Force you

 

I saw Star Wars when it first came out in 1977. It was unknown at the time. There were no lines. I was blown away and saw it a couple more times but the lines came. I have seen every Star Wars film since. I have been to the Star Wars section of Disneyland. I am a fan, but not obsessive. But the one thing I always believed in from the film was the Force.

Okay, the cool thing about the force is that it was a higher power but not religious. You could tap into it without being dunked in water or going to Sunday School. You didn't have to be saved, but it saved you anyway. 

It's kind of what I came to believe in after rejecting religions and metaphysical scams. I think there is a force in the world. Maybe it is nature. Maybe it is just what goes on at the subparticle level with atoms and such. But I do think everything is connected. It's like the ocean. It's hard to imagine a separate drop of the ocean. It's all one thing. So maybe that is the force.

The thing I do struggle with with that concept is losing my individual self to the force. It is what I worry about when I die. I don't like the idea of losing myself and being merged with the whole. It is selfish, I know, but I've spent a long time being me and thought of not being me is unnerving. 

In all fairness though, none of the Jedi seem to lose themselves after dying. Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Yoda and eventually Luke seem to fade in and out like benevolent ghosts encouraging others to trust the force. 

I could kind of use that kind of encouragement. When my parents passed I half-way thought they would watch over me in some way. But nada. Oh, they occasionally pop up in a dream or two, but I can't recall being comforted. This does not bode well for the afterlife.

Funny we call it the afterlife. It's this optimistic hope that there will be something. It would be a shame if there were nothing. It would make living kind of pointless if we just ended. Which leads me full circle to it being nice to at least think we rejoin the Force.

Or am I being too Forceful?

Still life?

 

So far, 2023 seems remarkably like 2022. Still, other than mind numbing inflation, COVID teaming up with the flu and other respiratory ailments, and (depending upon which expert you hear from) a looming recession, it is still better than 2021 and that dung heap of 2020 when everything spiraled out of control.

The significance for me this year is that I turn 65 in a few months. I finally gave in to the masses of junk mail urging me to sign up for Medicare and enrolled in the first level via the social security website. Like Dante's Inferno, there are several levels of Medicare, each more confusing than the last. Social Security does its best to add to the confusion with lots of legal mumbo jumbo and many links leading to attempts to simplify the language of bureaucracies (which even the Rosetta Stone has a hard time cracking).

It is not that I need Medicare at this point in my life. I am still working and have fairly decent health coverage. But in that not so distant future when I actually do retire I understand I'll need every cent of healthcare support I can get. Still the Social Security urges you to delay taking social security benefits until you are in your 70s so you can maximize the amount of your month allocation. I'm convinced they are actually hoping you delay taking it so the likely hood of you developing dementia and forgetting about it or dying and not collecting at all occur. 

And it is not that I think Social Security will ensure my survival after retirement. Even if I wait until I'm in my 70s to take it, the monthly payment is still about what I now bring home in a week. So I can only hope my 401K survives the bleak markets we are riding. I am sometimes afraid the only cruise I go on after retirement will be on an ice flow.

Day of the dread

 

The Day of the Dead is a traditional Mexican holiday to honor the dead. It is a time of remembrance, because the memory symbolically keeps the dead person alive.

Keeping our memory alive after we die seems to be a pretty common thread throughout human history. Kings build pyramids to be remembered. There are statues, portraits, tombstones, photos, memoires, and, of course, blogs. These are all attempts to keep memories alive after a person dies. But for the most part, I think they fail. Shoot, how many times have I railed on how I am invisible and forgotten while alive. I can only imagine what it will be like when I'm dead.

I think we dread death because we can't imagine becoming nothing. I think of the hundreds if not thousands of people I've met in my life through school or work. And as much as I enjoy their company when they are around, once they move on, they are gone. Very few stay in touch. Some even die and you have a twinge of sadness, but then everything moves on. 

But where is is moving on to? Last night I watched a movie on Showtime called After.Life. It stars Liam Neeson as a mortician who may or may not have the ability to communicate with the newly dead people he is preparing for viewings at funerals. One of those is Christina Ricci who may or may not be dead. The movie is pretty good at keeping you guessing until the end (no pun intended). But although the movie dealt with helping people to move on, it also did give any idea where you would move on to.

Of course, the reason is that the only way you can know where you move on to is by moving on to it. And despite what Tik Tok would like you to believe, once you have moved on, there isn't a social media channel for the dead to share posts with the living. If there was Zuckerberg would have exploited it by now and it would be called something like Dead Line or After Thoughts. There would also be controversies over all of the marketing information that was being harvested from the platform and companies would be figuring out ways to sell stuff to dead people.

Like every other social media platforms the one for the dead would also be rife with live people pretending to be dead and dead people pretending to be live. So basically you still couldn't trust anything that was posted. 

But there is no such social media platform and we don't really have anyway to know what happens after we die. Well, except for Ouija boards, and they open up a whole new can of worms.

Tears of a clown

 

You are probably sensing that I spend way too much time playing with the filters on Snapchat. But for me, it is a logical progression from the years I've spent Photoshopping my face on various animate and inanimate objects. It is also less labor intensive.

You (and I am as usual addressing the generic you - the now and future reader of my blog) may also think that I am enamored with my own face since I use it in so many of my posts. There are many reasons I generally use my own image. One, just as Van Gogh and many artists throughout history created self-portraits because they could always rely on their availability as a model, I use my own image because I'm always available. I avoid Photoshopping my family's faces on things for my blog to protect their privacy. Though I do Photoshop their faces on greeting cards (much to my children's chagrin).

In all honesty, I don't like my face. I cringe at photos of myself. I cringe when I look in a mirror. Photoshop and Snapchat filters allow me to fix some of my facial flaws. It's kind of like putting on a costume for Halloween so you can see what it feels like not to be you for awhile. And it has the advantage of not having to spend hours applying and removing makeup. 

Despite my morbid fear of clowns, mimes and those people who hand out food samples at Costco, I kind of like the way I look as a twisted, crying clown even though it does remind me a bit of Tammy Fay Baker (who was married to a clown). The image above reminds me of those black velvet clown paintings from the 60s. 

Ironically, the only thing I use Snapchat for is the filters. I have never sent anyone a Snapchat. I don't have a clue as to how it works or why you would send someone a Snapchat instead of a text. I vaguely know that the messages you send on Snapchat disappear after short time so I image it has something to do with sending naked photos of yourself to someone.  

I guarantee you that if I ever used it for that purpose the recipient would definitely want it to go away quickly.

Sad clown.

Mock of ages

 

I thought "Mock of ages" would be a clever title for a post about aging. I then Googled it and found out it is the name of a Def Leppard Tribute Band in Atlanta. Go figure.  It does illustrate one of the challenges of aging: you discover there are no new ideas.

Since re-engaging with Medium again, I've seen lots of posts from people in their early 20s bemoaning how much of their lives have passed without them feeling like they have accomplished enough. Most of them have 60 or more years ahead of them but they are oblivious. Try being in your 60s and realizing you have maybe 20 years left.

Twenty years. It's not a lot of time, and adding insult to injury, much of my time left is going to be dealing with the inevitable impacts of aging. I will continue to slow down while time speeds up. 

But no one wants to read about the grim future of aging. Though I am bombarded daily with the grim headlines about nuclear holocaust, plagues, global warming, economic downturns and the end of democracy. So don't point fingers at me for being a Debbie Downer when it comes to growing old. It's something you don't think about...until you do. 

Some people like to point out examples of people who accomplished relatively great things after they turned 70. They cite people like Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden. But Reagan lost it all to Altzheimer's and Biden is ridiculed in social media for displaying his age.

There is something about seeing old people that brings out a visceral reaction in young people. Hell it brings out a visceral reaction in not so young people. Maybe seeing old people makes them have to face the inevitable reality that they will be old eventually, too. And then there is the other eventuality they have to face as well.

It's why for the most part people look right through you when you are old. You fade into the scenery. You stand in lines at the grocery store or Starbucks and are ignored. 

So maybe I understand why some aging musicians would get together to form a tribute band called "Mock of Ages." I just don't get why it would be a tribute to Def Leppard.

Old man, look at my life

 

Old man, look at my life

I'm a lot like you were

Old man, look at my life

I'm a lot like you were

Lullabies, look in your eyes

Run around the same old town

Doesn't mean that much to me

To mean that much to you

I've been first and last

Look at how the time goes past

But I'm all alone at last

Rolling home to you 

--Neil Young 

 I have always liked the song, Old Man by Neil Young. I can't say the lyrics ever made sense to me other than a young man telling an old man that he was young like him at some point in his life.

Duh.

Actually Neil Young was writing the song to an old man who was the caretaker of a ranch he bought in Northern California when he was 25. Apparently the old man had lived on the ranch for a long time and couldn't believe a 25 year old could afford to buy it. So Neil Young wrote the song to rub his face in it.

Well he said he wrote it to tell the man that they weren't that different than each other. He just had got rich young by playing a guitar, smoking weed and singing in a weird falsetto voice. The old man on the other hand was taking care of the young man's cows and mending fences for what I imagine was minimum wage. 

I'm a lot like you were....NOT.

I can tell you that when I was 25, I wasn't imagining I was anything like old men. I didn't want to think about getting old. And at that age I was thinking 40 was old. Now 40 seems pretty young to me. I do remember being depressed when I turned 25 because I'd let a quarter of a century go by with out much to show for it. I'd like to go back in time and slap my 25 year old self a few times.

 Speaking of getting old, I've been watching Virgin River on Netflix (don't judge). In addition to young, attractive actors, the cast includes Tim Matheson and Annette O'Toole as an aging couple. If you don't remember who they are, Tim Matheson starred in the 1978 movie Animal Shack. If you really want some trivia, he was also the voice of Johnny Quest in the 1964 cartoon. Annette O'Toole was in lots of movies and series in the 1980s and 1990s. She was Lana Lane in Superman III. She was also in a 1982 remake of Cat People that I panned in a review in my college newspaper. My review headline was "Cat People belongs in the litter box." Anyway she was pretty hot back then.

But Virgin River shows what happens to all of us when we age. Matheson, once a heartthrob, plays a crotchity old country doctor. O'Toole plays his very unlikeable wife. Even when the doctor begins losing his eyesight and his wife suffers a brain injury, it is difficult to like either character. And the challenge for me is that I keep picturing them the way they looked in the early 1980s. 

Time is not kind to any of us. 

Now lest you think I am age shaming I must remind you that I am pretty much in the same boat (which could desperately use a new coat of paint). It is just a bit jarring to see these actors who I picture in their iconic young roles, growing old. It's like going to your 40th or 50th high school reunion and wondering who all the old people are.

Now that I am in this hole, I am going to stop digging.

Oh man, look at my life.

The Tim he is a-changing

I have never quite gotten used to being a grown up. But I am a little over a month away from turning 49 and it is hard to ignore the fact.

The worst thing about turning 49 is that it is one year away from 50. And I've heard that platitude about 50 being today's 40, but I'm not really buying it. Fifty is half a century no matter how you rationalize it.

It is not that I feel old (or grown up). I just feel changed. It's not just my body. My outlook has changed as well.

When you are young, it seems as though time will last forever. When you are older you look back and realize how fleeting it actually is. I am sure I am not the first person to discover this. But I think the knowledge comes in a time release capsule.

There are many things about aging that are actually not bad. Raging hormones have begun taking Yoga classes. I don't have to make up stuff under the "experience" column on my resume. I never get carded when I buy liquor. I can begin anticipating AARP discounts. And I can sneer at eager and ambitious young people with a sense of pity knowing that life will eventually wear them down as well.

There are things I am desperately trying to avoid as I age. I refuse to refer to myself as 49-years young. I won't eat dinner before 7 p.m. no matter what discount I can get. I won't wear black socks with shorts. I will watch for the "I want to gnaw my arm off to get away" look in people's faces if I catch myself telling one too many stories about the good old days. Finally, I will never buy a sports car and get a perm.

That being said, it is almost 7 p.m. and I am getting pretty hungery. I better go and fix dinner. Or we could go to the Country Kitchen Buffet. I think rush hour is over.

Legend in my own mind

Not long ago, someone accused me of being a "legend in my own mind." Other than being a cliche and unimaginative thing to say, it really didn't bother me. I am lots of legends in my mind. Or more precisely, I have lots of legends in my own mind. That's why I like to plaster my face on kings, cowboys, clowns and mimes. It's fun to bring my legends to life.

When I was a boy, I wanted desperately to be an astronaut. I watched Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin on our black and white television launched at the tip of rockets and walking on the moon. And I wanted to be them. Lately being an astronaut has dropped a notch in the legend category, but when I was a child they were truly legendary.

At various times in my life I've wanted to be Van Gogh, John Lennon, Elvis, Einstein, King Arthur, Braveheart, Edgar Allen Poe, King Tut, Ceasar, Wild Bill Cody, James Bond, Cyreno de Bergerac, Bart Starr, Hans Solo and the Godfather. The digital world allows me to play virtual dress up and be those legends.

So being a legend in my own mind really isn't that bad of thing. Oh, and I really never wanted to be a cheese quesadilla, ambergris, or an omelette, but sometimes it's fun just to be a random object in my own mind, too.

Growing Panes

I marvel sometimes at how my point of view regarding things changes as as I...mature (I almost said "age"...the two words aren't necessarily synonomous). I suppose it is to be expected. Experience is supposed to teach you what to expect. So logically experience teaches you to rethink your expectations. So you look at things differently after you've been through them a few times.

This is not to say I consider myself a particularily wise man. I just look at things differently than I did when I was...less experienced (I almost said "younger").

Now looking at things differently doesn't necessarily mean I don't occasionally repeat the same mistakes even after having experienced something that one would think would make me try a different tactic. This mainly involves engaging my mouth before my brain. You'd be amazed at how much faster my mouth is than my brain. I know I am.

I've always had this uncanny ability to be able to blurt out a response to something that, although occasionally quite funny, is often inappropriate or ill timed. Why? Because my brain is usually still reviewing the pros and cons of what I am considering saying while my mouth is already dashing out the door with it like a male dog unleashed on the neighbors poodle in heat. The results are initially quite satisfying but ultimately can lead to a high degree of unanticipated ugliness when the puppies are born.

I'm not even sure where that analogy came from, but it oddly fits (or fits oddly).

Fortunately when I was a child, in addition to having a quick tongue, I also had quick feet to run when what I'd say would sink into my brother's slower brains.

When I got older (yes older) and slower, I learned to control my penchant for blurting things out by mumbling. That way only people with very keen hearing can understand what I'm blurting out. In school this often caused problems for anyone sitting next to me in class. They would burst out laughing at something inappropriate I'd interject regarding the teacher and then get the brunt of the teacher's anger for interrupting the class. I would just sit there smiling angelic-like until I found another opportunity to mumble a wisecrack.

This coping mechanism has stayed with me as an adult in the business world. I get bored easily at meetings and mumble uncontrollably at times. The unfortunate side effect is that my normal speaking voice seems to have become one big mumble. Tess is always asking me to repeat things. Depending on the topic of my mumbling I normally just say in a slightly louder voice, "Oh nothing."

Perhaps this is why I became a writer. It allows me think a bit longer before I speak and it is difficult to mumble when you write. The closest thing there is in the written word to mumbling is gibberish (and some bloggers have turned gibberish into an artform).

Unfortunately, electronic communications have chipped away at that lag time writing used to provide us between thinking and speaking. E-mail (and blog comments) allow us to type before we think. But this is where experience kicks in (I bet you were wondering if there was a caboose to this train of thought). I have learned to type my unthinking responses and then think about them before I hit send. Then in most cases I do the right thing and hit "delete."

I wish I had a delete key for my mouth.

Well hell

One might believe that because I don't believe in the traditional hell and heaven that I am not a spiritual person. This is not true. I believe in karma. I believe in Quantum Physics. I believe in the power of the mind. I believe in spirits. I believe that children are our future.

Okay, you get my point. Don't assume that because someone doesn't believe in the same thing that you do that they don't believe in something. And never believe that your belief system is the only one that has any validity. That kind of arrogance will get you your own level of hell (which doesn't exist, but you'll go there anyway because you believe in it).

I believe we all create our own reality (I'm not sure who created George W. Bush, but could you give us a break and pull your head out of your ass). Everything we see, hear, say, do is sucked through that wrinkled gray matter of our own brain and then projected on the screen that is our life. That is the reality of things. If you don't like the script, toss it in the trash and open a new one.

But this time, write a happy ending.

The devil you say

I don't believe in hell. At least I don't believe in hell, the place. Well, I do believe there is a town in Grand Cayman called Hell. But you don't go there when you die. You go there when you are on a Caribbean cruise. That is an important distinction.

Not believing in hell bothers some people. One, it doesn't mean much when they tell me to go there. It's kind of like calling your parent's bluff when they say they are going to count to three when they are trying to make you do something. Though my mom generally only got to two before I caved. I never really wanted to find out what happened after she counted to three. My father never counted. He just smacked you.

But I digress.

Not believing in hell conversely means I don't believe in heaven either. So, I'm really messing with some people's punishment-reward motivation concept in controlling behaviour. But if punishment-reward motivation worked, we wouldn't have so many prisons now would we? So what good is hell and heaven in controlling morality?

I'm amazed that there are people who can't accept that heaven and hell aren't literally, physical places that people go to when they die based on which side of the moral ledger they end up on. If anything, heaven and hell are metaphors for the states of mind we can reward or damn ourselves with.

Isn't that a hell of a concept?

I, Tim Id

Self-image is an odd thing. How can we look in a mirror and truly see ourselves when everything...literally everything is filtered through our mind.

Ironically, I think this is why I hate photos of myself. And ironically, this is why I think I Photoshop so many photos of myself. I want to fix those flaws my mind's eye sees.

I realize this isn't particularly entertaining or enlightening for anyone but me. But I'm really fighting this trap of blogging what you think people want to read.

What is it though that makes you read other people's blogs? Sometimes I read someone's blog and I feel like a voyeur peeping through a virtual window. But then I realize that I wouldn't be looking if they hadn't left their virtual shades up. What is the point of blogging if no one reads it? If you write a blog and no one reads it, does it still make a point? What is the sound of one hand blogging? Show me the face you had before you were blogging?

Shit. I sound like a broken record. And the full moon has waned. What do I blame it on now?

Paint by numbers

One of my father's hobbies was painting those paint-by-number kits you could buy at K-Mart. He mainly painted horses and a few landscapes He was actually pretty good at it. The framed horse paintings hung on the walls of our family room for years while I was growing up.

I suppose in the purest sense, it wasn't really art. But it made him happy.

I feel the same way about my Photoshop creations. Sure I'm simply slapping my face on someone else's painting and making a few clicks of the mouse. But damn it is kind of fun. And there is an art in doing it in a way that isn't totally obvious. Plus it fulfills my rich fantasy life of being famous or infamous (delusions of grandeur?).

I am easily pleased. But hey, some people drape fabric along a stretch of highway and call it art. At least I'm building on the classics.

We art what we art through art.

Is it unbecoming to be becoming?

Hayden wrote another one of her great, "damn now I have to think" posts called "Becoming." The post was about finding yourself versus becoming yourself (my interpretation). She did not intend it as a Meme, but she did ask all of us, "What are you becoming?"

This question makes more sense if you are middle aged and comfortable in the fact that you don't know anything than it would if you are in your 30s and a little pissed that things aren't working out the way you planned them when you were in your 20s and knew everything.

First, I have learned many things as I fade into middle age. One is that John Lennon was right when he said, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." I have spent a lot of energy in my life wondering what my special purpose is (not the same special purpose that Steve Martin discovered in the movie "The Jerk"...I discovered that a long time ago). I'm pretty sure that the meaning of life is living it.

I know that aging does not guarantee you are becoming wiser. Some people just get old. Some try and stave it off by trying to act young and spouting cliche shit about "you are as old as you feel." If that is true then sometimes I feel like a freakin' 100-year old.

I would like to say that I am becoming better with time like a fine wine. But anyone who has drank their share of wine know that even really old wine can suck, especially if it is "corked." The best wine is the one you drink and get a mellow buzz from. Some of these wines have screw tops instead of corks.

I won't say I know what I want to be when I grow up. I do know that I more or less have always wanted to be a writer. And I write. Now granted, I write a blog read by maybe nine people on a good day, but they are good people. And I am becoming content with just writing and not caring what anybody else thinks about the quality of my writing.

You know. What I am really becoming is content. I tried religion, therapy, crystals, affirmations, anti-depressants, co-dependence, self-loathing and more self-help books than I care to shake a preverbial stick at. It wasn't until I finally got married (at aged 47 mind you) that I stopped always focusing on myself and started thinking my becoming may just be enhanced by putting something else before me.

I won't go as far as saying I am totally comfortable when I look in the mirror, but I sleep at night and I get up in the morning. So what if I'm not the president of the United States (wouldn't that be a downer). So what if I haven't written the great American novel (most of the world doesn't speak English anyway). And so what if I am not a household name. While the famous age and then fade into oblivion, screaming to be remembered for who they were, I age and simply am who I am.

I am enjoying starting to enjoy my becoming and be-going.