want to grow old, but I want to be young while I still can.

In the end, there's a whole lot of sand out there; deadlines and meetings and promotions and "networking" and handwringing about getting into the right school and buying the perfect house and buying the perrect stock. All sand, all of it. The real gold is all the stuff you can't plan and can't see; the laughs and love you shared with your family and friends, the simple joy of making someone you love feel better, the quiet pride of doing the right thing or doing a good job. These things, unlike money and health and prestige, can never be taken away.

So I'll plan as much as I can, but I'll try to remember while doing so that no amount of planning gets me that much further than anyone else really. In the precious little time I am here, I might not find a lot of gold, but I'll treasure what I do find, and hopefully, be able to distinguish it from sand.

The Cathode Beelzebub

Something that I heard on a radio program a while back has been troubling me.

I was listening to a program about "remote viewing" on www.artbell.com. Remote viewing is a type of clairvoyance wherein the practitioner attempts to concentrate on an unseen "target" or subject of interest which is not visible to the practitioner. Such a technique has been utilized by the military and police departments, apparently, for many years; aiding in locating missing persons and objects. It is a way of "seeing"without seeing, if that makes any sense, and assuming you believe such a thing is even possible.

The host that night asked the remote viewer if anyone had ever tried to use this technique to "find" the concept of the devil. I found this was a very interesting question, but the answer that was given was a bit chilling. The closest thing that anyone could come to an answer, the man said, was television.

Whoa. Television? I was stunned. All those hundreds of hours I had spent as a kid watching "Gilligan's Island" and "The Munsters" probably weren't what anyone would term "quality time", but I'd like to think it fell well short of being "evil".

Then I thought about it. It was possible, I supposed, to associate evil with television based on the way TV had been used through the decades to further evil purposes; disinformation, outright slander and the targeting of children to sell all manner of unhealthy, destructive products, and the way TV had sort of hijacked the culture by becoming the touchstone by which we measured legitimacy and relevance (heretofore known as "coolness"). You had to be thin, young, with a a great body and a Nordic appearance in order to be taken seriously as a human being. You had to wear the right clothes, drive the right car and live in the right neighborhood. And this was not just in the commercials. The message pervaded the network programming as well. The networks relied increasingly as sex and violence to sell their shows, and thereby, their advertising products. While I have and do defend television as a place where all sorts of programming occurs, it's hard to deny that this trend of appealing to the lowest common denominator has become more and more prevalent as the years have gone by. Now we even have supposed "reality" shows that generally exist to either humiliate the "real people" on them or pit them against each other and encourage them to be dishonest and unscrupuluous in order to win some perspective prize. I don't watch much of this type of programming, as it serves only to make me ashamed to be a human being.

But, is it fair to call television "evil"? Isn't there a lot of educational and beneficial programming content out there? Sure, the usual suspects pop up when mentioning education on TV; PBS, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel, the History Channel. You don't HAVE to watch "Fear Factor" and "Desperate Housewives". No one forces you to tune out "The McNeil/Lehrer Report" in favor of "The Man Show". That's YOUR choice, and we can hardly blame television for your weakness of character. Other mediums give you largely the same aesthetic options. "The New York Times" is right beside "The National Enquirer", just as Mozart is probably in the same store as Nelly. The choice is truly yours, and it's not fair to indict an entire medium on the basis of its more base contributions.

And that's why I always shy away from calling any "thing", in and of itself, evil. In the final analysis, "it"is just a thing, devoid of any predetermined (or unchangeable) moral value. I can always recall a "Superfriends" episode from my childhood that dealt with a box that was supposed to be "totally evil". This box was sought after by the Legion of Doom to use against the Superfriends, but Superman took it and used it for "good", which of course led to a little speech about how nothing is purely good or evil, that it's only the application of things that is good or bad. Sure, it's a simplistic message from a juvenile source, but the underlying philosophy is borne out from our own experience. Is there anything, that in and of itself, is evil? Money can be used to help the poor or exploit them. Guns can be used to protect or to kill. Drugs are able to cure and alternately, addict and destroy. In the end, it's all us and our ability to use our judgement when applying these instruments that nature or invention have provided to us.


Then again, maybe the remote viewer didn't actually "see" television, but perhaps just a monitor. Maybe what they really saw was a computer.

Oh dear, here we go again...

Unconditional Positive Regard

This was the term I learned WAY back in college, which described the feeling a parent has toward a child. In other words, no matter what you do, that love and affection will always be there. No reservations, no strings attached, no mitigation; just pure and unalterable love. It's automatic.

If you are lucky enough to have someone like this in your life, and you are reading this, please tell me how glad you are to have them around. I have been thinking a lot lately about how wonderful it is (or was) to have this in your life, and how hauntingly empty it is to live without it. You can have love, and good will, and caring and lots of positive stuff, but if you don't have "UPR", you are really missing something. I was fortunate enough to have it for over forty years (my mother) and in its absence, life goes on, but it's a very strange, disconnected and scary life. I'm sure there are millions of others in the same situation, but looking around me, it sure doesn't seem so. Everyone I see seems to have a parent, spouse, sibling or "significant other" within arm's reach, caring absolutely and totally...and I am jealous. It's not right and it's petty, I know, but I guess it's natural and I know it's true anyway.

I miss having someone care about me no matter what. It's an awful feeling to have that special gift for so long and then lose it. And I am grateful for the length of time I did have my mom, so very very grateful. And I'm not "mad" at her that's she's gone. She certainly didn't want to leave. But the little boy, the part of me that still expects nurturing and protecting and sheltering, wants to stamp his foot and demand his mom come back. The adult, who grew to love and respect my mother as a friend and a great person, misses the companionship.

Hell, I just miss her.

Give your special one a hug for me.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down (Getting Older)

I suppose it's only inevitable that the older we get, the more we think about death. Not only does your body start giving out signals that it is no longer on the uphill slide of things (i.e. worsening hearing, vision, tooth and skin problems, increasingly easier fatigue, lower tolerance for temperature extremes, and on and on), but you begin to notice the arc of history passing you by. You aren't as savvy about new technological developements as you once were (or are just more resistant to them), you start noticing that you think in markedly different ways than most of the younger adults you encounter, and perhaps most troubling of all, you start to harken back to the days of your youth when quizzed about "how things ought to be". Each generation I suppose, goes through this phase, but the acceptance of the aging process seems to be increasingly difficult for us in modern day America, where our youth-obsessed culture has just about wiped out any relevance and dignity for elderly citizens, and continually pushes back the age at which we are still deemed to be viable sources of knowledge. In the 1960's the battle cry was "don't trust anyone over 30"; with the rampant popularity of teen pop icons and the mad scramble for age defying technology we see today, that cry may have well become "don't BE anyone over 30".

I turned 42 this July. It seemed incredible to me that I am actually that old. For one thing, I have always been blessed (or cursed) with a very youthful face, and the fact that I have never married or had children (nor till recently, lived away from home) has sort of locked me in a perpetual state of adolescence in the eyes of most people in my community. On one level, they know full well my real age, but on another, my appearance and life situation seem to place me in a phase much closer to someone in his twenties than in the middle of his life. That's good and bad I suppose. It's good because like everyone else, I really don't want to appear old or "seem" old in my attitude toward things, but it's bad because whatever life experience and wisdom I've gained are much easier discounted than most other people my age. "Oh you've never had kids, so you can't understand" or "well, if you ever get married, you'll change your mind"...etc, etc.

So in some ways I have it a bit harder than a lot of folks who have these readily identifiable aging markers (marriage, children, even grandchildren, multiple moves, job changes) to sort of remind them that time is indeed passing and their life is indeed progressing. I guess I've been a sort of Peter Pan up until now, able to defy (or at least avoid) these markers and thus retain the ambiance of youth while in reality, aging just as much as everyone else.

But the death of my mother a year and a half ago has deeply affected me on a lot of levels, and one of them is that I am truly beginning to be aware of my age. Someone once said that one of the worst things about losing your parents is that there is no longer anyone between you and the grave, and while I submit there are much worse things about losing your parents, that statement does hold a lot of truth. My mother used to say something similar when she would lament to her friends that it was so hard for her to realize that she was indeed "the older generation", in other words, all the people she thought of as "old" when she was a girl and young adult were dying and people in her age group were taking their place in that most undesired category. I know what she means. While 42 is not considered "old" generally, it's at least half of a normal lifespan, and getting to the point where you think about things like retirement (if such will even be possible for folks my age) and increasing infirmity and eventual death. It's morbid, I know, but how do you NOT think about it? Those concerns, once just the province of the aforementioned "older generation" have now, by default, become yours, along with survivor's guilt and more frequent trips to the doctor. Quite a prize, huh?

I also remember my mother saying that she didn't "feel" old in her mind. That is, she was still the same person mentally as she had always been, and that was the truth. She was a remarkably "in touch" person for her entire life (nearly 78 years); she kept up with modern culture trends and politics and technology as much as possible. But her body reminded her on a daily basis that time was passing.

So far, I have been lucky to avoid most of those physical reminders. I don't smoke, drink or do illegal drugs. I try to avoid caffeine as much as possible, and I try to walk every day. I am thin, though the doctor told me I need to watch my sugar and cholesterol intake, chiefly by more exercise. I know as time goes on I'll be less lucky; no one is bulletproof and I'll be saddled with more and more physical burdens to keep me in touch with my aging process.

I guess the thing that makes me feel old the most if talking to people in their teens and twenties. I don't want to use this as an excuse to rail against the "damned kids today" but I do feel a real disconnect with most of them in terms of priorities and sensibilities. I notice a real affinity for "things" that really disturbs me. That is, no one talks about ideas; almost every conversation I have with people of that age is about something they have bought or the money they need to buy it. Cars, computers, CDs, all manner of new gadgetry seem to really occupy their minds. Sure, those are fun distractions but in the end they aren't even remotely important, and certainly nothing I would want to waste a lot of time talking about. I like to talk about what my mother and I used to talk about; politics, questions of right and wrong, observations about the people around us, new stories that were remarkable and what they meant to us. Maybe I like those topics because I was raised by older parents; my mom was 37 when I was born and my dad was 45. But maybe our culture is moving more and more toward a glorification of the physical and a diminution of the mental and emotional and maybe I just was lucky enough to be born in a time before the balance between these two concerns went totally out of whack.

I hate getting older, but on one hand, I was always a little different from my peers, and that has helped make the transition into (gulp) middle age a bit easier. I never was that physical a person and never fretted all that much about my appearance so the fact that I'm seeing some grey hairs and some thinning on top isn't quite as jarring to me as it might be to some. It doesn't matter if I was no longer able to "hold my liquor" because I never drank anyway. And it isn't a big deal that the opposite sex is no longer giving me "looks" because they never really did, at least not to my knowledge. I'm like my mom, still just me, with a little time attached. "Michael V.2".

I don't like to think about dying and death and being alone, but then again, no one does. And there's no assurance that those who have someone now will have someone when they are near death, and no assurance that someone alone now will still be so at that critical time. Now, just as with every other step of the path of life, I guess I have to just take things a day at a time. It's hard; you think you are secure, you have "backup" in your life in case something happens, and when it's gone it's easy to become very scared and depressed and feel helpless. But I guess the truth is that nothing is infallible, there is no backup that can't be gone tomorrow, and we all die how and when we die and all the preparation in the world can only do so much to influence things.

Oh, hell, it's just Sunday, and I need to get out.

Keep Breathing

"The important thing", Tom Hanks says in "Castaway", "is to keep breathing...you never know what will wash ashore...".

I have summoned that thought over and over the past few months. It's a nice buffer against all the scary, lonely ominous stuff that has happened (and keeps happening) and it's a source of hope that if I hang in there, something good might come ashore for me too.

I'm in my new house, thirteen miles from the home I lived in for nearly 42 years, my whole life. Since I moved in, I have learned that the neighbors think that part of the porch that borders their property is actually theirs, that the basement takes on water during heavy rains (prompting fears of mold infestation), and that several of the outlets in the house just don't work. The other day I turned on the bathroom light and one of the bulbs shattered. Now there are no working outlets in the bedroom, and the bathroom light is not working either. I guess it's time for the electrician to pay a visit. Sigh.

Worst of all, the cat I adopted from my humane society got very ill, or was somehow injured, and I had to euthanize him less than seven weeks after I adopted him. He was a great cat, and I honestly feel he was the nicest, easist to manage and most appreciative kitty I have ever owned. He had a beautiful long yellow hair coat, and had a very distinctive plaintive meow. He faced his illness with a lot of strength and dignity. I guess I'll never know definitively what was wrong with him, as I did not have him autopsied. It just breaks my heart that he was here such a short time. I really think he loved it here and would have been happy for a the rest of his life. I guess I had no idea how short that was going to be.

At work, things continue to degenerate. I don't really mind the job I'm doing, though at some point the physical component of it is going to begin to weigh upon me. And it's obviously not a dream fulfiller; it's repetitive line work, boring and tedious. But it is a challenge that would at least be tolerable if not for the cadre of screeching harpies I have to work with. They rate at varying levels of insufferability, and no, I'm not being snobby. Practically everyone else in the plant balks at working on this line from Hell, and it's largely because of the personell involved. We have been working ten hours for weeks, plus Saturdays and some Sundays. God knows how long this is going to last. I am making good money, granted, but I don't ever really get to enjoy it. I just have time to go home and get the bare minimums done there before it's back to work again.

I think at times about switching shifts. But the work is the same, and there are harpies everywhere. I don't think third shift is for me, and though I like second, there are personell issues there as well and it tends to make you like a vampire. You can kiss any hope of a social life goodbye.

Now I have to have two cavities filled on Thursday. At some point I think my teeth will be totally replaced by cavities; hmm, I wonder if a cavity can get a cavity?

In two weeks I am supposed to start another class. I hope the overtime is finished or at least subsided by then, but I am dubious. I don't know how I will be able to do well with such a heavy work schedule. But I guess I will have to find out.

Bottom line? Life kind of sucks right now. I'm down here all alone and it seems like all I'm doing it covering up holes, never getting anywhere. As soon as one problem is taken care of, another (or several) takes its place. It seems so futile. I guess its the effort that counts, yada yada yada, but honestly, the effort is getting old. I miss my old life, imperfect and probably dysfunctional as it was.

I have food and shelter and money and work and a car and some friends, and reasonable health. I guess things could be a lot worse. And I don't generally care to write this sort of diary type entry, because it always seems very presumptious to think that others are really interested in the minutae of my life. Actually, I'm not so much writing it for others as for myself. Hopefully someday I'll be able to look back at this entry and say "See, you survived that period..." and it will be a source of strength and accomplishment for me.

I hope so anyway.