Digressions Of An Old Man
Report from “The Foothills of Old Age”
“We humans surf our lives on an Ocean of Time. Sometimes we’re stoked and shredding the epic crest. Sometimes we get thrown riding a phat tube. And sometimes we’re just swallowing water from a rogue wave.
A corduroy of swells is always coming in from the horizon. Beware the ankle busters. The dings on your board are forever increasing. Do what you can—stay amped, hang ten, curve, charge, stay in the soup, make like a washing machine, or if necessary at the moment, bail. But never forget that what awaits is the ultimate wipeout.”
— Zĕna Kōan, wahini kahuna (woman surfer, shaman)
Reporting From That Place Known As Better-Than-The-Alternative
Forewarning to ye Mortality Deniers who are ever ready to apply your Pollyanna Unguents (“the 70s are the new 50s”) (“you’re only as old as you feel”) unto all symptoms of Decrepitude —please . . . peddle that jive elsewhere! Proclaiming that the onward march of Feebleness is “better than the alternative” shows a pretty desperate grasping for straws from the Positive Thinking column.
Through that thin whitewash, I see that the U.S. Life Expectancy continues to fall.
To everything there is a season sez Ecclesiastes—and I have certainly been known to utilize placebos. And while a dose of Denial is a valid coping strategy at times, Accepting, while keeping an eye on Da Guy with the Scythe, is the right strategy for me right now.
But yes of course it still gives me a lift to sing along with Jimmy Durante’s “Young At Heart” — and Frank Sinatra’s “You Make Me Feel So Young”.
“There’s a moment when people know — whatever their skills are at denial — that they have passed from what they can delude themselves into thinking is middle age to something that you could call the third act.”
— Nora Ephron
The medical issues I touch upon that I’ve encountered are not here to catalog my ailments but rather more as who-woulda-thunk-it examples of the endless myriad of things that can and will go wrong when you’ve driven the vehicle a certain number of miles. Your mileage will vary.
One regular warning light on my dashboard is the one that blinks when creative people whose work I’ve loved—writers, musicians, artists — are turning off on various exits along the Timeline.
So many friends and family are gone.
A cornucopia of humans live on in the mind. Girls, boys—school and street mates. Women, men — lovers, partners, sex buddies, co-workers, acquaintances. Gone. Some from life altogether, some from amorous love to friendship, some evaporated—to corners of memory inaccessible.
The obituaries I encounter these days are too often of people within a decade of my age.
When I meet friends that I haven’t seen in a while I can’t help but notice that many of them are also becoming old people—as they surely do me; a rendezvous of two of those carved apple shrunken head faces.
Even though I am a relatively Funky Fogey™, the offers from otherwise self-centered young people of a seat on the bus or subway are increasing. They can see old, and increasingly, I can feel.
The Body
“The question is: have I learned anything about life?
Only that human beings are divided into mind and body. The mind embraces all the nobler aspirations, like poetry and philosophy, but the body has all the fun.” — Woody Allen (“Life & Death”)
Achilles’ Heel (definition):
“A weakness despite overall strength, which can lead to downfall. While the mythological origin refers to a physical vulnerability, idiomatic references to other attributes or qualities that can lead to downfall are common.”
In 2017, at age 65, I was getting older, yes, but I was not getting old.
I had strained but never broken any parts in my life. No surgeries.I regularly walked 4 miles daily all around the city.
I could run for the bus — the ride on which, as a newly minted “senior citizen”, was half price.
I was planning my 13th return to Burning Man in August.
March came in like a lion . . . April came in like a tripwire . . .
Three months after turning 65, on 7 April 2017, I was getting off the M72 bus on Amsterdam Avenue. My toes touched the curb, and the rest of my foot went down to street level. Ruptured Achilles’ tendon. First, there was the stabilization boot (I named “Nancy”), then the cane (“Citizen”), and when I developed Plantar fasciitis in my foot as a result, there were the crutches (“Dali Sticks”).
Months of physical therapy to rebuild the muscles, medications to deal with blood clots, and the leg would never be quite the same. Thank you Big Pharma for pain relief and other medications.
A difficult journey through the physical and psychological terrain of immobility; with many repeated lessons in patience.
Amidst intense pain, gratitude for the perimeters of my lot is sometimes hard to muster—but living in a city of eight million I regularly see fellow humans whose difficulties are so far more extreme.
While still struggling with difficulties walking and some pain I nonetheless once again made a hobbling trip to Burning Man that year.
The following year, 2018, another major disorder showed up on this old chassis.
Meralgia paresthetica is a condition that causes tingling, numbness, and, in my case, intense burning pain in the outer thigh. It’s caused by compression of the nerve that provides feeling to the skin covering the thigh.
Taking my both-ends-burning stance to life I once again made my almost annual trip to Burning Man—with a literally burning man's thigh.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light!— Edna St. Vincent Millay
2019. Covid-19. Living in an epicenter, near Mt. Sinai Hospital where freezer container trucks were lined up as morgues, and 24/7 screaming sirens, was terrifying. Especially as the virus was said to be most dangerous for senior citizens—and I’d had a mild case of pneumonia the year previous. I got the vaccines, and eventually got a relatively mild case of the virus. My partner put together a beautiful little book about our daily experiences, culled from her daily journal.
Where is your pain in a scale of 1 to 10? — they always ask.
I figure a 10 would be Joan of Arc at the stake — so the following items, which were around then and are continuing now, are usually around a 3.
• spike migraine headaches, like a knitting needle jabbing the skull
• eye exams (stronger prescription, talk of cataracts)
• hearing tests (hearing aids didn’t work out)
• dental visits (some removals, some fixes, some replacements) —
— the latter three of which are often especially needed by senior citizens, none of which are covered by Medicare!
But then, in April of 2022, having turned 70 a few months earlier, I had my first surgery—prostate (not cancer)—overnight at the hospital and all the stuff that goes with that. A long story of its own which I don’t need to write.
In 2023 I felt the need to address my concerns with memory (what’s your name again??) with brain scans and neurological testing. Not Alzheimers / dementia—the synapses simply aren’t firing like they used to.
Diagnosis: old operating system, no updates available!
I manage most of the time—and can still write short stories, poems, political rants, and charming essays like this—but at times the blank spaces are difficult to deal with.
February 2024—someone put sugar in the gas tank. Much worse than that—blood tests eventually indicated an E. coli infection. Particularly disconcerting was not knowing where I picked up the bacteria. Almost two days in the hospital, being hydrated and ignored. A nightmare story of its own I don’t need to write. (My partner Tammy covered it from her point of view.)
June 2024 — I ended up in the emergency room again. Getting ready to go to bed the room started spinning, more intensely than adolescent memories of too much alcohol. Long story short: after an EKG, brain scan, and X-ray—to rule out a stroke—it was probably an inner ear thing — benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV)(you learn so many interesting names and acronyms) — possibly caused by my playful headshaking to some music earlier that evening; but who knows. Now that it has arrived it will likely return and so I am due for some physical therapy to help me deal with it. No more pogo-dancing in my future.
To finish off this list that’s hanging on the repair shop wall—there’s the osteoarthritis in my knees, the left one of which is threatening to need a replacement. (That’s where they take an electric saw to your leg bones, remove the knee joint, and replace it with metal and plastic.)
Much of the horrors of pain are forgotten, and as I don’t keep a journal, I don’t recall many of the smaller physical decrepitudes.
But it's not just these larger things—it’s the everyday.
Walking up steps.
Bending and lifting.
Getting tired quicker.
Needing naps. Taking longer to recharge.
Exercise and stretching and a good diet—and smiling and platitudes and thoughts and prayers — they all only do so much when the rust has permeated the entire vehicle's suspension system.
Luck and DNA
“I happen to hate New Year’s celebrations. Everybody desperate to have fun. Trying to celebrate in some pathetic little way. Celebrate what? A step closer to the grave? That’s why I can’t say enough times, whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don’t kid yourself. Because its by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck, than you’d like to admit. Christ, you know the odds of your fathers one sperm from the billions, finding the single egg that made you. Don’t think about it, you’ll have a panic attack.”
— Woody Allen (“Whatever Works”)
My father died of a heart attack in his sleep at age 52—I know almost nothing of his physical health or state of mind. At least until that age I feared an early death like his, and going to sleep has always carried some anxiety. And yet, here I still am.
My mother lived to 81, her last years were filled with pain beyond her tolerance. A strong woman who lived through the war in Europe (and supported my refusal to submit to the draft here), she had many physical issues — spinal deterioration, osteoarthritis, intense migraines, kidney stones, lichen planus, shingles, and much more I can’t recall.
Rest in that place of no pain, Mom.
Seven More Springs. (Originally Ten. I’ve used up three.)
In November of 2019, approaching my 67th birthday, as the aging thing began to be noticeable, I wrote about my wish for “Ten More Springs” — that season that represented for me a sense of renewal, perhaps mixed with some melancholia. Along with Maude (in the film “Harold and Maude”), I thought 80 was plenty.
This March of 2024 began my 3rd spring. So I have 7 to go. I’m okay with that. I’ll be celebrating and bringing as much Awe as I can muster to each one.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
— “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — T.S. Eliot
> > > “Get The Hell Off My Lawn!” < < <
Older. Wiser. Crankier.
(Notes for a Simple Desultory Philippic to Yell From the Porch)
I am retired. Well—unemployed. I lost my job just before COVID-19.
The pandemic hinted at a hope that it would change the world for the better—an event that would inspire empathy and get people to treat each other better. Peace on earth, y’know.
With the would-be-leaders directing the way—selfishness and lies won out.
The ensuing behavior caused me to go into my basement laboratory and construct my MisanthroMeter ™ ©.
“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers, “ said Emily Dickinson, poet.
The feathered thing has dogshit on its shoe, add I, curmudgeon.
The bouncing baby Hope I adopted, nurtured by my having grown up in the 1960s, is on a portable respirator out in the hallway. The bacteria—pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth—are eating it alive. The prognosis is not good. It stays alive mostly through the music coming through the headphones—right now resting with the spirit lifting of Van Morrison. It also loves my reading to it from books, and nature — when I roll it around Central Park.
Many a rant I’ve written—and expelled upon friends' ears—about The War Racket and the propaganda-fueled gullible groupthink that sustains it. Example: the crowd with hands on heart, and blinders firmly blocking Reason, singing “God bless America” at the baseball game. “Christian nationalism” at its most treacley.
Having to deal with the demand that I was to enter my life in the Death Lottery for the Vietnam invasion, my Skepticism, and Critical Thinking sailed me up onto the shore of Cynicism towards nationalism and patriotism. Over the decades the vile actions of the country I live in have continued and escalated—750+ military bases around the world. All so the citizens can maintain their privileged, arrogant, support for these military interventions from their geographic safety.
Diplomacy hangs in bondage with a red-white-blue ball gag in its mouth.
I have my Social Insecurity check.
My partner in art and life, Tammy, has a part-time job working from home. It ends in September. We’re getting by, not planning any of those fabulous trips that the New York Times is always suggesting for their favored demographic.
I am out of the house every day, walking at least a couple miles around our neighborhood, or with added public transportation, elsewhere in the city.
Greeting me outside my door, and continuing throughout my travels, are the neverending piles of dogshit not picked up by their owners. It has become the trigger symbol for so much of the callous, un-housebroken, human behavior that seems to be the attitude de jour.
The hundreds of rats that roam our block are particularly delighted with people tossing food trash everywhere. Mom will pick it up, right?
And then this old sourpuss, after having dodged a panhandler or two, makes it to the subway station—sighing and rolling his eyes with disdain at the ever-increasing parade of smug privileged human scofflaws who are avoiding paying their fare on public transportation. Dad will take care of it.
It has become quite rare, amidst these daily displays of arrogant irresponsibility, that the MisanthroMeter™© needle doesn’t go into the red quite early in any day.
The misanthropy nudges also sneak in regularly through the computer screen. And if the mouse scurries over and bites on the Xwitter app, the needle threatens to burst into flames.
(As misanthropic as I may get, I still prefer interaction with a bored underpaid cashier to the wonky self-checkout technology.)
Latino immigrant delivery guys on electric bikes fly down the bicycle lanes, and onto the sidewalks, to assure that those precious (er, white) people, with so little time to spare from their busy schedules, are well fed.
(You too can get that Bud Lite delivered to your door in 15 minutes!)
And while the Comfortables scoot off to the Office, nannies will take care of their kids, and dog walkers will pick up and stroll their pandemic puppiesaround the block.
I was born in New York City — Bellevue Hospital, 1951—and have lived the majority of my life here; I’ve left twice and come back.
Though I have many wonderful memories, I don’t idealize the past of this metropolis—I lived here through its notorious 1970s.
And we’re back there, with a vengeance—out of control more than ever. Respect lies on the curb along with the trash, the dogshit, and the used prophylactic. It becomes harder to defend its present, and the near-sighted capitalism-intoxicated future it seems to be stampeding towards.
This current reboot of the movie franchise called The Big Apple is filmed in smell-o-vision so you can’t help inhaling the stench of urine as you pass the neighborhood wall where men relieve themselves.
The high-rise reflective architecture going up around the city mirrors nothing more than mindless greed.
Hudson Yards, the antithesis of a New York neighborhood, is a sort of closed community distanced away from the rest of the city. There’s even a golf driving range nearby.
It screams we don’t care about human scale—we are here for the wealthy, who are satisfied with the image of technological advance—and the tourist dollar.
It has made the once interesting stroll of the HighLine into a yellow brick road into Excess.
Look at all the extras staying forever young by bloating their faces with collagen.
After thirteen years back (from my twenty years in Vermont raising a family) in the last few years it has become obvious that my coping strategies are failing and I again fantasize about an escape, however unlikely.
This scene from a favorite film, “My Dinner With Andre”, rings very true these days.
“ . . . he said to me, “Where are you from?”
And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built — they’ve built their own prison — and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result, they no longer have — having been lobotomized — the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.”
I think it’s too late. (If only Barcelona would reach out to adopt us, I’d start taking Spanish lessons.)
As to be expected from a cantankerous codger, even one with extremely eclectic tastes in music, new pop music has very little appeal to me.
I emit grumpy grunts in response to the high-hat-treble-tik tik rhythm backing boorish yelling coming out of the boomboxes—and the radio hits of the 1980s leaking down from the ceiling speakers at the grocery store.
Don’t ask this sourpuss about hip-hop or Taylor Swift.
Most of the musicians I loved are dead — from Ludwig von Beethoven to Frank Sinatra to Leonard Cohen. (Thank goodness for recordings.) And the absurd prices of concerts, tickets all now being legally scalped, make me glad I’ve already seen everyone I’d want to.
This miserable old git has lately been heard to say quite often that silence is the gold that is impossible to find in New York City.
Impossible to avoid are the cannabis boutiques and nail parlors on every block.
There is less and less I need or want from the metastisizing shopping malls. I don’t shop on Amazon. I eat a lot of pizza.
Along with my memory space, my carbon footprint is shrinking.
I flâneur the hot summer streets. Often I find Awe and photograph it.
Regrets I’ve had a few . . .
I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing . . .
To think I did all that
And may I say, not in a shy way
— “My Way” — as sung by Frank Sinatra
Gratitudes.
“I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself; things like clean air, green grass, children with bright eyes, not being pushed around, useful work that suits one’s abilities, plain tasty food, and occasional satisfying nookie.”
― Paul Goodman
For my friends, the kindred spirits in my life.
For my partner—who has DNA-based aspirations to live into her 90s—and who daily holds my hand as we walk down Hourglass Lane. We’re going to continue down that road until we have to part.
The body stays
And then the body moves on
And I’d really rather not dwell on
When yours will be gone— ”The Body Breaks” — Devendra Banhart
For my kids, who I can do so little more for, as I watch them surf their sections of Time, riding the crests and handling the inevitable wipeouts.
For the books I still have time to read, the music I still have time to discover, relish, share, and the gems of cinema.
My curiosity and sense of Awe that create cracks, for the light to get in.
The time and ability to put together these thoughts and share them with someone they might help in their journey.
What do I do from here?
Every crooked politician talks about preserving their legacy.
What do I do before the FIN and the ending credits roll?
I’m leaving a few books and publications on shelves around the planet, and some art on a few walls.
And a trail of works all over the internet—words, sounds, videos, photographs—like snail slime leave, drying up in time, disappearing.
I still have a few more stories to tell, a few more rants against the lies of war, and the displays of injustice. Can’t find a way to give up.
“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett
Tell them, Leonard . . .
That same look—what-the-hell-was-that-all-about?—which will adorn my face when I exit.
art/photos/text © AleXander Hirka 2024. All Rights Reserved.
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Re:the Foothills of Old Age"
I confess that I didn't read everything....reminder to self ....come back and read....eye strain and the need to get up.....but I note you also didn't like the idea of being drafted and going to war.....me either....though for you Vietnam and for me Carter and Reagan were talking about bringing back the draft to protect Ferdinand Marcos and The King and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia....
Hope you are well...I noted your car was vandalized.....one small thing in a sense.....but exhausting.....my car was repeatedly vandalized....and then lost in a crime I'll be describing soon on Substack....long story.....
Dodobbird.pixels.com
https://www.gofundme.com/f/my-puppy-wants-a-cheeseburger