As a professional “writer” I know that the best way to call attention to something is to put it in quotation marks. Just now, however, I fear I’ve brought negative attention, as these marks may challenge my writerly legitimacy, perhaps not something you had ever considered much less questioned. But I have long said that all people really want in life is attention, and that we’ll take negative attention over no attention, which explains almost all behavior of almost all children and a solid majority of adults. These days it’s known as “being seen” (see what I did there?).
I promise I will eventually move within striking distance of an actual topic for this essay, but this intro stuff is key to fighting today’s destructive tribalism by knocking down the wall between us. Yes, I’m doing almost all the heavy lifting here, but “you” are also an important—one might even say essential—player in this game, and so every once in a while, I like to open my literary locker room door and let you in for a good long sniff.
To this end, I will now share with you the precise moment the idea for this piece plonked into my head. I was walking along, lost in thought, and when I’m in that condition I revert to a childhood regimen of not stepping on cracks, for hopefully obvious reasons. But as I near 70, with my mother who lived to be 96 firmly in the ground, I realized my foot placement no longer played a role in whether or not her back was broken. OMG the weight that was lifted!
We’ll never know what would have happened were I not currently wired to view much of what I experience in terms of whether or not I can wring 1,200 words out of it by Monday night. What I find fascinating and frustrating in roughly equal measure is the way my brain is settling in my skull of late, enabling me to make very fun, imaginative connections then forget them almost immediately, and for extra joy, with permanence. If there is a heaven, I’d better get back all the great thoughts I had in my life but never wrote down or there’ll be hell to pay. But the “Step on a crack” stuck, and made me wonder if there were other, perhaps even not ridiculous benefits to clearing 70. Hey, here’s one now.
The saying “give zero fucks” became popular in the last part of the first decade of this century, and I’ll admit, I’m a fan. It dovetails nicely with my other favorite ultra-to-me-modern saying, “Not my monkey, not my circus.” I take neither of these to signal an abdication of personal responsibility or thoughtfulness, but rather a recognition of one’s prevailing reality and priorities.
That’s really the best thing about nearing the age that the speed limit was when I first got my license: the things you choose to give fucks about get whittled down to a delightful few. It’s not that you give fewer fucks, you just apportion them to many fewer things, as you have hopefully learned from the experience of giving so many more fucks about people and places and things than they deserved. Everyone has a finite number of donate-able fucks, and each one you waste on something undeserving is one you won’t have when shit gets real or your tuna’s overcooked. And now that I’ve reached Eddie Murphy-stand-up-level f-bomb saturation, I will subsequently be less profane. Sorry mom.
Life is, for some—certainly not me but for many of you out there—an often maddening, semi-blindfolded search for truth and meaning. And in some cases you have to make more mistakes than any organism should have to make in one lifetime in order to figure out what’s true and meaningful to you, and then and only then can you hitch up your shit and go find it. All that can take a long time, especially if you’re easily distracted. But it’s worth the investment, for once you get there—and it’s a long-ass runway, not a landing pad—things are just better. Regrets don’t go away, but somehow they go from being emotional ankle weights to improved optical prescriptions, which may now take the crown as the most tortured, I wanna say metaphor but that seems wrong, I’ve ever penned. And now back to our regularly scheduled silliness.
There are, of course, the obvious benefits of being Medicare-eligible, most notably your senior citizen discounts. My first came at the tender age of 60 and, poetically, at my local marijuana dispensary. Talk about gilding the lily! Given I spent much of my college years and 20s trying to not get caught while getting high, I still find each trip wonderfully illicit. I especially like it when the one older guy who works there waits on me, as we get to engage in a minute or two of “Can you believe this is all legal and I’m just walking into this place that looks like Pot Etsy came to life and yet everybody’s acting like it’s totally normal?”
You’ll probably say no to more things, but that’s okay because almost all of them will be things you don’t really like and maybe were just doing to please someone else who probably wasn’t all that pleased, not because you didn’t add value but because they would have had a fine time without you and you really didn’t want to go anyway.
If you’re like me, you’ll drive more gently, safely, and enjoyably. If my nuclear family is at all typical, the older folks place a greater priority on all them newfangled safety features they got on today’s horseless carriages. Nowhere is the fundamentally irrational nature of being human more vividly displayed than the chasm between our fear of flying, where your annual chance of dying is about 1 in 11 million, and our blasé response to the uber-dangerous act of driving, namely that we do it largely sans thought. I have more time to think now, so I drive less, and when I do, I’ve gone from Oscar the Grouch to Elmo.
Speaking of, getting old is kind of like being a kid again, only without all the annoying running around. You can go to the grocery store in your fuzzy bear slippers and people think it’s way cuter and less weird than if you did it in your 40s. Also, and this point cannot be overstated, though I will try: who cares if they think it’s not cute at all and quite weird? Not you! You find greater kinship with kids, especially as you lose agency and people start telling you what to do for the first time in a half century or so. They’ve been told what to do since they took their first breath, so they get it. Really, if kids and old people ever joined forces the adult world would be in deep shit, because that combination of energy, experience, and grievance would be formidable AF. The general population of adults is so busy and easily distracted that their overthrow would be a walk in the park—a kid and old person specialty.
I just took a pee break—the increased frequency of which will feature prominently in an upcoming and much longer essay on why aging blows—and in mid-stream, feeling flush after re-reading this unfinished masterpiece, I came to the conclusion that never before in my life have I been this good a writer. Even if I had been this good when I was younger I don’t think I would have allowed myself to think it. At some point, if it goes well, you become the best judge of your effort and output, and while that is not always a welcome voice, it’s eventually the most authentic.
That we slow our approach as the end comes clearer into sight could be ironic, counterintuitive, sensible, I don’t know, and I’m not talking physically, again, for obvious reasons. I’m still not great at it, but I’m better than I have been at living in the moment. Often I make it to moment-adjacent, mostly because I’m no longer in such a goddamn hurry. Why I was in such a hurry and where I was going are questions I don’t ponder anymore, largely thanks to those all the silver linings.
