May 4, 1943

I know that most of the people who stop by this blog are searching for information about W.B. Yeats, so as Yeats headstone says, “Horseman, pass by.”

On May the 4^th I am 68. I have been very fortunate to live such a life. Those who might know my personal history would be surprised that I would come to that conclusion. My life has been turbulent; I have had my fair share of a wide range of experiences that are unavailable to most people and unappealing in many ways.

Raised in the city and in the country; lived in ghettos and projects; beaten by gangs and engaged in gang fights; rode with the motor heads and had many heartbreaking and passionate romances: fought the demons that the children of alcoholics live with and behaved toward others both abominably and admirably. I have had many failures and moments of personal triumph.

As George Cluny said in a recent interview, “Getting old is not for pussies.” He is right; the psychological effects of knowing you may have one more day, that you no longer can have dreams of alternative careers and that your experiences in life are going to be limited – is a gruesome thought. Looking back and admitting your mistakes honestly to one’s self is just as painful.

The aged creep among the living – barely visible and mostly irrelevant, yet their personal turmoil, the riotous emotions elicited by the reality of soon ceasing to exist is never far from conscious thought. For some, senility conquers awareness and their interior dialog no longer speaks to them so they no longer suffer the agony of regret and the absence of a future.

Think of all those who ever were – the billions of dead; and how many are remembered – perhaps only the villains and kings. Soon you and I will join the countless unknown dead. No one will remember that we ever lived past perhaps two generations of your children’s family and then only when an old picture of you emerges from a pile of junk stored in some attic. If the picture survives for a couple of hundred years, it will become the picture of an unknown man or woman. More than likely all the pictures you cherished will be lost or thrown away by future generations.

The sadness that accompanies one’s thoughts about the end of life is unrelenting; I have begun to notice the small things in life – not because of any aesthetic significance attached to this or that object, but when compared to the eternal darkness of non-existence – every moment of life become something special; every visual experience is one more that will be lost to eternity.

But as King Lear said, “Let not women’s weapons water drops stain my man’s cheeks;” we have to suck it up because there is no escape - neither fee nor fortune will absolve us of our genetically programmed destiny. Again to quote Lear, “You think I’ll weep? No, I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, or ere I’ll weep.”

Well he was a better man than I because the thought of degrading into sub-atomic particles and joining the universe’s endless darkness and frigidity is enough to make you weep.

But on the positive side, I lived during the best of times; growing up as a teen in the 50s – I saw Elvis perform and stood no more than 20 feet from him for 2 hours in 1956. There were only 4,000 people there at the Tampa National Guard Armory – where I also saw James Brown, Little Willy John, Brenda Lee and many others.

I have met many celebrities in my life, made love to many beautiful women, had a lot of fast cars, and tasted the euphoria of many drugs. I worked as a consultant so I never had a boss to report to or a schedule. I’ve made good money for working 6 months a year and spent most of my life in front of small and large groups of people – something that not only gives you confidence but encourages arrogance as well.

I’ve been to most of the states and many foreign countries – and still travel internationally – because I still have to work because I was a real estate developer who was “all in” when the recent economic unpleasantness struck. I had to reinvent myself at age 65, going back into consulting after many years removed from that field.

But I have the resilience evident with many children of alcoholics; I had to look out for myself and my parents from an early age – going to the dentist by myself at age 9 and enrolling myself in a new grammar school at age 10 because of mother was indisposed.

Thankfully, I was born with some intelligence and street savvy so I see reality and understand our species; I don’t resort to the spiritual escapism of the masses – who think God guides their son’s performance on the football field, but was on vacation when 20 million civilians died during WW II (40 million died altogether; I assume because they did not pray good enough).

It is no mystery why most people need to believe in an afterlife; only the strongest of us can face the reality of eternal nothingness and still function normally. Living without hope is a hard row to hoe.

It took me many years to figure out that politicians are all corrupt at some level and the world works through the manipulation of power and money. It is best to stay out of their way; better still, in carping obeisance to their moronish reasoning, send your son off to die in some shithole country that will revert to radicalism as soon as we have spent every penny in the US budget and we have enough dead patriots.

Visit the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington, and explain to the 58,000 dead men why we are now doing business with Vietnam and allowing Vietnamese immigrants into our country. After all, most of those dead men were drafted and thought the war sucked but religious zealots and political fag-hags supported Nixon until the end. They were sent to die for no good reason and now everyone has forgotten as we send our troops to the Middle East to die for no good reason.

The great thing about being 68 is that you can say what’s on your mind with indifference to what people think about it. You don’t like my opinion – I don’t care. I may be dead tomorrow and I don’t give a shit. Not that I ever did, but I had to act like it when I needed to be accepted to earn a living in this sanctimonious theocracy we call a democracy – which is Latin for government by the cognitively disadvantaged.

You must think I am miserable; no, quite the contrary. The ability to see reality and face it like a human devoid of the superstitions that horrified our species several hundred thousand years ago, makes you human. Each human is a part of the greatest wonder in the universe; we are miracles of chance and particle organizational patterns. To degrade that wonder by saying some condescending super being dained to give us life if we agree to live it according to his dictates, is to declare yourself less than human – incapable of understanding the wonder of your own being.

It is the highest manifestation of natural selection to be able to discriminate the real from the imaginary - and, to think for yourself while the sheepish masses bray and cobble as the minions of political sociopaths; it is liberating to face reality.

There are a lot of people writing about aging these days, and invariably they make interesting jokes about the idiosyncrasies of thought and action that accompany the long walk to the hangman’s noose. They have no choice; no one wants to hear about the reality of facing one’s demise.

To know life as it is without having to disguise it with personal rationalizations or mythical imagery and symbolism – is wonderful. I have a wonderful wife, nice home, nice income, wonderful job, and a few good friends. No matter how sentient you are – how sensitive your aesthetic and emotional development – death is the irrevocable end of all ends.

It is interesting that death is a fate that faces all humans; it has not served to unite us. It is universally denied or replaced by visions of eternal bliss. How can a planet of 7 billion people come together when they have divergent rationales for death and its meaning? For some, the death of others is assurance that they will go to their heavenly paradise.

I will end this rant with a poem (I was a Lit. major and actually reread the old poets on occasion) from Ernest Dowson – a minor poet who fell in love with a 13 year old girl who threw him over for a waiter which prompted him to drink himself to death at the age of about 33.

"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for awhile, then closes
Within a dream."

Or for those of you who prefer a more direct representation of the realizations of death:

“And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.”