The 12 Years Phenomenon

I’m 72 and a half years old. Oddly enough, my life can be divided fairly accurately into 12-year chunks. The points of separation can be obvious and distinct even to an outside observer. They can even be labeled.

1. Childhood (0-12)

2. Youthful Star Rises and Falls (13-25)

3. Real World Apprenticeships (25-37)

4. Destruction and Rebirth (37-49)

5. Transformation (49-61)

6. Planning Ahead (61-72+)

I said the demarcations tend to be obvious and distinct. They are. Childhood begins with my birth in 1953 and ends when I went away to school a little over a month after my 13th birthday. My Youthful Star period includes my years at Mercersburg, Harvard, and business school at Cornell and ends with my sudden return to sobriety (yes, the alcohol-related kind) at 25 in 1978. Real world apprenticeships begin with career-building to recover from Harvard failure status and end with publication of The Boomer Bible in 1991. The Destruction/Rebirth years replaced the real world with real life, including falling off (read ‘jumping off’) the wagon while coming the closest I ever will to being a parent, subsistence jobs “below my station” in a bookstore and a business telemarketing boiler room, as well as creative works I could never have imagined myself doing when I was riding high; this ended with my return home to care for my failing, widowed mother in 2002. The Transformation began with my reconnection to a woman from my past who has since become my wife, which has also sent my creative life in new Internet-intensive directions; it ended with my closure of the original Instapunk website in 2014 and the beginning of a reconciliation between my ‘writing for the grandchildren’ perspective and a passel of ‘defending my legacy’ activities.

If I’m given another 12 years, I know what I want to do with them. I just don’t know if I’m up to the task anymore, given the constraints of Internet sprawl/oppression and my own deteriorating mental faculties, which I monitor as routinely as an athlete keeps tabs on his health-specific Apple Watch. One of several reasons why I gave up drinking again. Memory isn’t as big a problem as AutoCorrect, but it’s getting more troublesome month by month. The memories are still there, and I can find them but they are no longer reliable and instantaneous the way they used to be. My dexterity with using Internet search functions enables me to find the actor whose name slips my tongue and sometimes learn more about him or her in the process than I knew before. I do not resent old age or begrudge my body its aches and pains. I’ve earned them and am grateful to be reminded continually that mind and body are not separate but utterly indivisible from one another. Just as the brain is not the mind, the body is not some machine past its sell-by date we are sadly attached to; it’s as much an experiencer of life as the mind’s eye, and it is incredibly valuable in the changes of perspective it brings to each new day.

It takes being 72 to see the six 12-year chunks of time and recognize they reflect an order that transcends all the individual decisions, mistakes, and seemingly huge wrong turns I have made over the decades. There’s experience you had to have to be the person you are now. In the largest sense I am content with my life, and as proud of it as I can be given that so much of it appears to have been arranged by forces beyond my control and, yes, my frequent furious resistance. I do not spend any time at all wishing I had done this instead of that and somehow blighted my life beyond repair thereby. I am not assailed by guilts, inconsolable remorse, or the obsessive replaying of opportunities I passed up to make the mistakes I proceeded to make. I don’t mourn the monies and fame and acclaim I once thought I wanted. I am just here, doing what I do, knowing that I have never knowingly tried to injure or betray the other people in my life. 

What makes it all worthwhile? The work. When I read writing I don’t shake my head and wish I’d done it differently back then. More often these days, I find old pieces I don’t immediately remember writing at all. 

I generally like them as they are. I dislike finding a wrong prediction or some political character assessment subsequent events revealed to be mistaken. I’m pleased that there relatively few of these. 

Where I’m inclined to find the most irretrievable errors are in my graphic works, especially videos enshrined at my YouTube channel. I was learning the hard way. Using freeware without any tutoring by professionals or more naturally talented artists. I always took the position in the visual arts that I only aspired to be the Thurber of the Internet. Better writer than cartoonist, but unafraid of the blatant self-deprecation of publishing it at all, which was always part of the punchline. The computer drawings in Shuteye Town were the best I could do, but the population I was satirizing was a good match for my limited drawing prowess. 

Overall, the graphics are, to me, like the dumb-clumsy child in your brood. You love him just as much as the more talented siblings, and you are both proud and grateful to see him succeed when he does. And he can be so darn cute at times it makes up for his spilled milks and lost homework assignments and Little League strikeouts and ugly haircuts and fender benders and failed romances and credit card catastrophes. Having to help him sort those things out is as important in your education as a parent as basking in the ceremony when the smart kid makes the honor society. I have learned a lot by straining against my disadvantages as a graphic artist. Many times it has helped improve my writing skills as I must invoke visual imagination in place of quitting a project to fill in for what I simply cannot do without better raw materials, more powerful hardware and software, and, yes, more talent. All part of the sum that is ‘the examined life.’

What’s the point of this entry? The content here may seem haphazard, annoyingly without an express chronological framework that explains exactly where some post belongs in the big picture. The order is there though. All the necessary data and linkages will be provided in the aggregate. I write this the way I wrote individual books of The Boomer Bible. I work on the thing that says “Yes, Me today” in its still small voice. It all does come together as we go. 

I should tell you there will be pages added here, in addition to the posts. They will be topic specific, list oriented, heavily graphic and/or PDF file oriented. You’ll see. I’ll link them after I start feeling some confidence in them.

Do I know what I am doing, what I am building here? Yes. Definitely. And No. Not yet — just that it’s there already and waiting for me to catch up.