Old Man Listing

Time for a new list? I think yes. Specifically, an old man list, by which I do not mean a list of old men. (For that, Please See: Congress, all major political donors, and "established" rock bands - a term of art I recently learned from a friend who still writes about that Rock and Roll music. "Established" in this context means even I remember them, or put it another way, "Good lord! Isn't he dead? Are they still touring? Why do the Rolling Stones all look like Maria Ouspenkaya now? Is there still Journey? How are they not all dead?!") No. I am proposing a list of things that I've begun to realize may define me now as old, whatever my actual age. Due to a variety of recent indicators, many of them physical and involving new or more profound deficits, I've become increasingly aware of my age and or encroaching mortality. I wasn't unaware. The reminders just got rather more thick on the ground in recent weeks; kidneys and gall-bladder kicking up, knees misbehaving, had to cut the dosage on one of the heart medications that keep me alive because the higher dosage decided to kill me a different way, things like that. What else, by which I mean what other than the premature if entirely predicable decline of my body? What else has made me feel old lately? Best make a list. Lists are good. In order to make a list I've had to stop and think about what makes me old, which is something old people do by the way, stop and think, and make lists. A contemplative, scribbly bunch, the aging. It's all that free time when one stops going out or wanting to go out or do anything that involves wearing trousers after seven in the evening. Also trying to remember things like why one went into the kitchen, etc. (See: all the aging comedians.) that rather requires stopping and thinking even if this doesn't seem to change the outcome the way it used to. And sometimes old people just stop of their own accord, if not forever then in something like a preview of coming internment. The phrase is "stop dead." Old people do that a lot, I've noticed. I don't yet, but I know people who do. Not my problem so far, but who knows if I'll know when it is? People don't seem to. Lists are something of a hedge against unknowing. A good list is almost like doing something. I make lists instead of doing other things that may well be more useful, like updating my phone contacts and taking out all of the dead people (and the one convicted murderer now doing life -- no lie -- but that's a story for another day. Old guys say shit like that all the damned time too. Annoying, ain't it?) So, am I old yet? Turns out, the signs are all there. Now I'm deaf in one ear, I'm missing organs (Glad to be shed of 'em, mostly, you understand.) So maybe I am just getting to it now, but then I was always told I was old beyond my years and it seems the years have caught up. So maybe I am old-ish at last. This is strange considering that I'm being told incessantly by television commercials that no one my age or older is actually old at all anymore. Advertising would seem to have abolished old age. Seems nearly all of my contemporaries, at least the straight ones, are still fucking in hot tubs and on hammocks, taking Tai Chi classes, and walking off their COPD symptoms at various State Fairs with the grandkids, when not actually discussing term life insurance with their remaining friends in kitchens the like of which I can only dream. Even advertising can't stop death. So am I old now? How old am I really? Let's see.

ACTUAL SIGNS THAT I'M GETTING OLD 

1) What is a "substack"? What is it to be "Drake"? Is it "sus" of me to ask?

2) I still cook something called a "ham-steak" regularly, sometimes for breakfast.

3) I eat breakfast. 

    3A) Or My Breakfast Ruined.

Took the elderly husband into the hospital for an angiogram the other day. Normal enough, as he is actually of an age. (He's fine.) Anyone who has done will know that is is an all-day business, whatever weirdly optimistic estimate offered by one's health care provider. Got there in the morning. Didn't escape until late in the afternoon. Procedure actually took less than an hour start to finish, but they book medical procedures nowadays like they're scheduling flights for Southwest; cardiac cases stacking up like discount flights to Vegas on a three-day weekend. It's a mess. Now how old am I? I'm so old I actually rate hospitals -- all of which are now nightmares of for-profit-callousness and service-shaving -- at least in part by the quality of their cafeterias. Yeah, you heard me. Hey, you spend the day, you're going to get hungry and they frown on egg-salad sandwiches pulled from pockets. I won't say I looked forward to this visit, but I did remember this particular cafeteria being specially nice, at least pre-pandemic.

Entirely automated now, with touch-screens to order and pay, and no chance of an actual human interaction. I personally know exactly one person who likes the self-checkout in the grocery store and this sort of profitably impersonal interface. He's an old friend, I'm quite fond of him, but I sometimes worry he'd rather his friends were actually robots. All I know is that someone actually had to help me order my breakfast burrito after I repeatedly tapped "pay now" but could not see what came next -- turns out this was "done." There used to be a whole line of cooks serving hot food in this cafeteria, some of it made to order, as well as fresh salads and pastries and whatnot. Now there were three lost souls in the whole kitchen, all of them looking like they'd been forced to work off a dermatologist's bill. None of them spoke until one finally bawled out whatever name one had typed into the wretched touch-screen to tell you your order was ready. (Wish I'd known this as I would have typed in "Dante Alighieri.") 

When it came my food was cold and not so much wrapped in a traditional tortilla as shrouded in one. Soon as I picked the thing up, everything fell out. It was not good. Looking around me nothing looked good. I noticed that none of the staff seemed to be eating anything that had not been prepackaged in plastic. 

So, yeah, I did lean over to strangers at the next table and tell them how nice the place used to be. So now I'm that guy.

4) We still watch television on a television.

5) I wear hats because my head gets cold -- because bald not hip.

6) I remember when Johnny Depp was fuckable and you could still see Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes.

7) We watch what we still call, "The News."

8) we subscribe to four newspaper and two of those are printed on paper.

    8A) Or My Virtual Newspaper Spoiled.

The new-to-me theatre critic for The Guardian newspaper recently wrote a piece defending people eating and talking and applauding at awkward moments during live performances. She argued there was historical precedence for this seemingly new raucousness and that reverent silence was a fairly recent imposition on audiences. This piece made me as furious as anything happening of actual consequence in the real world including war and the climate crisis. I actually argued aloud with my phone while reading this nonsense. Now I will hate this person forever and ever and cannot bring myself to even open that section of the paper. Hurrumph.

9) I still speak to at least three Republicans, and one unaffiliated Libertarian which is way worse.

    9A) Or The Real Reason I Hate QAnon.

Just this morning I was reading a new book called Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, by journalist Will Sommer. (Old men it seems like making themselves furious over breakfast, when we still have the energy for a proper sputtering fury.) The broad strokes of all of this Q bullshit were pretty familiar. Even some of the loopiest details I already knew from previous reading. Still, it was weirdly satisfying to have a proper narrative of the whole rotting horror, like watching that time-lapse footage of a dead opossum turn eventually to dust and fur. So what was nagging at me this whole time? What was the thing I couldn't and still can't get past about this cult? 

Q. The letter Q.

For me Q will always be the nickname of the very late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; out of print novelist, first editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse, and chief influence, via the New York Public Library, on my beloved Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road. She didn't get to go to college on account of the Great Depression. She always credited Q, whom she never met, and the books he wrote and edited as being her university, as in a smaller way she was a vital part of my own education. (From her I made lists of books I had to read and did, including Quiller-Couch, but also Hazlitt, Newman, Landor, Milton.) I continue furious that this inoffensive if somewhat pointless English letter, and by extension the memory of a great and largely forgotten English Gentleman of Letters, has now been forever besmirched by these conspiratorial goons, these whooping Yahoos and shit-slinging lower primates of American politics. Damn them all to the very Hell they've made in their empty little heads, for all the evil they do, yes, but also in memory of dear old Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, heaven rest 'im. The man embodied nearly every virtue in opposition to the Philistines, and now the Philistines have taken his nickname and made it synonymous with insanity. The bastards.

10) I always take the envelope when I buy a greeting card (no one under the age of thirty does this.)

11) I probably have change for a twenty.

12) I'm gay. Just gay. Straight up homo. No flex. No bend.

13) I vote, every time.

    13A) Or Why I Vote.

Washington is a Vote by Mail state because -- sanity. Don't get me wrong, we have plenty o' local, homegrown crazy, they just can't keep their numbers up, bless 'em. The state is actually divided East and West by a mountain range and attraction/repulsion to Idaho. That's right. There are people whose ideal, whose shining city on a hill is -- Idaho. Dude, I am not making this up. There are separatists right now in the eastern part of Washington who want to join, county by county, Idaho. What's your vision for the future, my Eastern Washington friend? Well, mister, that would be the past, and not just any past, mind you, but an execution by firing-squad, we love militias, can't practice obstetrics anymore 'cause 'bortion, "weather creating difficult calving season conditions" leading the local news past. Sometimes think Western Washington being the cradle of aviation may have happened just because no rational person wanted to drive east.

        13a) The last Special Election we voted in? One issue. It was something called a "social housing" initiative. look it up if you want the details. Did not know what this meant, so I read the ballot information booklet and looked up the definitions online. I am that old. It passed, by the way. 

14) I remember things now but not other things.

    14A) Okay, not birthdays or the name of the lady who buys all the crochet books, but I do remember:

        1) The John Birch Society

        2) When fresh cut roses cost less than a car-payment

        3) Having a waist

        4) Network television

        5) FM radio

        6) When Teenage Jesus Jeffrey Hunter redefined the temptation of Christ (if you didn't want Robert Ryan's John the Baptist to do unspeakable things to Him, you simply were never gay.)

        7) Or We Have Been Here Many Times Before.

I remember Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafly, the fat Falwell, and Ronald Reagan. I remember Pat Robertson and the Lesbian hurricanes. I remember Matthew Shepard. I remember the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. The time before that I read about in books, as I have all the times before that that I know of. (So old I read books. So old I read history. So old I remember history. So old I don't expect to be remembered by history.) It is always our fault, or rather it is our fault when it isn't the Jews or the brown people, etc. O course there's quite a bit of crossover there, and never more so than when the reactionaries are looking to explain The Decline of the Bless'd, or Now Why Ain't It Enough I'm White?  I remember the Birchers and the Blimps, the Dixiecrats and the South'rn Baptists, the closeted clergy and the closeted congressmen, the conversion "therapists" and the troglodytes in pickup trucks, and the Nazis and the Klan, and yeah, I remember yesterday and Trump and the NYT before they decided to hire Terfs and trolls for their editorial page. I remember what it feels like to be threatened and bullied and unsure of my safety. I remember what cops all but invariably were and mostly are still. I remember being punched in the face for just being gay. 

Now it's drag queens reading children's books aloud to kids, and transgender athletes, but it's the same shit. The same assholes who can't understand that I have exactly ZERO interest in their wretched, filthy, little litters of Future Fascists of America are exactly the same goons, dullards, and bores who think those precious babies should be spared the history of race in America, the sight of David's penis as sculpted by Michelangelo for a cathedral, and knowledge of my existence. How is this sort of thing still possible in the modern world? Well, if one's cosmology comes from a comic book and one's politics from a Fox feeding trough, safe bet that one will be just as pig-shit-stupid as one's unremembered and un-mourned grandpappy. More to the point though, it seems there will always be cynical types in search of scapegoats and wedge issues, and those fuckers can never let the gays alone.

    14B) And just for balance, I don't remember the following:

        1) Civility in American politics (guess you had to be there in the Senate dining room)

        2) "Life before phones," a phrase I've heard a lot from actual old people, but none of them born before 1876 so just shut up about this. We have COMPUTERS that fit in our POCKETS!!!

        3) When candy bars were "way bigger" (My husband insists this was true, and no, it's not just that his hands were smaller when he was a child and... now I'm an asshole.) 

        4) Caring about cars, sports, camping, maps, or pandas especially. 

        5) The words to Tiny Dancer, though I always seem to think I do and should but then I don't.

Wait. Is this still a list? Where was I? 

     15) I lose the thread sometimes.

Okay, enough with the listing. Maybe just skip to the Big One, the number one sign that I am getting older. Ready?

       (DRUMROLL!)

Hate. 

That's right. I'm hateful now. What does that mean? I will explain. (Old men do this ALOT.) It means I hate more now, more easily, and more often. One could say that I've gotten better at it. (Q: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?) I guess I'm a hater now. I'm surprisingly okay with this. At least I've become accustomed to it, to hating, I mean -- oh, and I specifically hate way more people than I used to. It's "second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in." 

You wouldn't know it to look at me. If anything, I now look absolutely harmless, not unlike my childhood hero Freddy the Pig when he would affect human clothes and false whiskers. This is one of the most common dodges of the old, looking harmless. If one didn't know the real purport of a Trumpf  Hassfest, for example, just looking at all the whitehaired attendees one might be forgiven for assuming they were just watching the wrestlin'. Do not be deceived! Grandma isn't singing along with Wayne Newton, she's making overt her hostility to the Jews and the queers, and the GD brown people, and grandpa is wishing Nancy Pelosi and her elderly husband actually, violently murdered. No, really. That's what these MAGA goons do now. Ignorance and pride aren't just for Sundays anymore. Pawpaw and Meemaw go to Nazi rallies now, just like they kin used to was spending picnic-time with the Klan. Some of these good white Christian folk hate full-time now, 24/7 and right in front of the grandkids and the television cameras. I'm not so far gone as that, I can still keep my head, I still have all my faculties, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. Unlike them I am not yet consumed by hate, but I do hate, even as I seemingly grow ever more so adorable. Irony!

Maybe older people just hate more easily, just as love seems pretty straight-forward to me now. (Old people quote old songs a lot so I could just say that if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with. Just change the singular to plural. You get it. Peace and love.) Getting older means feeling everything pretty much all the time. Joints, kidneys, receding gums, for instance, but also complex psychological states and rich veins of sentiment. Emotions seem nearer under thin skin. Some clever person suggested that we humans tend to hate what we fear and I cannot disagree. It's true. I'm scared. It seems I am frightened anew, and in a way I perhaps foolishly thought I had done with, until Trumpf. In my youth I remember being very much aware of young men in crowds, and old men in pick-up trucks with gun-racks, gym coaches, and cops, and all the people who did not hesitate to call me a faggot and threaten my life. It's not like I thought these men went away, (a number of them seem sadly to have gone on mission to post colonial Africa,) but I did think they'd been driven well back into the VFW Halls and golf resorts and gun clubs. Perhaps naively I hoped they would all eventually go peacefully into pig and boar sanctuaries, mostly in Florida, and there die.Years ago I decided to only live thereafter in civilized places north of the Mason Dixon Line, places with large and diverse populations, public transportation, more than one Asian cuisine, and more than one bookstore. I thought, frankly, I'd outrun the bastards. Turns out, no. They regrouped, elected a leader, and got if anything louder. Hate that.

Hate, not dislike, mind. There's a difference. I dislike babies on airplanes. I dislike gin. I dislike commercials on Hulu (but refuse to pay more just to watch Murders in the Building. I dislike pretty much everything else on Hulu.) I disliked both Bushes and remain to this day none too fond of Bill Clinton. I disliked everyone on Fox News since the launch and I thought Glen Beck was an unbelievable ass. Then they came out with Bill O'Reilly who was of course a whole new kind of bellicose buffoon. (Always up-grading ((down-grading?)) their idiots at Fox. It's what they do. Now Tucker's got the boot! Who's next? Just an actual boat-shoe full of actual shit? Stay tuned. Actually, don't. Please.) What did I hate though, back in my callow youth? Well, I hated bullies in school. Wished those boys dead in a ditch many a bedtime. And algebra. Hated algebra. Hated my algebra teacher, come to that. She was a miserable old bitch who's favorite question was, "Are you stupid?!" I was heartened years later when my mother sent me that teacher's obituary. Mum wrote on the back, "Knew you'd want to see this." Funny. I have of course hated the Republican Party as long as I can remember, but then we were always Democrats. Didn't mean I necessarily hated the neighbors. Most of them voted wrong even then. Didn't make me like them, but hate? I did actively hate Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, all those other old bigots, racists, and windbags from back in the day. Why wouldn't I? Why didn't everyone? I know that I hated Reagan and I will 'til the day I die. Soulless, empty-headed, suit. He left my friends to die. Couldn't make him even say the word for years. Hated him and was glad he died sitting in his own mindless mess. See? I've had practice. So, yeah, I have been doing this whole hate thing longer than you might think. Nothing new really, just more so now. Never knew how easy it could be though until Trumpf. Not all to do with him, but yeah, him. 

If there's ever been a man in the White House or out that only sapheads, hoaxers, and authoritarian-bossy-bottoms could love, it was Donald whores'-john Drumpf, that piss-poor President for all the worst reasons and all the worst people. You remember him. If you don't hate the sight, sound, and smell of the man there is something fundamentally wrong with you. Have you had a stroke? Are you completely disengaged? Are you really that dumb? What is wrong with you?! And if you've been itching to pipe up just here and say that you, as a Christian, or a Buddhist, or an ethical vegetarian, and or just a better-person-than-me, that you don't hate anybody and that the only answer to hate is love and whatnot -- well all I can say to that, my darling, is go fuck yourself. Was that uncharacteristically harsh? Did that sound shocking coming from a human snow-globe of otherwise relentless good cheer? Well? See? Hateful.

Growing up in the 1960s as a sissy in a small town I understood pretty quickly that hate was coming my way sooner rather than later, the minute I spoke, walked, or sang quietly to myself while I played with my troll dolls and or drew pictures of misunderstood clowns and monsters. Hate could spring up from various directions and pop like a jack-in-the-box from seemingly harmless looking, even cheerful settings. Sunday school and church functions could be a minefield. Any sport or sporting venue was inherently dangerous, and locker-rooms were guaranteed to be unspeakable. It was my responsibility to avoid, deflect, deny, or diffuse. Being hated was something of an accident of biology, if not my actual fate. It somehow was my fault. Knew that. I was the object of the verb. Nothing to be done about it but dodge. I certainly saw and heard it directed at other innocent folks like blacks and Jews and feminists and foreigners -- none of which tended to be anywhere near in those days --  and other real or imaginary radicals, communists, and or strangers. When I was little I didn't always know that that was what that was, hate, but that was what that was. I wasn't very old before I understood that I deserved a share. I hate knowing how young I must have been when I learned that. But then even if I've been hating for a good stretch now, those motherfuckers have been at it for centuries.

The most obvious difference between me hating them and them hating me is potential. They could kill me. I wouldn't care if they died but that's not the same thing. Me being frightened of them is not the same as them being frightened of us. They are always frightened of us for stuff they insist we intend to but never do like take their guns for instance, and their children, and their Constitutional right to worship an angry little white god, and listen to Trace Adkins read the Bible as a book-on-tape while they drive their Ford F-150 across endangered tundra. They're convinced we will make them watch RuPaul and not go to Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A, maybe spell out the word "filet" or maybe even spell it with two "l"s like a bunch of damned foreigners. They are sure that some crossdresser is just waiting in the next booth in the lady's loo to molest them. Actual history, like science, matters not at all. The odds matter not a bit. Percentage of transgender athletes actually in competition? Evidently one's too many. Every single advance in human equality, every scientific advance in our understanding of sexuality, identity, gender, reproduction, -- well, anything frankly not to do with making Cheetos cheesier or guns more deadly -- it's all a slippery slope leading to... their mild discomfort, and that would be INTOLERABLE. 

Meanwhile they shoot us at nightclubs, accuse us of unspeakable horrors more properly left at the doorstep of their preachers, priests, pastors, and police. They bully, bash, and murder us as if we mattered less for being unlike them which is the greatest blessing frankly in our collective lives. They have influenced whole nations in Africa to make us illegal again, to send us to prison, or to our deaths. Suddenly they even like Putin -- a fuckin' Russian -- in part at least because he hates us too. And we, it seems, and people being respectful to one another, and people struggling to make a more equitable world, plain old common decency, all of this is a graver threat to them than actual deadly viruses. It is insanely stupid. I hate them.

I can see this more clearly now after decades of unlearning the self-loathing with which they once sought to control and marginalize me. That's energy better directed now at the idiots who think me and the beloved elderly husband are a bigger threat to their children's safety than pink AK47s for the baby's birthday. 

A century ago George Bernard Shaw said, "I have defined the 100% American as 99% an idiot" and that has clearly not changed. What has changed for me at least is my willingness to call a blockhead a blockhead I guess. I understand that it is possible to hate ignorance and stupidity and yet not hate the person manifesting these in public. Seems to me high school teachers must do this every hour of every working day, bless 'em. I am not a teacher. I do work in retail. That has its struggles too. Not the same, briefer pain, but real. Really, nearly all of us put up with quite a bit, humans, but some more than others and some, it seems, have to invent their oppression just to feel more important and exaggerate their loss of power and status and blame equality for their inadequacy and narrowness of spirit, and yeah, I fucking hate 'em.

Yup. Hate. I honestly do not wish them well. More, I wish they all fell right off the edge of their flat earth and took the Taliban, and Narendra Modi, and the Tories, and the dictators, and all the evangelicals here and in Africa and the Carribean, etc. with 'em. I should live so long as to dance on all of their graves. May all their children become dance majors with a minor in French Literature, marry outside their race and religion and cease to define their gender traditionally. May their churches fall in on their heads and their fortunes be lost in crypto and their guns be melted down to anchors to be hung 'round their stupid necks. That's hate, isn't it?

According to my dictionary (like I have just the one! Ha!) it is meant to be "a strong feeling of dislike" but in common usage we tend to hate pretty indiscriminately in conversation: I hate these commercials, I hate my hair, I hate beets, I hate poppy seeds in my teeth, etc. Such drama. Getting older hasn't broken me of the habit of exaggeration. I still "adore" singers I will not listen to in a month's time. I still describe meals as "unforgettable" and then forget them. I insist that everyone simply must read this book or that and then, a week later when they do I don't remember the plot anymore. Did I say I love broccolini? Well, now I don't so much anymore. Fickle bitch, that's me. My "strong feelings of dislike" though, at least for the people banning books, and drag shows, and medical care for trans people, you know, assholes like that? That turns out to not be a mood.

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

SO many smart people have said SO many smart things about hatred, including above, this brief bit o' Blake. And maybe wacky William is right and just expressing my detestation of bullies and boneheads and bigots allows me to let some of my anger go. But all of that wise advice about hatred hurting me more than the people I hate? Doesn't alter the fact that I can't look at a Proud Boy and not want to punch him right in his smug ignorance. 

What to do then with this new knowledge of just what a hateful ol' bastard I've become? Where, as it were, to put that bit of self-awareness? Obviously - here - was my first thought. Makes sense. Among friends. And then there's the list of where and what I won't:

1) Much as I may want to and much as I may feel fully justified in doing so, I will probably never:

    a) punch a Nazi

    b) slap Lauren Boebert in her stupid mouth

    c) set Mar-a-Grosso with all its hideous occupants, goods and chattels alight

    d) kill, crush, mutilate, torture, abuse, traumatize, and or actually shit on anybody

    e) be rude to grandma until she's rude to me

All of that said I will probably go on feeling what I feel and doing largely as I've always done because I was raised right and I am not actually a jerk. Not bragging. Still hating, still okay with it too, but if one were forced to demonstrate the clearest difference between what I do and what they do? There it is. I may be yet another hateful old bugger, but I'm not a fascist. If you are, please keep in mind that I did say "probably."