Okay, I’m Old
Okay, I’m old.
Although some people insist on insisting
that I don’t look as old as I am,
as far as I’m concerned that’s no
Big Fucking Deal.
Numbers may indeed be abstractions,
but numbers, meaning years of age, are scary,
and numbers, meaning years of age, are silly,
sometimes.
It all depends –
on how dependable
or dependent things are –
doesn’t it?
First, the scary:
I’m 71.
Scared the shit out of you didn’t I?
Oooh, I hope that filthy
old fart doesn’t want any intimacy with me!
Next, the silly:
I mean – despite the numbers, I’ve always been who I am, y’know?
and part of me’s always been eight years old,
since I was eight,
and at moments still I’m that 10-year-old at camp,
or that suffering, clueless teenager,
and I don’t particularly like the part of me
who was at my idiot testosterone peak when I was 25,
and too much of me remains of the doormat I’d become 20 years later,
and have in some ways always been,
and of course part of me’s always 15 years old –
especially when I see long, well-toned female legs, and so forth.
And that’s the point, isn’t it?
Because that’s ridiculous
because I’m old,
and because I don’t think I deserve ridicule –
at least not for that,
but Big Fucking Deal, eh?
Old
It gets right up my nose;
I mean, it really sticks in my craw
when, in the flow of conversation,
in regard to, say, riding on city buses,
I off-handedly refer to myself as being old,
and another party to the conversation,
usually with a patronising or condescending smile,
contradicts me and insists, ‘Oh, you’re not old!’,
or some crap like that,
and asserts the superiority of using some euphemism.
This always offends the shit out of me.
I know it shouldn’t, but not giving a shit
about what I should or shouldn’t feel
is one of the advantages of being old.
It offends me because it’s an affront to the English language,
to which I have devoted a large portion of my life.
Old means old, as in having stayed alive for a long time.
It disgusts me when they treat it as if it were a dirty word.
Shit, being old is okay with me, really.
A really ugly line is, ‘You’re only as old as you think you are,’
as if lying to myself were a virtue,
and personal honesty and integrity a loathsome deformity.
Shit, being old is okay with me, really.
Another bullshit insult is, ‘But you have such a young mind!’
My mind right now is enormously superior to what it was 50 years
ago.
As if my lifetime of curiosity and experience, and reflection on
both,
hasn’t meant a constantly improving mind! Fuck that.
Shit, being old is okay with me, really.
Being old also means having arthritis and cataracts
and other physical niggles. Okay. That’s part of it.
It’d be a real drag to have them if I were still young,
but I’m not.
Notes On The Slipperiness Of Days
The days slide by like turds
along the endless cosmic sewer pipe,
never pausing, never looking
behind, never looking ahead.
Wednesday? Friday? I don’t know
and I don’t care.
My mind has continuously
engulfed the experience
that the shit all around me has
provided,
my growth in understanding and
wisdom
as imperceptibly gradual as my
body’s deterioration.
My emotional life, however, has
remained stunted;
having the emotional
development of a nine-year-old
has made being old doesn’t seem
unreal to me;
I view myself with child eyes,
which helps to make my reality
seem distantly unreal,
as the days slide by.
I walk my old dog daily,
elevated by the caress of
opioids or opiates, plus cannabis,
and usually no more than a wee
bit of pain;
the doppler-effect rumble and
hraahoomsh of traffic lends its music
to the dancing molecules in my
brain and nervous system,
connecting me with my own kind
better than most face-to-face
encounters,
as the days slide by.
Even middle age, and all that
entails
is a fading memory that won’t
slip away,
although the septic emotional
wounds of that time
remain encrusted on top of all
the day-turds
from childhood and onward,
as the days slide by.
I bought my new coat about a
half a year before composing this,
or maybe it was about a year,
or more, or something like that.
The days do slide by.
Progress
As soon as I become accustomed
to the aches and pains and
points of fatigue
that come with being how old I
am,
I grow older still and have new
ones to contend with.
That Old
I may have been whinging
about one or more of the ways
my body’s deterioration over time
has inconvenienced me or worse –
but anyway she accused me,
as many others have done
(why they have to make it sound like an accusation I can only
guess),
‘Oh, you’re not that old!’
and I began to wonder, as I do,
being the type of person who wonders about shit,
how old is that old,
anyhow?
By what units do we measure it?
By months and years?
By tastes and attitudes?
By technological competence?
By knowledge of pop culture, both now and then?
By speed going up and down stairs?
By body odour?
By the number of grandchildren?
By how long we’ve been telling the same old jokes?
By the amount of wisdom accumulated?
… and where and how do we set the line for any of these
between what is just not as young as we used to be
and being that old?
Old enough to know better, I suppose.
National Super
It doesn’t seem real.
After struggling for years to
survive
both financially and psychologically
at the same time
(the word simultaneously
wouldn’t have worked there),
just as I was close to having
to sell my house
in order to do so I
simultaneously
reached my sixty-fifth
birthday,
and as much money as I’d been
paid some months,
and more than I’d been paid in
some months lately,
before taxes,
doing the demanding and
difficult work that I do –
excellently, permit me to add –
began to appear, after tax,
like magic,
in my bank account every other
Tuesday,
and although I still had
burdensome debts to pay off,
I began to have to suffer less from privation.
It seems extraordinary to
someone, such as myself,
who has a generally low opinion
of my species,
that anyone, let alone a
country,
actually takes care of tired
old people, such as myself,
without asking questions,
stuffing up, or saying,
‘Nyah! Nyah! Just teasing! We’re taking it back!’
I still expect them to do these
things,
being largely incapable
of real interpersonal trust.
Rice Isn’t
A Daily Thing Here
I don’t panic over work
pressure anymore.
If I can’t do my work at a
leisurely pace
that’s other people’s problem –
it doesn’t matter to me.
My superannuation pension has
provided me
with what the Maoists would’ve
probably called
my iron wine bottle.
Seventy
Floating, or sinking, along a footpath – or
both or neither,
a cool breeze ruffling my forearms’ hairs,
the high grey clouds diffusing what light was
left
as the daytime shaded into the evening,
I focused on the outlines of the trees, still
full of green leaves
despite the equinox having passed a couple of
weeks before.
I felt connected to everything but humans –
humans who feel compelled to try to impose
their egos
onto phenomena ridiculously larger than
themselves,
onto phenomena absolutely indifferent to
themselves,
such as by believing that by throwing a switch
or something
at midnight on the first day of March
they have magically changed the season from
summer to autumn,
here in the Southern Hemisphere,
although midnight and March are both random cultural
inventions
that they’ve invented for their convenience,
and have nothing to do with the Earth itself,
the changing of the seasons obviously being
a gradual and multifaceted process.
Flip a switch. Say it’s official.
The seasons themselves couldn’t give less of a
shit,
less even than the official-season crowd gives
for the actual seasons.
The same for anniversaries and holy days – or
holidays –
take your pick.
Time slides by seamlessly, incomprehensibly,
indifferently.
The difference between my last day of being 69
and my seventieth birthday
being neither more nor less
than that between any other two consecutive
days,
the universe throwing no switch
and caring not at all about my personal
bullshit.
Despite my knowing better, though,
my awareness of this particular seamless
transition
stirred up my personal bullshit within me,
and weighed heavily and stupidly on my human
mind.
