I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what’s next, beyond the rest of today and what I’m working on right now. I have no biological children, which is probably a good thing for them, and why I don’t need to worry about providing for them after my death or worrying about how they will remember the ups and downs of our relationship. That’s not to say I don’t worry about death in any respect. I worry about the order of death between my wife and me. I want to be able to be with my wife for the rest of her life and do what I can to make her remaining time as happy as possible. I worry a little about what happens if she dies first because it’s a bigger bite of the apple than I have any inclination to chew on. Her daughter, who lives with us by default, isn’t fond of either of us, and if her mother is no longer an excuse for just being here in some capacity, she may overturn this household for good in perilous ways. I don’t think about that much.
My wife has a large extended family an hour away from here who do care about her and with whom I have lost contact myself because of my increasing physical immobility and reclusiveness. We are, daughter-in-law included, unable to maintain our house sufficiently well to entertain even casually. Funds have grown extremely tight since my wife retired and I abandoned the last of my business freelancing clients. (I turned down an offer from one of my best corporate sponsors who was launching a consulting career of his own upon receiving a doctorate in the communications strategies we developed together at Whirlpool. After a cautious expression of interest, I reversed field and declined, because he had revealed his area of specialty would now be “diversity.” Told him I couldn’t do that. End of my business life.)
If all this sounds like gathering solitude, I suppose it is that in fact, but I know and accept the reasons I’m alone at this stage of the game. That part doesn’t trouble me particularly. Some lifelong friends are still alive, but we have nothing in common anymore. There have been some falling-outs and some books just being silently closed. I have never been much for the “Remember when we…”) sort of friendships. Many think I let them down in some way; I understand their point of view better than they’d understand mine if I explained it to them. The one friend who never let me down died shortly after he turned 40, killed by some overdose of meth that damaged his heart 20 years before. The life of the truly daring and heedless of consequences is dangerous indeed.
No kids, no friends, no day to day contact with anyone who pays me any attention whatever. Seem bleak? It isn’t. No one even wants to engage in conversation with me. I have more than half a million total visitors to my my Blogger websites over the last half dozen years, I have electronic friends on Facebook who give me “Likes” and occasional fond comments. When I chafe about such limits of Internet life, the survivors who know me best tell me I don’t leave much for anyone to say in disagreement or collateral insight. Don’t worry about it, they say. So I don’t. After all, here I am still talking to you after 80 posts you’ve never commented on here. That’s fine.
Back to the Eastwood communiqué. Like everyone else, I want approval. But I wouldn’t trade for what I’ve gotten instead. When I look back, I know, I feel, that it has all been worth it, every bit of it. Even if I had died at 40, like my friend Howard and Edgar Allan Poe, I would still be content with what I had left behind for others to find if the breaks break right. The punk writer conception and the Boomer Bible were a flat out gift given me from above, however you define that word. All the time since has been gravy. The prospect of death doesn’t bother me at all. Disability is a more bothersome thought, but if I go blind and deaf, I’ll still probably have enough warning to lay in a sufficient supply of booze to fulfill my long delayed desire to drink myself to death. No one to mourn my passing? Well, if I’m childless biologically, I have transferred my love to the generations of children to come, who are very real to me. Who do you think Leonardo was writing and encoding and hiding his codices of boundless invention for? He no longer trusted the men in charge in his time, but he was creating a gift for those who would one day find and decode and understand the products of his mind. No, I’m not pretending to be Leonardo. He has the Mona Lisa. I have this trifle instead.
The reclusiveness is a frequent endgame in lives projected so voluminously outward into the world and so infected in the process by pessimism. Like Leonardo, Twain, Nietzsche, Tesla, et al, including more pedestrian talents like J. D.Salinger and, I’m told, Thomas Pynchon. It is a price of some kind, no doubt, but also preparation for who knows what?
On the price side of the equation, though, I concede I’ve been giving short shrift to Baby Boomer men with whom I might be expected to feel some remaining affection and interest. I don’t worry about Clint Eastwood, for example. (Yes I know he’s not a Boomer; neither is Jagger, who’s in Eastwood’s class too.) He doesn’t even interest me that much anymore, despite my admiration for so much of what he has accomplished both as a movie star and as a breakthrough director. I don’t need to think about him because there are plenty who will in years to come. One of his gifts, in addition to pragmatic vanity, musical talent, and incredible perseverance, is accessibility. Wish I had more of that myself at times.
Other men closer to my age have come to interest me even less over the years. Far too many have been AWOL in the great cultural battles that caused the world wars and the ensuing rapid decline of western civilization. Too many of my own acquaintance have expended their talents to find silos and boxes they could reside comfortably within, shrinking all the while to living fossils of their vanished youth.
One example. Several years ago I hung up on my college roommate of three years after he recounted being led to the door by security with his office trinkets in a cardboard box. He’d been an executive vice president of big banks in Manhattan and seemed surprised that he could be discarded so casually. We had not spoken since I had been a groomsman at his wedding, and I had known somehow not to try continuing contact with him. He’s been my best man; his was his prep school roommate. He had never acknowledged receipt of the copy of The Boomer Bible I had sent him. And he obviously had made no attempt to keep tabs on me since. He had become pals with a guy I’d known at Cornell Business School and once rescued from a very bad bar fight in Trumansburg, NY, when everyone in the car had been determined to drive off and leave him for the cops in a dive he had destroyed and a bartender he’d bloodied. My former roommate loved the guy, but it had never occurred to either of them to give me a phone call on one of their nights out. After we’d talked about the cardboard box and “Gross Bob” for a while, with few questions at his end, he ventured a joke about Donald Trump being too busy playing golf to perform his Presidential duties. This, during the excruciating first-term lawfare assault on Trump and his family and friends. I said, “Fuck you,” and hung up in his ear. We got an astonished text message from his wife, who said it was just a joke. My wife replied in my stead, suggesting there was nothing more to talk about. Where things have stood ever since.
Other friends, other stories of rupture or elongating silences between briefer calls. I don’t miss them. I know of more solid and estimable accomplishments by Mercersburg alumni since my day than any I’ve seen from Harvard or Cornell. Not saying they’re completely absent from the ghostly honor roll I imagine, but they’ve all made their choices as I have made mine, and theirs are none of my business. Truthfully, I’ve never bought the official class ring from any school I’ve attended, and the first Harvard sweatshirt I ever owned was a gift from my wife a few years back. At some level, always the solitary.
Perhaps I should be more interested in what other of my peers have been up to.
If you’re feeling some of the phenomena Eastwood was describing, I sympathize. I’m probably too oddball to have anything helpful to offer beyond what I’ve already written in the past. I have no idea how much of my blog content you have read, but here’s the lead graphic from one of my own dalliances with dread.
The article that goes with the graphic is here, along with two other posts that might be relevant…
Wasting Away
Wheels Within Wheels (EOY ‘24 Thoughts)
My Ghost Prevention Plan
Yesterday I cobbled together a video for my post-death escape from that grave for a drone-level flying tour of all the marvelous places I’ve visited or lived in during a long life. The hardware comes from my design of Johnny Dodge’s quantum instrument panel from his 1953 Chevy pickup truck. AI tools may make that flying tour possible more easily than I’d have imagined before I imagined it.
