OLD AGE IN THE NEW AGE

For the first time since beginning this blog my sometimes occupation has been quite constant with requests from my two favorite clients. Contemplating what to post is too distracted by their concerns to launch anything with continuity about my thoughts, so I am going to glean partial ideas from past entries in the life long journal in which I have made no entries since beginning the blog.

Having discovered the joys of iChat AV with my pal Erica in New Yawk as we cranked up new iMacs and simultaneously lept back to the future of Dick Tracy, sharing coffee and early morning thoughts face to face is a bit of a distraction as well. You don't have to have an iMac, just a way to get a video camera into your computer and iChat will link you to anyone in your address book with the same deal. AOL or .mac membership is also required, but hey… find out what has been missing in your phone conversations. I've spent half my life without a phone, I'd rather read a letter, but face to face conversation is something totally different!

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I am becoming Chance the Gardener, discovering that I have been tending the Old Man’s garden ever since he took me in as a child. As I tour my pots and plots for signs of health and growth, the requiting of my love and appreciation for being here, this small haven from the ill wind I've been driven by, and eventually driven from, with full awarenness of the value my life is to me in my part in the universe. I feel these inspired jottings to be new leaves, occasional flowers and rare mature fruit growing from my limbs, energized by the sun on my trunk and fed by the soil on my roots. I also like to watch. Everything we do is a version of nature, even the freedom to make bad choices, just not for others.

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Old Age in the New Age
The competitive pride of youthful minds and bodies becomes tempered by the tautological cul de sacs of committed belief and the physical pains of excessive abuse. By the time most of us learn to get it right, we are unable to do it at all.

Live a full life while you may. If you do it right you may well out live your legs and will need to be able to sit around with folks of your age, which, as one gets older seems to be of a similarly increasing span, swapping old sea stories, without many to add and saying, “I could have,” too heartachingly often.

I will not brook an old age preserved in a pickle jar where the container is us and the brine is the pharmacological stewpor concocted and prescribed by the witch doctors of western mythology and sent running through our veins.

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“Fear is like those diseases that disfigure the face with running sores. One becomes more afraid of their being seen than of their source, and comes to feel not only disgraced, but defiled.” —Gene Wolfe

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If you want to entertain a man give him something round, like a ball, or an argument, or a woman at a ball.
If you want to entertain a woman give her something long, like a bat, or an agreement, or a man with a bat.

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Granting the same potential to all, mans noblest act is not exploiting his vast discovered greatness. To have experienced such enlightened beings teaches that learning can best come from examples in life rather than lectures from pedestal, podium or pulpit.