Old punks

inverted drafting via wired

Despite his best efforts not to oversell the Angels, many readers felt a strong kinship with them. Thompson received countless letters from fans inquiring about club membership. To one teenage fan, Thompson provided strong cautionary words. “The best of the Angels,” he wrote in a letter dated July 6, 1967, “the guys you might want to sit down and talk to, have almost all played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who left are almost all the kind who can't do anything else, and they're not much fun to talk to. They're not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They're just Old Punks, and that's a lot worse than being a Young Punk.”

Marc Weingarten - The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution

I never had any plans beyond a certain lifestyle

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

The hate grows ever bigger

gerhard richter

the grandmother's role is the soothing role.
that's why granny is liked so much by the children. granny is always disliked by husband and wife, because she interferes.
her own husband, the grandad, hates granny, first of all because he always already hated her when he was younger, which an old much-loved habit, which one cannot give up so easily, and one keeps up this hatred in old age, because what does one have in old age after all, nothing except one's good old tried tested hate.
and the hate grows ever bigger, because the granny has long ago lost her only capital, a beauty which was perhaps present. granny was devalued. grandad, the worn out old duffer, long ago lost the other younger women to other worn out but younger men, who are still able to earn a living.
the younger women won't risk their secure existence at the side of these younger men for an old bugger like him.
so grandad too dies away, more slowly and more drawn-out than his almost-dead wife, but anyhow; dying is dying, lost is lost and gone. and one's own wife will always remind one of the decline from young lad to dirty old man.

Women As Lovers, Elfriede Jelinek, p82

Midway upon the journey of our life

henry miller
paul ryan photography

So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, "Life! life! Eternal life!" So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain.

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

39.5 = 51%

tokyo undressed

In six months I'll be 40, which is exciting because it's a) better than the alternative, and b) I should be getting there in better condition - by all metrics - than I ever would have thought possible from the ages of 0 - 35, possibly even later. Life expectancy for a 40-yr old British male is 77.

Not having kids, and not hanging out with folk who do, it's easy to forget about aging. There are few external things of consequence that I see changing in anything other than a cyclical way. The seasons come and go, the years pass, but having dropped out of fashion and popular music, everything pretty much stays the same aside from the constant parade of techno-novelty that's now so ingrained as to just be how things are. The point is, I don't have a kid who not long ago was a mewling infant and is now autonomous and who'll soon be a little adult. In this way I've fallen slightly out of time.

So I was a little shocked the other night when I went for a bowl of ramen and sat across from a mother and her son, about 10 yrs old. Now I plan to live a long time. In all my accounting I aim for 90+, although looking at my family I'm only likely to get 80 or so. Still, I exercise and try and eat right, because good health is always good, and hard-living loses much of it's romance well before middle age, crisis binges notwithstanding. So, if I make it to 90 this kid will be 60, and he'll still have me beat, and I'll die first, while everyone else goes on living.

I looked at the kid and took it as a challenge.

Middle-age

a painting of some prickly pears by rudy rucker

When someone twice your age dies of natural causes and you're not surprised, then you're officially middle-aged [or older].

As healthy as possible

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That's my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body. This might sound paradoxical, but it's something I've felt very keenly ever since becoming a professional writer. The healthy and the unhealthy are not necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. They don't stand in opposition to each other, but rather complement each other, and in some cases even band together. Sure, many people who are on a healthy track in life think only of good health, while those who are getting unhealthy think only of that. But if you follow this sort of one-sided view, your life won't be fruitful.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, p98

Recently I've met a number of people who say they want to die at 60 or 70. Myself, I want to be 90-something and in good health. It probably won't happen, but I want to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

Still, dying is not very difficult, it's not something you need to plan 20 or 30 years before the event. It's as easy as getting a haircut. You can open an artery, take an overdose, drive into a wall, jump off a tall building, inhale gas, hang yourself. There are enough ways to die that everyone is sure to find one that they can accept.

Of course, I got into this discussion with between five and eight beers in me, and then rode my bicycle home at 04:30, but at least if I'd been hit by a truck my body would have been working well right up until the moment of impact.

Narrative fallacy

Going through my notes from the UK trip, so things may appear to be out of order

Garbo

Other than occasionally and subconsciously, the past has very little meaning for me. It's an effort to go back there, and rarely worth it. Every five years or so my life starts again, and the people and the places that I knew either leave or are left. I'm out of the habit of dwelling on the past, and now it feels forced and ridiculous, like watching TV after years of not having one.

The future also doesn't really interest me. I try to keep healthy and save money, do things I enjoy. Those things done, the future will take care of itself as best it can, it's not something I need to worry about.

Monroe - this is war

I was back in the UK when I wrote this, staying with my parents, in a place that has no immediate past or future for me, only memories of 20 years ago, and it's hard to connect myself to those events or feelings. What's the point of even trying? I'm fascinated by the idea that there is only now, and that by thinking about the past or the future I'll miss out on what I think and feel now, even though the ideal - which I seem to be approaching with great speed - is perhaps to barely think, to only feel and then move on.

One of my original sicknesses was that when I used to live in the UK I only lived in the past and the future, and it never made me happy.

I don't know if living in the present has made me happier, or if being happier has made me live in the present.

I used to believe in narrative, but now I think it only belongs in fiction. I barely even believe in events. When one thing happens - say a meeting with an old friend - so many things are going on that only a few things can ever be corralled into misrepresenting the whole. More specifically, when and where do things start, when and where do they end?

If /when I get Alzheimer's I don't think much will change. My life [a narrative fallacy] will be a trip to satori / senility, and no doubt a nightmare for my wife.

People are a part of nature

Kurosawa's Dreams - Village of the Water Mills, Part 1

Drunk early in a BBQ restaurant, and the old realization that even if anything isn't possible, at least any feeling and thought is, which is good enough. Plus, the key to drinking early - and at any time - is to know when to stop, and for me that's always when I start to think that maybe it might be a good idea, perhaps, to put my hand up the skirt or down the top of a stranger. Once that thought is entertained, I always move on to water.

Part 2

Tainted, in on the joke

Francis Bacon: Self portrait 1973

Being 38 a lot of people who were young when I was a kid have now become old, with the implication clearly being that for the kids I see today I'll be old before too long, when they're finally getting the hang of things. Always a lot of high school / university students in the summer classes, and the idea that I'll be almost 60 when they hit my age freaks me out a little, although I intend to make it in good physical shape. And when I meet them on the street 20 or so years later they'll also be tainted, in on the joke.

I started losing my hair when I was 18, so I've done the mid-life crisis thing enough times to have burned through it, and I shave my head with relief twice a week. I have a good skull, a stroke of luck.

I like living in an aging society, it means that I won't look out of place, but I also like folk young. It's such a seemingly arbitrary property, but no more so than being attracted to something because it's on sale, the same as before but just cheaper. When something is a bargain you can afford to take a risk, as the chances of regret are greatly diminished, and at a certain cost/wealth things become disposable. Much the same is true of youth, plus it's usually an attractive package. So little permanent physcial damage has been done to anyone under 21, little that a good rest and a month or two of diet and exercise couldn't put right.

The other reason why I like some young people is that they haven't f***ed things up yet, but then others are wasting away. I have nothing against people being young and confused - I spent years wandering around - but it frustrates me to see people tearing themselves apart within such narrow boundaries, "should I do A or B?", with neither appeals to them, without testing either to see if it really works, let alone considering C or extending their options even further. If you're going to f*** up at least do it in a spectacular fashion that leaves you twisted and broken from pursuing something you actually wanted.

I resigned the post I then held

From the time of my youth, I had set the age of forty as the terminal point for my efforts to succeed and as the one for all my vain ambitions. I was fully resolved once this age was reached that whatever situation I might be in, I would struggle no longer to get out of it and would spend the remainder of my days living from day to day without ever again concerning myself about the future. The moment having come, I executed this plan without difficulty; and even though my fortune then seemed to want to take a turn for the better, I renounced it not only without regret but with actual pleasure. In releasing myself from all those lures and vain hopes, I fully gave myself up to carelessness and to the peace of mind which always constituted my most dominant pleasure and most lasting propensity. I forsook the world and its pomp; I renounced all finery: no more sword, no more watch, no more white stockings, gilding, or headdress; a very simple wig, a good coarse cloth garment; and, better than all that, I eradicated from my heart the cupidity and covetousness which give [sic] value to everything I was forsaking. I resigned the post I then held, for which I was in no way suited, and began to copy music at so much a page, an occupation which had always greatly appealed to me.

From the Third Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 30

The text goes on in a way that'll appeal a lot if you like the above, and I find it hard to believe that it's unavailable for free online.

My summer of far too much work is now over, and today's the first day in eight weeks I haven't had a backlog of proofreading / class prep breathing down my neck in every stolen moment to myself. So, a day to do nothing, to let being busyness wash off me with frequent showers and a shaved head and no aims beyond watching There Will Be Blood, drinking tequila, riding my bicycle, and gardening.

Related post: Reveries of a solitary wa*ker

Death on the installment plan

Aoshima Chiho - click the picture to enlarge, the name to know more

At the cram school I work in each course runs eight weeks, and I'm due to move part time at this end of this one, down to 15 hrs from 38, plus 10 - 20 proofreading hrs on my own account, all of which I like to push into Mon-Fri. I do other things to, so I get tired.

August the 8th is my last day, and you can imagine how this is starting to obsess me. I've made a file card calendar to cross off the days, and am thrilled that tomorrow marks the first quarter done, and that a week later will be more than a third. In this way I'll work and wish away the next six weeks, aided for a time by the fact my wife is out of the country and there's little around the house to remind me of other rhythms. The idea is that by Chinese New Year, 2009, all the work I do is chosen by me, which doesn't seem too much for a supposedly free man to ask for.

Still, in the interim there's something tragic about wanting Monday to Friday to race by. If I make it to be old, how much of my life will I feel I've wasted?

As long as we're young, we manage to find excuses for the stoniest indifference, the most blatant caddishness, we put them down to emotional eccentricity or some sort of romantic inexperience. But later on, when life shows us how much cunning, cruelty, and malice are required just to keep the body at ninety-eight point six, we catch on, we know the scene, we begin to understand how much swinishness it takes to make up a past. Just take a close look at yourself and the degree of rottenness you've come to. There's no mystery about it, no more room for fairy tales; if you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The years of illusion

...the years of illusion aren't those of adolescence, as the grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, p125

Things fall apart

Few objects are able to convey as much meaning as the human face. Mine is rapidly falling apart, and there seems little I can do to stop the process.

A staple of profiles of dissolute characters is the before and after picture - see what life has done them. And this is usually very stupid, as most often the person in question has just aged at the normal rate, not much worse than their clean living peers. Now I'm not old, only 38 this year, but was much younger once, and looked it. This wave of reflection is prompted each time I look in the mirror, but set off more specifically by a recent photograph of Martin Amis, not known for being dissolute, below:

When I was in high school, 20 years ago, just before the wave of younger, better looking, more American, and therefore more exciting, US brat pack authors hit the UK shelves, Amis was the go-to guy for the novelist as sex god. At the time he was full of roguish charm and promise, London Fields still ahead and looking something like this:

From my perspective this happened in a short time, albeit several lifetimes, but fast enough to be alarming. What state will I be in 20 years later?

This matters not for those occasions when I meet someone from my past - what happened? - because those seem to be entirely theoretical, the chances standing between zero and less than zero. What worries me more is the general, professional halo effect, how looking one way colors everything people feel about me. In part this is a legitimate concern, and in part pure vanity, which I channel into exercise and healthy diet. Of course, the effect goes both ways, and a strong perceived competence or charisma is able to mitigate the effects of physical decline in the eyes of others, but not in one's own.


Anyway, enough posts tagged 'myself'. Copied and pasted last year's Edge question [100 or so scientists, thinkers respond to "What have you changed your mind about?] into a Word document and had it printed and bound for $100NT and am going through for new ideas to trip out on. It can be read online, but if anyone wants it in a more printable form to get away from the screen then email me.