Tag: aging

I joined two teenagers in holy wedlock yesterday. I consider it an accomplishment since I’m not a minister, they hadn’t thought about marriage when they got up that morning, and I was wearing a pair of boots on my head. In fact, they had never seen me and didn’t know I existed until three minutes before I pronounced them man and wife in front of 30 strangers who didn’t even bring gifts.

All in all, it was a pretty normal spring-time Sunday for me.

I work at a renaissance festival in the spring. Most people go there to have fun, except the guys dragged there by their girlfriends when they’d rather be watching NASCAR, but they fear they won’t get laid tonight if they say no. I don’t go there to have fun. I go there to goad other people into having fun. I get paid just like most professional actors, which means I earn less per hour than a blind dishwasher in Burundi.

People have a lot of different opinions about renaissance festivals, and festivals are run a lot of different ways. There are a lot of jokes about renaissance festivals, some of which are hilarious. For example:

You know you’re at a bad renaissance festival when there’s an eight minute drum solo in the middle of “Greensleeves.”

Mainly I work there because it’s an acting challenge. I like to call it theater with no stage, no script, and no separation from the audience. To put it another way, I have no idea what I’m going to say or do until it happens, we have 33 acres so I have to pin my audience against something so they can’t get away, and I have to make them look brilliant even if they’re gaping at me with a sliver of turkey leg hanging off their cheek. I can tell when I’ve done a decent job of transforming into my character, because my character likes almost every person he’s ever met. You can ask my wife and my friends just how much that does not describe me. So—good acting challenge.

In most cases you have to select your audience, stalk them, and approach them. The best part is when they see you coming and their eyes get that desperate, calculating look. It’s as if they were trapped between a river and an army of tigers, and they’re assessing whether they can make the jump to freedom. At the same time they hover between smiling and not smiling, because they’re not sure which one is most likely to draw the tigers’ attention. That’s the best part because they have such trepidation when you arrive, and you know that when you’re done in a few minutes they’ll be happy, or amused, or feel welcome. Or maybe they’ll feel relieved that you’re done, which is at least better than getting drunk and kicking a mime.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about renaissance festivals. I just said all that in order to say this.

One day fifteen years ago at this festival I don’t want to talk about, I got tired of selecting and stalking my audience, so I set a trap. I gathered a double-handful of little rocks and sat on a bare, flat spot on the ground. Then I began placing and stacking rocks in patterns that didn’t mean a damn thing. Within ten minutes I had a bunch of little kids, about six or seven years old, picking up their own rocks and stacking them along with me.

I didn’t give them any instructions or rules. My only rule was that whatever they did was perfect. If they knocked down 30 existing rocks, I told them that was the most beautiful thing ever and those rocks must have been in the way. The funny thing was that most kids had a parent standing nearby telling them to be careful and not mess anything up. We tried to ignore those parents as much as we could.

This weekend I realized I hadn’t set a kid trap in a decade and a half, so I gathered up some rocks and went to work. In the first five minutes several kids stopped to look, but none of them sat down to play. In the following five minutes a couple of kids brought me rocks, but they wouldn’t sit down to help, even though I invited them. The parents, who were grown up versions of my kids from 15 years ago, just looked and didn’t say anything. After 30 minutes I gave up and moved on.

What the hell?

I pondered this change last night as I ate an economically priced New York strip, and I came up with a small array of possible explanations:

Stacking rocks loses its charm when a child can play Angry Birds on his cell phone 24 hours a day, even on the toilet.

For a child today, sitting down to play with an unknown person seems as dangerous as injecting arsenic into your neck.

Today’s children are expected to follow rules that govern every type of human behavior, so when they looked at the unstructured rock-stacking activity, their minds couldn’t deal with it. Their brains had to reset like a computer that’s been told by Captain Kirk to divide by zero.

I didn’t like any of those explanations. They’re all depressing. And since I possess modern man’s ability to convince myself that the things I don’t like are untrue, I denied all these explanations. As I choked down the last gristly bite of cow, the correct explanation revealed itself.

It’s me. I am 15 years older. I’m 15 years stranger. I no longer look like the fun but kind of weird uncle. Now I look like the really weird old guy doing something with rocks that’s inexplicable but probably bad. No wonder they stood out of reach, watching like I was a musk-ox in the zoo. They didn’t know what to make of me, but they were sure nothing good was going to come out of me.

So I’ll put my kid trapping techniques aside from now on and go after older audiences. The kids are safe. Wait until they’re teenagers on a date at a renaissance festival, though. Then I’ll own their asses.

"When's that man going to do something interesting, mommy? I want a wooden sword so I can give my brother a concussion."
“When’s that man going to do something interesting, mommy? I want a wooden sword so I can give my brother a concussion.”

Photo by Steven H. Keys via Wikimedia Commons.

Fifty years will carve a people-sized Grand Canyon into a person’s body and mind. Sure, the Colorado River took millions of years to gouge the real Grand Canyon out of the Arizona rock, but we’re softer and get hit with harsher stuff than water and wind.

My friend The Bean pointed this out to me, although she may not have meant to. She’s young and feisty and pregnant. The Bean has enthusiasm oozing from all her pores, even before she became a vessel for new life and the metaphorical hope for the future of all humanity. She also cooks a tasty Beef with Scallion and Mushroom Sauce.

This week The Bean said that there’s something strangely comforting in hearing your doctor say “That looks awful.” When her doctor says that, she knows she’s not complaining for no good reason. Plus, she loves her doctor, and that makes her observation more palatable. But I guarantee that I, being a generation older, would not find, “That looks awful,” comforting in any way at all. In fact, I might be inclined to do something rude with a tongue depressor, or at least make a cutting remark.

Annoying medical experiences have eroded me far longer than they have The Bean, and bad statements from doctors can find no welcome in the canyons of my psyche. I’m not criticizing my friend. When I was her age, I was the same damn way.

Another generation of living will dig the canyons deeper, and the patience for stupid medical remarks pretty much disappears. When a person of 75 years like my mom is lying in the hospital full of morphine with a condition no one has been able to diagnose for two months, and when the doctor unwraps the dressing, the words “Oh my God!” plunge to the bottom of the canyon to crash with a bitter thud. When every nurse and aide says roughly the same thing, then comfort, patience, and acceptance evaporate. Even a smile from the doctor and the words, “That sure is spreading,” only create the urge to rip the doctor’s heart out through his nose.

Of course, our reaction depends a lot on our proximity to Death, that snappy-dressing clump of fungus and slime. When you’re in the hospital you know you’re in Death’s stomping grounds, sort of like his favorite bar. At my age, when I go to the doctor, Death hangs out in the waiting room, feet on the couch and reading Guns and Ammo.  He wants to get the news right away. For The Bean, Death just runs his errands at the mall and maybe goes to see The Phantom Menace in 3D, trusting that she’ll call later if they need to have lunch.

But I think that Death’s distance is less important than how time has changed our understanding of the word “awful.” I’ve seen how people a generation ahead of me understand difficulty and suffering in a way that I can’t. I feel sorry for them, and to be honest I feel sorrier for myself knowing that I’m coming up behind them. On the other hand, The Bean is still young enough to feel comfort and even laugh at bad news. And in the end I feel happy that her canyon is shallow, and she hasn’t yet been kicked in a tender place quite as much as us old folks.

I’m trying to decide whether I’m having a mid-life crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a petulant fit. I googled each of them, but I couldn’t find any distinct definitions to help me figure this out. Maybe they’re all quite similar. Maybe I have all three at once, which I suspect would be novel.

Certain behaviors tend to come along with a mid-life crisis. They include quitting your job to weave rugs in New Mexico, buying a penis-shaped sports car you can’t afford, joining a gym you will never visit, having an affair with the most inappropriate person you can think of, spending a year’s salary on plastic surgery and hair implants, and acting like such a gigantic weasel’s crotch that your spouse has to chain herself to the toilet to keep from murdering you every night. If you allow that my wife only chains herself to a metaphorical toilet, then just one of these applies to me. Therefore, I’m putting mid-life crisis at the bottom of the list for now.

On the other hand, a nervous breakdown seems to be a short-term thing. It usually shows up as depression or anxiety. In my life, I refer to that as Tuesday. Therefore, I’m classifying nervous breakdown as “unlikely.”

So, I’m going with “petulant fit.”

Ten years ago I could optimistically say that I still had more years ahead of me than behind me, barring a catastrophic carnival accident. I can’t fool myself like that anymore. I heard someone say, “50 is the new 20,” the other day. I don’t know about him, but when I was 20 I had a lot less trouble peeing.

So my brain is telling me things like, “If you don’t go for it now, when will you? This may be your last chance.” Coincidentally, this is precisely the same sales technique used to peddle time share condos, so I should know better when I listen to my brain say this shit. But instead I allow my brain to lure me into an unnatural state. I have fallen into a state of “yearning.”

What the hell is “yearning”? It’s kind of like “wanting,” except that wanting is done with the heart, and yearning is done with everything from your belly button to your knees—yes, including those bits. What do I yearn for? I yearn for the things any adult my age desires: for people to read my mind and give me exactly what I want, to do whatever I love doing all day and for people to pay me lots of money regardless of how good I really am, to find so much variety and spontaneity in each day that I forget I’m just the same old me, and to have more sex than the Sultan of Morocco. The usual things.

I lack a solid plan for achieving any of this. I don’t really have a plan at all. I do have a disorganized collection of vague hopes, so I feel I’m well on my way. Even better, I envision that everything will be accomplished through the efforts of other people and without much inconvenience to me. What this scheme lacks in specificity it makes up for in warm fuzzies for me.

I do have one responsibility. When I think events are moving away from me securing everything for which I yearn, I must behave like a tiger with hemorrhoids and aggravate everyone around me to such an insane level that they start paying more attention to what I want. Then I can go back to aggravating them the normal amount.

And I will keep doing this. Relentlessly. Until I get everything I yearn for. 

Definitely “petulant fit.”