Even before beginning this blog, I suppose, I had a set of unenunciated expectations for myself, and for what I thought I was going to do. The time frame of 730 days, from my 68th to my 70th birthdays, seemed a convenient framework on which to build a set of observations and reflections about my own mortality, and to confront, at least for myself, the surprising number of basic questions I still have, at what I shrink from terming an advanced age, about living, in and of itself.
It's been just two weeks, by my count, since my initial post, and I've managed already to fail to adhere to my own unvoiced regimen. Surely, I thought without really thinking, one entry per day, for two consecutive years, shouldn't be unmanageable, given the very real fact that, aside from weekly laundry, and putting out the recyclables twice a month, I have nothing in particular to do, and nowhere important to go.
But also, among that bag of mixed emotions I brought to this self-generated assignment, was what I find shameful to admit: the sad hope that, somehow, by putting myself through this discipline, successfully, I might evade the very end I thought I was so brazenly facing. Denial is much more clever than I thought, and seemingly much more pervasive, and expert at disguising itself.
Currently, I find myself amid other endings, some more foreseeable than others, but no less debilitating for their predictability. The production of 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street' has its final two performances this weekend --the sixth and seventh public performances we will have given, of what I consider to be the most challenging theatrical work with which I've ever been involved. I would like to hope that, in these final two shows, I'll finally be able to do my one solo song correctly; our one Sunday matinee was recorded, and of course I managed to stagger, at the very start of the music, and fluff some lyrics, which will be all I'll be able to see, I'm sure, when and if I watch the disc. In this regard, I feel like a mountaineer who, after rigorous training and considerable preparatory effort, has failed, by only a few yards, of reaching his goal, before it's time to turn around and go back to daily life again.
Our little red cat Buster, whom I've mordantly nicknamed Buster the Dead Cat for online identification, lingers on, in the final stages of fatal kidney failure. I keep simultaneously hoping and fearing I'll go upstairs and find him dead on the heavy, soft, blue and white and green afghan our friend Toni gave us for Christmas a few years ago. He seems to prefer sleeping on it, on our big bed. So far, though, each time I look into the room, he's still breathing, even though there's so little left of him now. I spend some time, usually twice a day, stroking his bony sides and prominent spine, and after a few moments, he starts to purr.
I've picked out a probable burial site, in the back yard, as near to our badly-situated redbud tree as I can manage to dig a deep enough hole to protect his remains from unsentimental scavengers. I know where the pick and spade are in the garage. I have a glass block, flat on one side and curved on the other, that I'm thinking of using as a grave marker for him. The blue silk brocade fabric I think I'll use as his shroud is currently still a child's jacket, being worn by a big teddy bear that's been banished to our 'guest room' -- hypothetical guests only being accommodated, if they can either sleep while levitated, or are prepared with their own hammocks. I've cleared out space in our freezer, leaving the top shelf empty, as Buster's temporary morgue, so John can also witness the interment. Although I am hydrating him with saline solution daily, I have stopped forcing him to eat -- I think it's stressful for him, to be wrapped in a big towel and have his jaws pried open, then to have cat food spooned onto his tongue, so he'll swallow what he doesn't manage to squeeze out of the side of his mouth. And to be frank, I find this stressful for myself as well -- although I also feel that, as the voluntary care giver, with the opposable thumbs so handy for prying cat jaws open, I am not entitled to complaint.
And it's impossible, simply impossible, to avoid seeing myself in what is proving to be a much more protracted death than I had anticipated. (Allowing myself to be guided by our vet's tacit assurances, that death by kidney failure is, for the animal, painless and simple, I'm half content and half resigned to let Buster meet his end here in the only real home he's ever known, amid shadows and scents that are familiar to him) I wonder if anyone will be with me, and whether or not I'll want to have my hand held, or if I'll prefer to have everyone in another room, when the mystery of death overtakes me.
At the risk of sounding laughably stupid, or of revealing a startling -- and unwarranted -- sense of my own superiority, I am ashamed of the fact that I'm going to die, just like Buster will. For some reason -- abetted by clever, relentless denial (op. cit.) -- perhaps buttressed by the now-mythic arrogance of the maligned 'boomer' mentality -- I have unknowingly supposed that I might be clever enough, somehow, to evade mortality. I'm probably misquoting again, but I remember Proust having said something to the effect that 'death is easy. People do it every day. Thinking about one's own death, however, is impossible.'
But, in the face of this conceptual imponderability, I find myself perversely determined to keep my eyes open for as long as possible, and to keep reporting back, as it were, from the front lines, about what this struggle (?) entails. Perhaps -- again nudged by denial, I realize -- I think that by putting up show of pathetic defiance, I'll trick death into seeing me as an inoffensive jester, unworthy of notice. Sort of the human equivalent of one of those bright clown fish that thrive amid the poisonous tentacles of blind sea anemones, I guess.
I am also sheltering the delusion of being able to clean up my own mess, before I leave the studio, as it were -- even though the thought of merely excavating our basement fills me with despair. And what I consider to be an especially ironic, or pathetic layer of this despair, is the hope I see embodied in so much of what I've accumulated with such apparent indiscretion. Instead of striking me as burdens to be sloughed off, many of the oddments I've rescued from one gutter or another still provoke a vision of what I thought they might become. I'm as unwilling, at some level, to part with these battered and, in many cases, unidentifiable scraps, as I am to find Buster dead, either on the bed or under it -- Buster isn't an especially old cat, after all, and didn't I make a tacit pact, with each of these objects I've adopted, to give them a safe and respectable place to reside, so different from what they would have expected, had they been left to be swept up and dumped in a landfill?
(And actually, I do have an incomplete blog entry, still simmering, I guess you'd say, but which I can't post until what I think are the missing elements are put into place. So I haven't spent the entire time, between my last post and what I guess will be my next one, watching old movies on TCM. I seem, simply enough, to want to isolate myself from my own life experience, as from everything else I avoid on a more or less daily basis)
Every once in a while, I do something. Every once in a while, I start something. Mostly, though, I sit in a kind of painful indecision, daydreaming about painting this or assembling that, or concocting something else -- all while sprawled on our hand-me-down sofa in the under-lit den. I wonder, without having whatever you would call it -- nerve? Insensitivity? Vulgarity? -- to ask, how people much older than I manage to get out of bed every day, dress themselves, and go out into the world. For the time being, at least, even my seemingly limitless capacity for spitefulness doesn't seem adequate to get me past my feelings of existential anxiety and horror. Although I openly question the value of such a belated effort, I've started again, with another therapist, who has said that, together, we can find away around or through my present impasse. In a way, if I could view it from enough distance, I might even find my own behavior amusing -- a man in virtually perfect health, with more than enough time and resources to do the things he says he's always dreamed out, who is nonetheless both consumed with the dread of wasting time, and yet frozen in an indecision fueled by despair.
So. Back in the practical world. I have laundry to continue washing and drying. I'll pack my gym bag, and drag my passive corpus the eight miles to the Sumit YMCA, and work up a sweat, walking two miles while staying in the same geographic location. Later, and holding my breath, I'll set out for Madison, and the weekly therapy session -- the one offering a key to my figurative handcuffs. No one is shooting directly at me, as I often quip. I'm ambulatory, as is my usual reply to questions of how I am. I guess that, for today, these factors, and maybe even my own potentially magnificent failures, will have to suffice.
© Walter Zimmerman (though, why?) 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
725. But Who's Counting?
Only the sixth day of my mortality count-down, and already I'm in danger of losing track of which day I'm in, and I've already skipped an entire day's opportunity to weigh forth on the benefits and drawbacks of... coming in for a landing, shall we say? I can barely wait for the struggle, come next August, of ticking off the days, backwards, to figure out which mile marker I've reached...
I've never been very good at counting, actually. I have a hard time staying focused. It seems such a boring thing to do. My mind continually wants to run off in the direction of a color or smell or random memory, and by the time I've reined in my naughty train of thought, I've forgotten whether I'm at 47 or 79.
This isn't usually too much of a problem, as problems go, in daily life. Twice in my life, however (at least as far as I can currently recall), this foible or shortcoming did have a material impact, at least on my mood at the time. With 'mood', in my case, equaling 'my entire life, from beginning to end, focusing mostly on my failures'. Which is a lot of weight to put on such a small, round word of Germanic derivation.
When I was in the Air Force, and stationed for a year at the Keflavik Naval Air Base in Iceland, I was supposedly a computer operator, as career fields were then defined. At that point, however, computers were giant lumbering laboratories for miscalculation, more prone to stopping for no apparent reason, than for providing much useful information. What I really worked with was punched card equipment, and my nemesis, counting-wise, was the card sorter.
Once a month, we computer operators had to produce an inventory of everything of any description that the Air Force contingent had, anywhere at all on the Keflavik Naval Air Station. This meant sorting boxes filled with punched cards -- slim lengths of oaktag-like paper slips, each filled with bits of information, in the form of rows of little rectangular holes. The card sorter used a series of small brushes, to 'read' the arrangement of these holes, and then send each individual card sliding into a corresponding slot along the machine's four or five-foot length. Once all the cards had been sorted about a million times, the final arrangement was fed through yet another machine that wasn't really a computer either, so we could print out a paper report, to reassure the bored officers in some office, somewhere across the base's bleak expanse of windblown volcanic rubble, that there were enough cans of beans and rolls of toilet paper for all of us for the rest of the month. (It doesn't matter whether you understand this or not, as long as you find it really boring. Think about it)
And I was to stand at this machine, patiently loading stacks of these punched cards into a feeder, setting the column indicator to read the next appropriate column (one letter, one number at a time, please), and then starting the cards on their whirring sort. Numbers on the cards required only one trip through the reader; letters, composed as they were of two punches, required two. Then the smaller, sorted stacks were gathered, in order, from their little landing slots, and then straightened up, so they could be put back neatly into the feeder, for the next pass, with those reader brushes set to the next column.
Or, as was too often the case, maybe not.
I may have done this particular job correctly once, in the year I was there -- but I also think I'm deluding myself. Much more often, a younger enlisted colleague would be called on to repair the sorting damage I'd accumulate, which repairing usual took this other airman a remarkably short period of time. The pitying glances I invariably got, from this person of inferior rank, would have withered acres of aspens. As far as the punched cards were concerned, I was much better at turning them over, and drawing weird pictures in black grease pencil on their blank backs.
Flashing forward to New York City, in the mid 1980's, and the 39th floor windowsills of the Exxon Building, overlooking the intersection of 6th Avenue and 51st St. I am now the titular supervisor of a team of data-entry clerks, hired to sit at typing terminals from 5 pm until 1 am, keying in expense information for executive spending accounts and other outlays racked up by the employees of Morgan Stanley, 'the whitest of the white shoe investment firms', (which designation-- as none of the managing directors ever sported albino footwear -- made no sense to me at all. But then, I didn't really know what investment banking was either. I just knew that, in one purchase, of an antique demi-lune side table to be used the upper echelon dining room, the company spent more than my annual salary. And those tables aren't even whole, when you think about it), while on the aforementioned windowsills, are being arranged, in what I hope is numerical order, all the taxi vouchers for all the cab rides racked up by all the employees eligible for such a perk, for whatever month preceded the one back into which we imagine that we are now peering. Little wrinkled clumps of thin paper, to be smoothed out and stacked up -- taxi company by taxi company, of course -- and sorted by the red number in the upper right hand corner. A job which was just engaging enough to keep me focused on it, while reminding me that I had been assigned it simply because I was the only employee in the department who had had the gall to go to, and to graduate from, college.
It was one of the most tedious and difficult jobs I ever had to do, while at that job. The notion that the taxi voucher information could be input in any random order, with the computer (we did have remotely recognizable equipment for that, by this time) doing the sorting internally, seemed inaccessible to my manager, who of all my colleagues was the most threatened by the Penn State diploma I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able locate at the time anyway.
On the other hand, what I mostly did, during the dreary hours when the keyboards were clattering, was to stalk around the Morgan Stanley offices, strewn about on different floors of the building, and make art on the various copy machines to which I could easily gain access. I have boxes of these prints upstairs in my attic, and a folder of what I think are remarkable prints done on a now defunct Xerox 360 -- sumptuous smears of lush inks that would make Gerhard Richter a little envious, I suspect.
But I still had to count those damned vouchers. Or, at least, put them into numerical order, which wasn't that much different, really.
Sometimes, though, I have to admit that I do actually count, voluntarily, and on purpose. Or, perhaps more correctly, on purposelessness.
I first happened on counting as a possibly helpful activity, while in graduate school, in Rochester NY, in the early 1990's. I had a considerable round-trip commute to school every day, and the radio in our old maroon Ford LTD didn't work (in solidarity with the heater and the air conditioner and one of the windows), so my own thoughts were my regular driving companions. And one day, for no reason I can remember, I actually listened to what I was thinking about -- I realized that I was in an imaginary courtroom, energetically arguing a case before a judge and jury. The substance of the argument seemed to hinge on some minor imagined driving mistake I'd made, or some other recent wrong I'd committed, but the mental focus and energy expenditure was considerable -- what a lot of concentration I was exerting, on defending myself, to myself, for something that hadn't actually happened!
And then I sort of... came to, I guess. I realized that, for the most part, this was how, probably for years, I had been spending most of my thinking time -- when I wasn't actually doing something that required my full-ish attention. I was in a court room, the judge often none other than the woman I refer to as my horrid grandmother, her pale bitter face hovering above the blackest of judicial robes, behind a high podium...
What a stupid thing to do, I realized. Why on earth, I asked myself, was I spending so much of my time, in these imaginary struggles? Why didn't I... think about something else instead? What could be easier -- to say nothing of more pleasant and perhaps even productive?
But I found, much to my puzzlement, that without these habitual and chronic courtroom fantasies, I really had no idea what I should think about. I did try singing to myself -- bleak old Scottish folk songs about infanticide and adultery and other frivolities -- but that would only work for, at best, half of one portion of my daily journey. So, for lack of anything else to do, I started to count.
At first, I tried to keep a running tally of how far I'd counted, on the trek between my house and one of the school's more remote parking lots and then back again, but as I've already mentioned, my concentration wasn't as reliable as one might like, and eventually I decided that simply counting to 100, over and over again, had just enough focused carelessness to appealed to me. Plus, it used a lot less mental energy than trying to argue my way out of a life sentence because I'd taken a right on red when I wasn't supposed to.
And now this pointless, almost meditative counting has became a habit in its own right. Currently, when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, I count to my favorite target sum of 100, over and over, timing the count at one number per two strides, with the machine set to 4.2 mph., on a 3.5 incline, whatever that means. I suspect though, that I'm actually skipping from, oh, say 49, straight to 80, because I'm not really thinking about the counting at all, but am somehow wandering through a more unruly, wordless part of my brain, exploring an alternate world filled with images borrowed from the treadmill's TV screen, that I mute, and tune to the Discovery Channel. So that, as I make my journey to nowhere but sweatiness, and rack up meaningless numerical sequences, I'm also ruminating on the likelihood that these two particular naked urban-dwelling white folks from America running across a deadly venomous fer-de-lance, right on their path in the Nicaraguan rain forest, as they search desperately for potable water. All the while being trailed by a TV camera crew toting its own weight in bottled H2O. Is it any wonder I might forget whether I've reached 52 or 78, when the cameras are once again lingering on blond Adam's remarkably picturesque, naked posterior?
(I also try using meditation technique which encourages me to imagine that I have no head. But Adam's butt can be such a distraction, even to the headless exerciser)
(Even to the headless exerciser who is, on the one hand, counting meaninglessly and carelessly, and on the other, demarcating sections of the remaining portion of his predicted mortality)
[A Dread Suspicion: As I was driving to the gym today, and in between counting meaninglessly, I had a chilling thought -- in figuring out how many days make up a 70 year life span, did I remember to include the two quarter-days that get tacked onto every year, just because of the earth's wobbly axis or something like that? Actually, now that I think about it, I did factor in these extra partial days, though I may have short-changed myself on this negligible hourly overage...
I'll check the math later. I've already swallowed my meds, and taken off my socks. Tomorrow, as has been remarked upon, is another day...]
© 2014 Walter Zimmerman
I've never been very good at counting, actually. I have a hard time staying focused. It seems such a boring thing to do. My mind continually wants to run off in the direction of a color or smell or random memory, and by the time I've reined in my naughty train of thought, I've forgotten whether I'm at 47 or 79.
This isn't usually too much of a problem, as problems go, in daily life. Twice in my life, however (at least as far as I can currently recall), this foible or shortcoming did have a material impact, at least on my mood at the time. With 'mood', in my case, equaling 'my entire life, from beginning to end, focusing mostly on my failures'. Which is a lot of weight to put on such a small, round word of Germanic derivation.
When I was in the Air Force, and stationed for a year at the Keflavik Naval Air Base in Iceland, I was supposedly a computer operator, as career fields were then defined. At that point, however, computers were giant lumbering laboratories for miscalculation, more prone to stopping for no apparent reason, than for providing much useful information. What I really worked with was punched card equipment, and my nemesis, counting-wise, was the card sorter.
Once a month, we computer operators had to produce an inventory of everything of any description that the Air Force contingent had, anywhere at all on the Keflavik Naval Air Station. This meant sorting boxes filled with punched cards -- slim lengths of oaktag-like paper slips, each filled with bits of information, in the form of rows of little rectangular holes. The card sorter used a series of small brushes, to 'read' the arrangement of these holes, and then send each individual card sliding into a corresponding slot along the machine's four or five-foot length. Once all the cards had been sorted about a million times, the final arrangement was fed through yet another machine that wasn't really a computer either, so we could print out a paper report, to reassure the bored officers in some office, somewhere across the base's bleak expanse of windblown volcanic rubble, that there were enough cans of beans and rolls of toilet paper for all of us for the rest of the month. (It doesn't matter whether you understand this or not, as long as you find it really boring. Think about it)
And I was to stand at this machine, patiently loading stacks of these punched cards into a feeder, setting the column indicator to read the next appropriate column (one letter, one number at a time, please), and then starting the cards on their whirring sort. Numbers on the cards required only one trip through the reader; letters, composed as they were of two punches, required two. Then the smaller, sorted stacks were gathered, in order, from their little landing slots, and then straightened up, so they could be put back neatly into the feeder, for the next pass, with those reader brushes set to the next column.
Or, as was too often the case, maybe not.
I may have done this particular job correctly once, in the year I was there -- but I also think I'm deluding myself. Much more often, a younger enlisted colleague would be called on to repair the sorting damage I'd accumulate, which repairing usual took this other airman a remarkably short period of time. The pitying glances I invariably got, from this person of inferior rank, would have withered acres of aspens. As far as the punched cards were concerned, I was much better at turning them over, and drawing weird pictures in black grease pencil on their blank backs.
Flashing forward to New York City, in the mid 1980's, and the 39th floor windowsills of the Exxon Building, overlooking the intersection of 6th Avenue and 51st St. I am now the titular supervisor of a team of data-entry clerks, hired to sit at typing terminals from 5 pm until 1 am, keying in expense information for executive spending accounts and other outlays racked up by the employees of Morgan Stanley, 'the whitest of the white shoe investment firms', (which designation-- as none of the managing directors ever sported albino footwear -- made no sense to me at all. But then, I didn't really know what investment banking was either. I just knew that, in one purchase, of an antique demi-lune side table to be used the upper echelon dining room, the company spent more than my annual salary. And those tables aren't even whole, when you think about it), while on the aforementioned windowsills, are being arranged, in what I hope is numerical order, all the taxi vouchers for all the cab rides racked up by all the employees eligible for such a perk, for whatever month preceded the one back into which we imagine that we are now peering. Little wrinkled clumps of thin paper, to be smoothed out and stacked up -- taxi company by taxi company, of course -- and sorted by the red number in the upper right hand corner. A job which was just engaging enough to keep me focused on it, while reminding me that I had been assigned it simply because I was the only employee in the department who had had the gall to go to, and to graduate from, college.
It was one of the most tedious and difficult jobs I ever had to do, while at that job. The notion that the taxi voucher information could be input in any random order, with the computer (we did have remotely recognizable equipment for that, by this time) doing the sorting internally, seemed inaccessible to my manager, who of all my colleagues was the most threatened by the Penn State diploma I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able locate at the time anyway.
On the other hand, what I mostly did, during the dreary hours when the keyboards were clattering, was to stalk around the Morgan Stanley offices, strewn about on different floors of the building, and make art on the various copy machines to which I could easily gain access. I have boxes of these prints upstairs in my attic, and a folder of what I think are remarkable prints done on a now defunct Xerox 360 -- sumptuous smears of lush inks that would make Gerhard Richter a little envious, I suspect.
But I still had to count those damned vouchers. Or, at least, put them into numerical order, which wasn't that much different, really.
Sometimes, though, I have to admit that I do actually count, voluntarily, and on purpose. Or, perhaps more correctly, on purposelessness.
I first happened on counting as a possibly helpful activity, while in graduate school, in Rochester NY, in the early 1990's. I had a considerable round-trip commute to school every day, and the radio in our old maroon Ford LTD didn't work (in solidarity with the heater and the air conditioner and one of the windows), so my own thoughts were my regular driving companions. And one day, for no reason I can remember, I actually listened to what I was thinking about -- I realized that I was in an imaginary courtroom, energetically arguing a case before a judge and jury. The substance of the argument seemed to hinge on some minor imagined driving mistake I'd made, or some other recent wrong I'd committed, but the mental focus and energy expenditure was considerable -- what a lot of concentration I was exerting, on defending myself, to myself, for something that hadn't actually happened!
And then I sort of... came to, I guess. I realized that, for the most part, this was how, probably for years, I had been spending most of my thinking time -- when I wasn't actually doing something that required my full-ish attention. I was in a court room, the judge often none other than the woman I refer to as my horrid grandmother, her pale bitter face hovering above the blackest of judicial robes, behind a high podium...
What a stupid thing to do, I realized. Why on earth, I asked myself, was I spending so much of my time, in these imaginary struggles? Why didn't I... think about something else instead? What could be easier -- to say nothing of more pleasant and perhaps even productive?
But I found, much to my puzzlement, that without these habitual and chronic courtroom fantasies, I really had no idea what I should think about. I did try singing to myself -- bleak old Scottish folk songs about infanticide and adultery and other frivolities -- but that would only work for, at best, half of one portion of my daily journey. So, for lack of anything else to do, I started to count.
At first, I tried to keep a running tally of how far I'd counted, on the trek between my house and one of the school's more remote parking lots and then back again, but as I've already mentioned, my concentration wasn't as reliable as one might like, and eventually I decided that simply counting to 100, over and over again, had just enough focused carelessness to appealed to me. Plus, it used a lot less mental energy than trying to argue my way out of a life sentence because I'd taken a right on red when I wasn't supposed to.
And now this pointless, almost meditative counting has became a habit in its own right. Currently, when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, I count to my favorite target sum of 100, over and over, timing the count at one number per two strides, with the machine set to 4.2 mph., on a 3.5 incline, whatever that means. I suspect though, that I'm actually skipping from, oh, say 49, straight to 80, because I'm not really thinking about the counting at all, but am somehow wandering through a more unruly, wordless part of my brain, exploring an alternate world filled with images borrowed from the treadmill's TV screen, that I mute, and tune to the Discovery Channel. So that, as I make my journey to nowhere but sweatiness, and rack up meaningless numerical sequences, I'm also ruminating on the likelihood that these two particular naked urban-dwelling white folks from America running across a deadly venomous fer-de-lance, right on their path in the Nicaraguan rain forest, as they search desperately for potable water. All the while being trailed by a TV camera crew toting its own weight in bottled H2O. Is it any wonder I might forget whether I've reached 52 or 78, when the cameras are once again lingering on blond Adam's remarkably picturesque, naked posterior?
(I also try using meditation technique which encourages me to imagine that I have no head. But Adam's butt can be such a distraction, even to the headless exerciser)
(Even to the headless exerciser who is, on the one hand, counting meaninglessly and carelessly, and on the other, demarcating sections of the remaining portion of his predicted mortality)
[A Dread Suspicion: As I was driving to the gym today, and in between counting meaninglessly, I had a chilling thought -- in figuring out how many days make up a 70 year life span, did I remember to include the two quarter-days that get tacked onto every year, just because of the earth's wobbly axis or something like that? Actually, now that I think about it, I did factor in these extra partial days, though I may have short-changed myself on this negligible hourly overage...
I'll check the math later. I've already swallowed my meds, and taken off my socks. Tomorrow, as has been remarked upon, is another day...]
© 2014 Walter Zimmerman
Sunday, October 19, 2014
727: Too Tired...
Well, day three of my effort to journal through what, according to Biblical sources, should be the last 730 days of my life -- and I'm fairly dropping with exhaustion. Not from having done much today -- well, I did go to the gym, for one of my lighter-than-usual 'Sweeney Todd' workouts -- but just from... gravity? I can't tell.
But I think that, in an uncharacteristic act of charity toward myself, I"m going to let this mini-entry stand, for the time being anyway, as today's contribution to the effort. It's hard enough to write while awake -- writing in my sleep is guaranteed disaster. (I know, because I recently tried writing an email, while is a similar state of near-torpor, and the next day, on reviewing what I'd written, I found that the closer I got to the end, the less sense anything made, until it looked rather like gibberish, or the result of someone leaning on the keyboard several times.
Life is already too short. I'm going to take my medication and go upstairs and lie down, and see what happens next. If it's anything interesting, I"ll tell you tomorrow. If I can...
© 2014, Walter Zimmerman.
But I think that, in an uncharacteristic act of charity toward myself, I"m going to let this mini-entry stand, for the time being anyway, as today's contribution to the effort. It's hard enough to write while awake -- writing in my sleep is guaranteed disaster. (I know, because I recently tried writing an email, while is a similar state of near-torpor, and the next day, on reviewing what I'd written, I found that the closer I got to the end, the less sense anything made, until it looked rather like gibberish, or the result of someone leaning on the keyboard several times.
Life is already too short. I'm going to take my medication and go upstairs and lie down, and see what happens next. If it's anything interesting, I"ll tell you tomorrow. If I can...
© 2014, Walter Zimmerman.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Day 728; The Difference Between Buster And Me
(On the TV, with the sound down low, 'The Black Stallion', on TCM, so no commercials. The ship has just sunk; the boy is picking himself up on the beach, and washing off the pen knife his dad just gave him the night before. I'll probably watch for a while, at least peripherally, until Mickey Rooney shows up)
Buster the Dead Cat keeps coming into the bathroom when I'm there, and butts his little head against my left leg, until I pick him up and put him into the bowl of the old pedestal sink that's one of his favorite places in the house. I turn the cold water to a thin drip, and fill a red plastic cup all the way to the top, and put it in the flat-bottomed basin too. Sometimes Buster keeps his spinkly back legs propped on the lip of the sink, sometimes all four paws are on the sink's bed. Sometimes he drinks from the tap, sometimes he laps up water from the plastic cup. I use an old decommissioned hair brush of mine, to groom his thin sides, astonished that his spine is so pronounced. He purrs while he drinks, and I brush. I try to be gentle, but also try not to miss the hollowed-out places along his flanks, where he's wasted to almost nothing. He purrs anyway.
The vet told me that cats can't possibly drink enough water every day, to meet their hydration needs. So it's at least a bit extra-poignant, to attend to Buster's doomed efforts to satisfy his thirst -- a thirst he couldn't quench, apparently, on even the best of days. But a thirst now magnified by the progressive failure of his little kidneys, to do their designed interior work, of purifying his blood, and pulling toxins from his system. He drinks and purrs anyway.
He'll be dying soon. The vet (why does it bother me that the man refers to Buster as 'she'? Buster is a neutered, dying cat. Why do I always want to mutter 'he', in correction?) says that Buster is in incurable, progressive kidney failure -- apparently, the death of choice for cats that live past the age of two. It's a peaceful, relatively painless death, the vet says -- dogs of his own have died at home, stricken down by the same ailment.
(The boy just woke up on the beach, facing a huge coiled hooded cobra, reared to strike, for no apparent reason. The music assures me that this is a dire situation. The black stallion -- which the boy managed to save from drowning in the shipwreck -- comes up out of nowhere and kills the snake with his own hoofs. I'll have to look up cobras on Wikipedia, I guess)
I'm supposed to hydrate Buster once a day, with 100 cc of saline solution, and feed him somehow, so he'll ingest 1/2 tsp of powdered potassium supplement, to help offset the malign effects of creatinine in his blood -- standing, now, at about six times the highest levels regarded as healthy. To get this medicine into him, I have to mix the powder with wet food, drag Buster from his hiding place, wrap him securely in a bath-towel, hold him on my lap like a little cat-headed rag doll, and force his jaws open with my right thumb, wiping a bit of powder-bearing food into the back of his tongue. It's the only food he gets, as he won't eat on his own. I keep my fingers alongside his mouth, to keep the food from slipping out the side. His ordeal lasts maybe three or four minutes, and then I allow him to struggle loose, and sustain his self-image as an independent creature.
While I was brushing Buster this morning, I thought -- he doesn't know his kidneys are failing him. He doesn't even know he has kidneys, or that I think of him as a cat. He doesn't recognize his own reflection in a mirror. I question whether or not he has what I would consider a self-image -- his world must pretty much end where he stops feeling its impingement on his own body, or as far as his nostrils will take him, when he's sniffing for squirrels from the upstairs bedroom window.
Though I know this about Buster -- his essential ignorance about his own body, whether when it's functioning properly, or as it betrays him -- I would still tell him, if I could, about what is happening, doing my best to convey some awareness of what these physical changes mean, how they're unfolding, and where they're taking him. I would love to give even this painful news to him, as it's currently the only news I can contribute, and if I were him, I believe I'd want to know this.
I would explain to him everything I know about dying, and about death. As I see and feel it, now, this would be the only faithful thing for me to do -- completely in line with daily hydration, and efforts at providing him with nourishment, even if against his will. I would try to be as careful with this news, as I am with the honkin' big hypodermic needle, with its dire point that I have to slide under his skin, between his shoulder blades. I would tell him, the best way I know how.
If, in fact, I knew anything about either of these things, myself, other than their inevitability.
And here's where I get into trouble with orthodoxies of every sort, I think.
Because if I -- poor, fault-ridden, sensorially-deprived, myopic and error-prone human that I am -- would try to explain death to my cat, in the possibly deranged hope that my explanations might bring him some sort of solace -- or, at least, give some structure and meaning to what I am supposing to be his suffering -- then what does this say, with regard to God's monumental silence, at least so far as I know, on the same topic, with regard to me and all my human relatives?
Or, to be a bit more focused on questions I rarely hear asked, what does this say about the motives and means of the countless (mostly) men and women, who for centuries have told themselves and anyone else who'll listen, just what it is that God will or won't do, does or doesn't like, might or might not provide, if only... (Insert some human activity here, often including the donation of money).
I'm tempted, by language and culture, to rail about a careless God, or perhaps about the nonexistence of any kind of deity at all. But, given the barrage of ever-emerging facts about the enormity of what we try to think of as our universe -- given the imponderable expanses, and the inconceivable quantities of distance and time involved, in merely trying to explain, in mundane terms, where one particular galaxy might be located -- I am prone to making the possibly counter-intuitive leap -- if there is, say, a Designer behind all this, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that some entity with such a vast playing field might not, at the same time, have the keenest awareness of the tiniest cluster of neurons in the lower part of my right heel? To me, the possibility of such an apparent contradiction is unquestionable.
The evidence of such an awareness -- or, perhaps I need to be really specific here -- the evidence of a caring awareness -- is slender to non-existent. And it's certainly a waste of my dwindling time, to go around shaking my fist in frustration at what a dumb God we've gone and gotten ourselves.
What I can lament, however, and with more justification -- though to as little effect, of course -- is the relentless egotism and self importance of those other mere error-prone, sensorially-deprived, myopic and fault-ridden human beings who've told me, in any manner of ways, to expect something that plain observation, and the merest rudimentary grasp of human history, must show to be ludicrous at best, and pathetic and cruel at worst.
And here I am, trying to keep my eyes open, while feeling my stomach churn at the unthinkable, and feeling lonely as ever -- facing the great terror, with not even the poor assistance, the simplest of kindnesses, that I would, if I could, provide for my poor, stupid, abandoned, and now fatally ill, trusting little red cat.
Who somehow manages to purr anyway. And, silly though it seems, in this, he's providing far more comfort for me, than I could ever hope to do, equipped as I am, for him.
(Uh-oh -- Mickey Rooney's turned up. Time to iron shirts and stuff...)
© Walter Zimmerman 2014
Buster the Dead Cat keeps coming into the bathroom when I'm there, and butts his little head against my left leg, until I pick him up and put him into the bowl of the old pedestal sink that's one of his favorite places in the house. I turn the cold water to a thin drip, and fill a red plastic cup all the way to the top, and put it in the flat-bottomed basin too. Sometimes Buster keeps his spinkly back legs propped on the lip of the sink, sometimes all four paws are on the sink's bed. Sometimes he drinks from the tap, sometimes he laps up water from the plastic cup. I use an old decommissioned hair brush of mine, to groom his thin sides, astonished that his spine is so pronounced. He purrs while he drinks, and I brush. I try to be gentle, but also try not to miss the hollowed-out places along his flanks, where he's wasted to almost nothing. He purrs anyway.
The vet told me that cats can't possibly drink enough water every day, to meet their hydration needs. So it's at least a bit extra-poignant, to attend to Buster's doomed efforts to satisfy his thirst -- a thirst he couldn't quench, apparently, on even the best of days. But a thirst now magnified by the progressive failure of his little kidneys, to do their designed interior work, of purifying his blood, and pulling toxins from his system. He drinks and purrs anyway.
He'll be dying soon. The vet (why does it bother me that the man refers to Buster as 'she'? Buster is a neutered, dying cat. Why do I always want to mutter 'he', in correction?) says that Buster is in incurable, progressive kidney failure -- apparently, the death of choice for cats that live past the age of two. It's a peaceful, relatively painless death, the vet says -- dogs of his own have died at home, stricken down by the same ailment.
(The boy just woke up on the beach, facing a huge coiled hooded cobra, reared to strike, for no apparent reason. The music assures me that this is a dire situation. The black stallion -- which the boy managed to save from drowning in the shipwreck -- comes up out of nowhere and kills the snake with his own hoofs. I'll have to look up cobras on Wikipedia, I guess)
I'm supposed to hydrate Buster once a day, with 100 cc of saline solution, and feed him somehow, so he'll ingest 1/2 tsp of powdered potassium supplement, to help offset the malign effects of creatinine in his blood -- standing, now, at about six times the highest levels regarded as healthy. To get this medicine into him, I have to mix the powder with wet food, drag Buster from his hiding place, wrap him securely in a bath-towel, hold him on my lap like a little cat-headed rag doll, and force his jaws open with my right thumb, wiping a bit of powder-bearing food into the back of his tongue. It's the only food he gets, as he won't eat on his own. I keep my fingers alongside his mouth, to keep the food from slipping out the side. His ordeal lasts maybe three or four minutes, and then I allow him to struggle loose, and sustain his self-image as an independent creature.
While I was brushing Buster this morning, I thought -- he doesn't know his kidneys are failing him. He doesn't even know he has kidneys, or that I think of him as a cat. He doesn't recognize his own reflection in a mirror. I question whether or not he has what I would consider a self-image -- his world must pretty much end where he stops feeling its impingement on his own body, or as far as his nostrils will take him, when he's sniffing for squirrels from the upstairs bedroom window.
Though I know this about Buster -- his essential ignorance about his own body, whether when it's functioning properly, or as it betrays him -- I would still tell him, if I could, about what is happening, doing my best to convey some awareness of what these physical changes mean, how they're unfolding, and where they're taking him. I would love to give even this painful news to him, as it's currently the only news I can contribute, and if I were him, I believe I'd want to know this.
I would explain to him everything I know about dying, and about death. As I see and feel it, now, this would be the only faithful thing for me to do -- completely in line with daily hydration, and efforts at providing him with nourishment, even if against his will. I would try to be as careful with this news, as I am with the honkin' big hypodermic needle, with its dire point that I have to slide under his skin, between his shoulder blades. I would tell him, the best way I know how.
If, in fact, I knew anything about either of these things, myself, other than their inevitability.
And here's where I get into trouble with orthodoxies of every sort, I think.
Because if I -- poor, fault-ridden, sensorially-deprived, myopic and error-prone human that I am -- would try to explain death to my cat, in the possibly deranged hope that my explanations might bring him some sort of solace -- or, at least, give some structure and meaning to what I am supposing to be his suffering -- then what does this say, with regard to God's monumental silence, at least so far as I know, on the same topic, with regard to me and all my human relatives?
Or, to be a bit more focused on questions I rarely hear asked, what does this say about the motives and means of the countless (mostly) men and women, who for centuries have told themselves and anyone else who'll listen, just what it is that God will or won't do, does or doesn't like, might or might not provide, if only... (Insert some human activity here, often including the donation of money).
I'm tempted, by language and culture, to rail about a careless God, or perhaps about the nonexistence of any kind of deity at all. But, given the barrage of ever-emerging facts about the enormity of what we try to think of as our universe -- given the imponderable expanses, and the inconceivable quantities of distance and time involved, in merely trying to explain, in mundane terms, where one particular galaxy might be located -- I am prone to making the possibly counter-intuitive leap -- if there is, say, a Designer behind all this, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that some entity with such a vast playing field might not, at the same time, have the keenest awareness of the tiniest cluster of neurons in the lower part of my right heel? To me, the possibility of such an apparent contradiction is unquestionable.
The evidence of such an awareness -- or, perhaps I need to be really specific here -- the evidence of a caring awareness -- is slender to non-existent. And it's certainly a waste of my dwindling time, to go around shaking my fist in frustration at what a dumb God we've gone and gotten ourselves.
What I can lament, however, and with more justification -- though to as little effect, of course -- is the relentless egotism and self importance of those other mere error-prone, sensorially-deprived, myopic and fault-ridden human beings who've told me, in any manner of ways, to expect something that plain observation, and the merest rudimentary grasp of human history, must show to be ludicrous at best, and pathetic and cruel at worst.
And here I am, trying to keep my eyes open, while feeling my stomach churn at the unthinkable, and feeling lonely as ever -- facing the great terror, with not even the poor assistance, the simplest of kindnesses, that I would, if I could, provide for my poor, stupid, abandoned, and now fatally ill, trusting little red cat.
Who somehow manages to purr anyway. And, silly though it seems, in this, he's providing far more comfort for me, than I could ever hope to do, equipped as I am, for him.
(Uh-oh -- Mickey Rooney's turned up. Time to iron shirts and stuff...)
© Walter Zimmerman 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Day 729...
Oh dear -- a blog about running out of time, and I'm already running out of time to write about running out of time. I hope someone somewhere finds this amusing, because I certainly don't.
One of the things I thought I could explore, in the beginnings of this journey, is the list of things with which, as of the achievement of my 70th year, and supposedly my last day alive, I will no longer have to concern myself. As i must leave the house in about fifteen minutes, this topic seems ideal, as I can stop it anywhere I like, and resume it whenever and wherever it suits me. A privilege of being on the way out, I think.
So, without any further ado than is absolutely necessary, it begins.
I will only have to make two more Christmas shopping lists, and worry about not having bought a single thing on either of them, come Christmas eve.
I only have two more years of hearing complaints about how early the Christmas decorations are going up this year.
I will never again have to concern myself with anything remotely related to, redolent of, or tasting like, pumpkin spice.
I will no long have to worry about how old I look, or whether or not I'll have to start wearing those shapeless tan trousers that older men seem to be able to find, in some awful store I don't yet know about.
I won't have to worry about not understanding constant references to TV shows and characters and plot lines for shows I'm only barely aware of, and have never seen.
I won't have to see what happens next, as the standards of public taste continue to shift, and I am now watching commercials about women having uncomfortably dry intercourse. Or, to avoid being sexist, watching impossibly buff young men take showers and then shave, and look all the while like unconcerned young gods, because that's essentially what they are. At least for the time being.
I will no longer have to worry about what it is that's going bad in the refrigerator.
I will never again have to change the cat litter.
I won't have to touch a snow shovel, unless there's some possible contact between the dead and the living, in which case, touching a snow shovel is all I'm likely to do.
I won't have to worry about losing my glasses at least... (50 times 739...) 36,950 times in the space of roughly two years.
I won't have to concern myself about where my cell phone is, or whether it currently has a charge or not.
I won't have to secretly worry about not completely understanding just what an app really is.
I will no longer have to sit in a car, on a trip to a local party, in a neighborhood unfamiliar to us, and listen to Cyrus (we gave Siri a boy voice) interrupting our conversations with inane, useless instructions to turn left in 600 feet, by which time we've already gone too far...
I only have two more autumn leaf rakings to face.
I will never again have to visit a dentist.
I will never again get a flat tire, or have the transmission give out on me.
I will never again miss a train -- or even be just a minute too late for the last one for the next three hours, and the air conditioning is off in the Amtrak waiting room...
I won't have to worry about being late for something, even though I'm leaving fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but because driving on the Garden State Parkway is almost always a foretaste of Hell with Cars, I will still probably arrive later than if I'd waited half an hour.
I can ignore spell check.
I can keep my unblemished record of never having sent one single tweet during my entire human existence, and can brag about having only texted once -- a four-letter name, which ended up being a useless operation because soon thereafter, I lost my phone.
I will never again have to make the decision about when it's time to put a pet to sleep.
I will never again have to use euphemisms for killing my pets.
I can stop wondering whether my oven cooks too hot, or too cold, and just where the perfect place is, to set the pan of lasagna, so it doesn't burn on the bottom while staying raw on the top.
I won't have to worry about the escalating price of romano cheese -- or anything else, for that matter.
I won't have to worry about remembering a new acquaintance's name.
I won't have to wipe down the gym equipment after I've done my crunches in the Strive Room.
I will no longer need a parking space.
I will no longer need deodorant, or toothpaste, or moisturizer, or shampoo, or bath soap, or dish detergent, or postage stamps, or whole black pepper.
I won't have to worry about whether something's been grown locally, or bussed in on a huge, exhaust-belching eighteen-wheeler.
I will no longer have to search through the mess on the kitchen table, to find something that, by the time I've looked through everything, I've already forgotten what I was looking for in the first place.
Oops -- I'm two minutes over my self-imposed time limit. Which, when you think about it, is pretty hilarious, because our measuring of time is totally connected of the spin of our planet in space. How weird to think that I'm coordinating my miniscule life with the rotation of an entire populated glove, whirling through space. Kind of makes ATM machines and passwords and correct change seem paltry, don't you think?
Now, I'm off, and if the gods are kind (or vengeful) I'll be back tomorrow, to continue the countdown, to Day One... I can barely wait...
©˙ Walter Zimmerman 2014 (See, I told you I'd get it right. But I had to ask John...)
One of the things I thought I could explore, in the beginnings of this journey, is the list of things with which, as of the achievement of my 70th year, and supposedly my last day alive, I will no longer have to concern myself. As i must leave the house in about fifteen minutes, this topic seems ideal, as I can stop it anywhere I like, and resume it whenever and wherever it suits me. A privilege of being on the way out, I think.
So, without any further ado than is absolutely necessary, it begins.
I will only have to make two more Christmas shopping lists, and worry about not having bought a single thing on either of them, come Christmas eve.
I only have two more years of hearing complaints about how early the Christmas decorations are going up this year.
I will never again have to concern myself with anything remotely related to, redolent of, or tasting like, pumpkin spice.
I will no long have to worry about how old I look, or whether or not I'll have to start wearing those shapeless tan trousers that older men seem to be able to find, in some awful store I don't yet know about.
I won't have to worry about not understanding constant references to TV shows and characters and plot lines for shows I'm only barely aware of, and have never seen.
I won't have to see what happens next, as the standards of public taste continue to shift, and I am now watching commercials about women having uncomfortably dry intercourse. Or, to avoid being sexist, watching impossibly buff young men take showers and then shave, and look all the while like unconcerned young gods, because that's essentially what they are. At least for the time being.
I will no longer have to worry about what it is that's going bad in the refrigerator.
I will never again have to change the cat litter.
I won't have to touch a snow shovel, unless there's some possible contact between the dead and the living, in which case, touching a snow shovel is all I'm likely to do.
I won't have to worry about losing my glasses at least... (50 times 739...) 36,950 times in the space of roughly two years.
I won't have to concern myself about where my cell phone is, or whether it currently has a charge or not.
I won't have to secretly worry about not completely understanding just what an app really is.
I will no longer have to sit in a car, on a trip to a local party, in a neighborhood unfamiliar to us, and listen to Cyrus (we gave Siri a boy voice) interrupting our conversations with inane, useless instructions to turn left in 600 feet, by which time we've already gone too far...
I only have two more autumn leaf rakings to face.
I will never again have to visit a dentist.
I will never again get a flat tire, or have the transmission give out on me.
I will never again miss a train -- or even be just a minute too late for the last one for the next three hours, and the air conditioning is off in the Amtrak waiting room...
I won't have to worry about being late for something, even though I'm leaving fifteen minutes earlier than usual, but because driving on the Garden State Parkway is almost always a foretaste of Hell with Cars, I will still probably arrive later than if I'd waited half an hour.
I can ignore spell check.
I can keep my unblemished record of never having sent one single tweet during my entire human existence, and can brag about having only texted once -- a four-letter name, which ended up being a useless operation because soon thereafter, I lost my phone.
I will never again have to make the decision about when it's time to put a pet to sleep.
I will never again have to use euphemisms for killing my pets.
I can stop wondering whether my oven cooks too hot, or too cold, and just where the perfect place is, to set the pan of lasagna, so it doesn't burn on the bottom while staying raw on the top.
I won't have to worry about the escalating price of romano cheese -- or anything else, for that matter.
I won't have to worry about remembering a new acquaintance's name.
I won't have to wipe down the gym equipment after I've done my crunches in the Strive Room.
I will no longer need a parking space.
I will no longer need deodorant, or toothpaste, or moisturizer, or shampoo, or bath soap, or dish detergent, or postage stamps, or whole black pepper.
I won't have to worry about whether something's been grown locally, or bussed in on a huge, exhaust-belching eighteen-wheeler.
I will no longer have to search through the mess on the kitchen table, to find something that, by the time I've looked through everything, I've already forgotten what I was looking for in the first place.
Oops -- I'm two minutes over my self-imposed time limit. Which, when you think about it, is pretty hilarious, because our measuring of time is totally connected of the spin of our planet in space. How weird to think that I'm coordinating my miniscule life with the rotation of an entire populated glove, whirling through space. Kind of makes ATM machines and passwords and correct change seem paltry, don't you think?
Now, I'm off, and if the gods are kind (or vengeful) I'll be back tomorrow, to continue the countdown, to Day One... I can barely wait...
©˙ Walter Zimmerman 2014 (See, I told you I'd get it right. But I had to ask John...)
Thursday, October 16, 2014
I'm Just A... Corpse In Training...
Hello, and welcome to what I'm expecting to be a long good-bye note.
68 years ago today, at about this very minute, my head had collapsed into itself, my shoulders had hunched forward, closing around my inner organs, and I was being forced down through my mother's birth canal.
68 years ago today, about now, my collapsed head was probably emerging into what we all now think of as 'the real world'; those soft bones were resuming their more or less globe-like shape, and the attending doctor, in the delivery room of St. Margaret's Hospital, in Montgomery AL, was probably thinking about something else, while the rest of my wrinkled little body followed.
68 years ago today, right about now, the attending nurse -- who may or may not have also been a nun -- wrote my given name, my length and weight, and other information about me, on an official birth certificate, giving the time as 3:40 pm, the date as October 16th, in the year of 1946.
Today, I'm lounging on a hand-me-down sofa that just fits into our den, with 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' muted on the TV. (I've already seen this episode anyway, and there's no projectile vomiting in it...) I'm dressed in stained khaki-colored camouflage cargo short, an A-shirt with a little stain in the front, and the cheapest flip flops I've ever had, that I bought out of desperation, in a general store outside Trenton ME, last summer, just before the transmission on the Honda Odyssey gave out, and I had to have it towed, at 6:30 in the morning, all the way up to Portland, to see whether or not I would be driving back to New Jersey, or filing a change of address notice.
Today, I weigh 194 lb, stand at 6'2" and change, and am more or less left-handed. These, on a list of innumerable details which would have been unknowable, not only to that squalling wet new human, but, in all likelihood, to everyone else in that room. If not in the state of Alabama. If not, in fact, in the whole world.
But you already knew that.
What you may not know -- just yet -- is that, having reached the age of 68 (having, as the Swedes say, 'filled 68 years'), and, according to Psalm 90, Verse 10, in the King James version of the Christian Bible, 'The days of our years are three-score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.', it seems that I now have... 730 days to live.
And I thought -- well, this is as good a time as any of whatever time I still have left, to start writing about -- well, probably almost anything, really. But mostly about this dour countdown, and whatever may happen as the hours tick away.
My own life span's neglibility became evident to me, was maybe around 2 am, on some weekday, in the autumn of 1978. I was working the midnight shift, sitting in the computer room, on the eighth floor of the main building of the Rhode Island State Department of Employment Security, absently minding the IBM 360 as it chuckled through its calculations of how many Rhode Island residents were and weren't working that month. Rumor had it that the numbers were fixed; I didn't really care -- I was working there to save money, so I could move to New York and pursue a career in the theater.
But on that particular day, I didn't have enough saved yet, to be able to achieve lift-off, and as I performed my official duties, I was likely to think about any number of things. It just so happened that, on that particular day, I'd happened on an article in the local paper, about one billion dollars.
It was one of those whimsical bits of fluff that show up in the media with a certain degree of regularity, along with stories on local psychics and haunted city buildings and amazing child artists we somehow never hear about ever again. This particular author had apparently figured out exactly how big a room I would need, if I wanted to store my billion one dollar bills in one place, or how tall a stack of those single dollar bills would be, if I wanted to pile my billion dollars up, one bill at a time. I learned how many times my billion dollars would stretch around the earth's equator, if I were to lay them end-to-end, and could somehow get them to stay there. (I don't think this figure included changes in altitude, like the mountains in Ecuador for instance, it only occurred to me sometime later) I also learned how close to the moon that same line of one billion one dollar bills, laid end to end, would get.
None of this was very interesting to me, though, as not one of these things were what I would typically do with my own money -- which of course never approached anything like even the very leading edge of billion-dollar-hood. All I do with my money, aside from wadding it up in my front pocket, and probably dropping the odd $5 or $10 from time to time, out of sheer slovenliness, is spend it.
So I thought I'd figure out, for myself, how long it would take, to spend one billion dollars, if I were born with exactly that much money in a bank account, and I had to spend it, in equal daily outlays, for the full extent of the biblical threescore and ten. (I double-checked the wording of that particular verse in the Bible I was given in September of 1956, almost ten years after my head had collapsed and then popped back into shape again, and while I was living in an orphanage in Mars PA. But I think I'll follow that particular tangent a bit later. Should there be a later, that is) I did the simple math, with a ballpoint pen, on a sheet of blank paper -- totting up just how many days there are, in 70 years. I figured the division would more or less take care of itself.
My midpoint, in solving the math problem, turned out to be 25, 567 and one-quarter days, which comprise the 70 years during which I would spend this actually unimaginable imaginary sum of money (no interest coming in, no days off...). And the final answer, of what I would have to spend, on a daily basis, to go through one billion dollars in my seventy years, turned out to be $39,112.53.
I was going to write my own article on the topic, breaking down just how long it would take, for that newborn -- or, at least, that newborn's trustworthy adult proxies -- to pay for round-the-clock nursing care, until it was no longer needed, and housing, and food, and clothes and other necessities. But thinking, in terms of a lifetime, instead of a period of about two weeks. So I tossed in a college education, and a car, and maybe another car....
But by that time I wasn't really interested in the billion dollars anymore. I was more deeply struck by this measly number: a lousy 25,567 days. And six hours. Of which paltry number, I had already 'spent', I guess you'd say, a little more than half.
So, now, the inevitable countdown begins. Why not? I'm in relatively good health, I think. I am playing host to a pacemaker, its miniscule copper corkscrew-tipped wires burrowed into the muscle walls of my right auricle and ventricle, helping my heart pumping at a regular pace. I may have the beginnings of macular degenration, although my wonderful opthalmologist can't quite be sure, until maybe five years from now. (I don't have the heart to tell her she'd best not plan my appointment schedule too far ahead -- that's way over budget, time-wise) I take some antidepressants and anxiety-relief medications every day, and the thought of having even these more or less benign drugs in my system makes me a little nervous. I make myself go to the gym at least twice a week. I've only smoked seven cigarettes in my entire life, which resulted in my throwing up in the rose bushes planted in the front yard of one of the coolest kids in my high school, who'd invited me over to a graduation day party at her house, probably only because high school was over. I'm in a long-term relationship, which will clock in at a monstrous 29 years next May, if I manage to behave.
I worship coffee. I hate going to bed. I expect the worst, pretty much at all times. I'm plagued with shame and guilt, which I suspect that all the medicines in the world would not significantly reduce for anything but the briefest periods. I may drive too fast, but I rationalize it as decisiveness, and a conscious effort to avoid wasting anyone's time. I think about suicide on a more or less steady basis. I'm immensely impatient, and harbor deep reserves of anger. I'm sure there are some other things wrong with me too, but I can't remember what they are. Which, of course, is probably one of them.
I would like, for the remaining time, to continue to witness, via this blog, the dwindling of the sand in my particular little hourglass. Or, as it looks to me now, my particular little egg timer. I would prefer to speak openly, but I probably won't. I'm not wild about getting comments on my writing, because I'm basically a coward and a snob, in pretty much equal proportions, and I very rarely read them anyway. I'm more likely to divert myself with old movies, and episodes of Project Runway...
But now I've got to go to Madison NJ, for my weekly talk therapy appointment, with my new-ish therapist, Joe, whose own birthday was yesterday. (Say hi, Joe!) I was going to make some cookies, for us, but I went to the thrift store instead. I'm arriving early, so I can maybe treat myself to a better-than-usual meal -- although I'll probably go to the coffee shop instead, and spend the extra time, playing on this neat-o laptop computer, which John gave me for my birthday two years ago, and which is substantially smaller, and significantly lighter, than the wet, squirmy red baby boy I was, 68 years ago.
Or, to be thematically correct, as I was, exactly 24,320 days ago, today.
(Copyright, 2014, by Walter Zimmerman) (I'll put the correct copyright thingie here, when I remember how to do it...)
68 years ago today, at about this very minute, my head had collapsed into itself, my shoulders had hunched forward, closing around my inner organs, and I was being forced down through my mother's birth canal.
68 years ago today, about now, my collapsed head was probably emerging into what we all now think of as 'the real world'; those soft bones were resuming their more or less globe-like shape, and the attending doctor, in the delivery room of St. Margaret's Hospital, in Montgomery AL, was probably thinking about something else, while the rest of my wrinkled little body followed.
68 years ago today, right about now, the attending nurse -- who may or may not have also been a nun -- wrote my given name, my length and weight, and other information about me, on an official birth certificate, giving the time as 3:40 pm, the date as October 16th, in the year of 1946.
Today, I'm lounging on a hand-me-down sofa that just fits into our den, with 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' muted on the TV. (I've already seen this episode anyway, and there's no projectile vomiting in it...) I'm dressed in stained khaki-colored camouflage cargo short, an A-shirt with a little stain in the front, and the cheapest flip flops I've ever had, that I bought out of desperation, in a general store outside Trenton ME, last summer, just before the transmission on the Honda Odyssey gave out, and I had to have it towed, at 6:30 in the morning, all the way up to Portland, to see whether or not I would be driving back to New Jersey, or filing a change of address notice.
Today, I weigh 194 lb, stand at 6'2" and change, and am more or less left-handed. These, on a list of innumerable details which would have been unknowable, not only to that squalling wet new human, but, in all likelihood, to everyone else in that room. If not in the state of Alabama. If not, in fact, in the whole world.
But you already knew that.
What you may not know -- just yet -- is that, having reached the age of 68 (having, as the Swedes say, 'filled 68 years'), and, according to Psalm 90, Verse 10, in the King James version of the Christian Bible, 'The days of our years are three-score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.', it seems that I now have... 730 days to live.
And I thought -- well, this is as good a time as any of whatever time I still have left, to start writing about -- well, probably almost anything, really. But mostly about this dour countdown, and whatever may happen as the hours tick away.
My own life span's neglibility became evident to me, was maybe around 2 am, on some weekday, in the autumn of 1978. I was working the midnight shift, sitting in the computer room, on the eighth floor of the main building of the Rhode Island State Department of Employment Security, absently minding the IBM 360 as it chuckled through its calculations of how many Rhode Island residents were and weren't working that month. Rumor had it that the numbers were fixed; I didn't really care -- I was working there to save money, so I could move to New York and pursue a career in the theater.
But on that particular day, I didn't have enough saved yet, to be able to achieve lift-off, and as I performed my official duties, I was likely to think about any number of things. It just so happened that, on that particular day, I'd happened on an article in the local paper, about one billion dollars.
It was one of those whimsical bits of fluff that show up in the media with a certain degree of regularity, along with stories on local psychics and haunted city buildings and amazing child artists we somehow never hear about ever again. This particular author had apparently figured out exactly how big a room I would need, if I wanted to store my billion one dollar bills in one place, or how tall a stack of those single dollar bills would be, if I wanted to pile my billion dollars up, one bill at a time. I learned how many times my billion dollars would stretch around the earth's equator, if I were to lay them end-to-end, and could somehow get them to stay there. (I don't think this figure included changes in altitude, like the mountains in Ecuador for instance, it only occurred to me sometime later) I also learned how close to the moon that same line of one billion one dollar bills, laid end to end, would get.
None of this was very interesting to me, though, as not one of these things were what I would typically do with my own money -- which of course never approached anything like even the very leading edge of billion-dollar-hood. All I do with my money, aside from wadding it up in my front pocket, and probably dropping the odd $5 or $10 from time to time, out of sheer slovenliness, is spend it.
So I thought I'd figure out, for myself, how long it would take, to spend one billion dollars, if I were born with exactly that much money in a bank account, and I had to spend it, in equal daily outlays, for the full extent of the biblical threescore and ten. (I double-checked the wording of that particular verse in the Bible I was given in September of 1956, almost ten years after my head had collapsed and then popped back into shape again, and while I was living in an orphanage in Mars PA. But I think I'll follow that particular tangent a bit later. Should there be a later, that is) I did the simple math, with a ballpoint pen, on a sheet of blank paper -- totting up just how many days there are, in 70 years. I figured the division would more or less take care of itself.
My midpoint, in solving the math problem, turned out to be 25, 567 and one-quarter days, which comprise the 70 years during which I would spend this actually unimaginable imaginary sum of money (no interest coming in, no days off...). And the final answer, of what I would have to spend, on a daily basis, to go through one billion dollars in my seventy years, turned out to be $39,112.53.
I was going to write my own article on the topic, breaking down just how long it would take, for that newborn -- or, at least, that newborn's trustworthy adult proxies -- to pay for round-the-clock nursing care, until it was no longer needed, and housing, and food, and clothes and other necessities. But thinking, in terms of a lifetime, instead of a period of about two weeks. So I tossed in a college education, and a car, and maybe another car....
But by that time I wasn't really interested in the billion dollars anymore. I was more deeply struck by this measly number: a lousy 25,567 days. And six hours. Of which paltry number, I had already 'spent', I guess you'd say, a little more than half.
So, now, the inevitable countdown begins. Why not? I'm in relatively good health, I think. I am playing host to a pacemaker, its miniscule copper corkscrew-tipped wires burrowed into the muscle walls of my right auricle and ventricle, helping my heart pumping at a regular pace. I may have the beginnings of macular degenration, although my wonderful opthalmologist can't quite be sure, until maybe five years from now. (I don't have the heart to tell her she'd best not plan my appointment schedule too far ahead -- that's way over budget, time-wise) I take some antidepressants and anxiety-relief medications every day, and the thought of having even these more or less benign drugs in my system makes me a little nervous. I make myself go to the gym at least twice a week. I've only smoked seven cigarettes in my entire life, which resulted in my throwing up in the rose bushes planted in the front yard of one of the coolest kids in my high school, who'd invited me over to a graduation day party at her house, probably only because high school was over. I'm in a long-term relationship, which will clock in at a monstrous 29 years next May, if I manage to behave.
I worship coffee. I hate going to bed. I expect the worst, pretty much at all times. I'm plagued with shame and guilt, which I suspect that all the medicines in the world would not significantly reduce for anything but the briefest periods. I may drive too fast, but I rationalize it as decisiveness, and a conscious effort to avoid wasting anyone's time. I think about suicide on a more or less steady basis. I'm immensely impatient, and harbor deep reserves of anger. I'm sure there are some other things wrong with me too, but I can't remember what they are. Which, of course, is probably one of them.
I would like, for the remaining time, to continue to witness, via this blog, the dwindling of the sand in my particular little hourglass. Or, as it looks to me now, my particular little egg timer. I would prefer to speak openly, but I probably won't. I'm not wild about getting comments on my writing, because I'm basically a coward and a snob, in pretty much equal proportions, and I very rarely read them anyway. I'm more likely to divert myself with old movies, and episodes of Project Runway...
But now I've got to go to Madison NJ, for my weekly talk therapy appointment, with my new-ish therapist, Joe, whose own birthday was yesterday. (Say hi, Joe!) I was going to make some cookies, for us, but I went to the thrift store instead. I'm arriving early, so I can maybe treat myself to a better-than-usual meal -- although I'll probably go to the coffee shop instead, and spend the extra time, playing on this neat-o laptop computer, which John gave me for my birthday two years ago, and which is substantially smaller, and significantly lighter, than the wet, squirmy red baby boy I was, 68 years ago.
Or, to be thematically correct, as I was, exactly 24,320 days ago, today.
(Copyright, 2014, by Walter Zimmerman) (I'll put the correct copyright thingie here, when I remember how to do it...)
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)