Honea Express

Archive for the ‘Getting Old is Stupid’ Category

We passed the flags flying halfway up. Waves of people walked alongside us. Some found themselves caught in sudden bursts of empathy, while others never even gave a glance. The flags carried on regardless.

Ten years since it happened. Ten more birthdays for my stepfather. Ten more anniversaries of the day that my grandparents wed — no longer a celebration of their moment, but now the deepest part of the deepest hole where my grandfather buries his loneliness.

September 11 is many things to many people. The day is marred with beginnings and ends and the stories of those still between.  It is like any other day, but only more so.

I can’t remember when I first wrote the string of words floating below, but I meant them and I called them a poem despite the broken form and blatant disregard for any thought of structure. Consider the chaos a reflection of it. Consider the typed words as a sterile version of those that once fell across a bourbon-soaked bar napkin, left to ripen in the forgotten pocket of some seldom-worn jacket. Consider them what you will, for yours is the freedom to do so.

On a September day
when school bells rang,
and leaves entertained thoughts
of leaving –
things went wrong in a world
that was much more right
than we ever thought it was.
On a September day
when the bells rang
for the dying.

It starts with an email. Then there is a phone call. You might get some training on their system. There are some guidelines. You print out a contract and some tax forms, sign them, and email them back to sender. You write your first post. Maybe there is some feedback. Maybe you just keep logging on, doing what you were told, and you never hear from anyone. Your inbox may be full of jokes and community. Your comments may be full of hate and ignorance. You hope there is a check, and you hope they keep coming.

Other sites like what you do. They want your name, your talent, and your Klout score. They offer you various levels of pay and flexibility. The money is never good, but sometimes it is just enough. At some point you are able to cut the strings to a day job you have always hated and you spend the next five years working from home, writing for a living, and loving your children for stretches of time that you never knew existed. This is your benefits package, and it is everything you need but medical.

It could be you are in a new town and your wife has a new job. This is the fresh start you always read about. You might be staying with friends while you are trying to find the perfect home. There are big plans and family dreams and finally, it is the time to seize them.  Everything could be coming up roses. Everything could smell just as sweet. But everything is full of thorns, and pretty flowers tend to mask the dangers lurking underneath.

Perhaps you are standing barefoot in the cool grass of your friend’s yard, holding a phone to your ear and straining to hear the words that are changing your life forever. Perhaps it is the third straw in as many months, and it breaks your camel’s back accordingly.

It ends with an email. There might be a phone call: It’s not you, it’s me. We’re letting go of everyone. We’re revamping the system. We’re going in a new direction. We need someone that will do twice your work for half your price. We love your writing.

And then the checks stop coming.

It could be that things will be okay, except that your well has run dry and you are so frozen with fear that you cannot coax your drive out of park. In a moment your big plans and family dreams are reduced to the facts: you are as good as unemployed and you do not have a home.

Your options are few, but options are all you have. Options are the rope that life likes to dangle like so many participles: a noose, a lifeline, a tug of war, and things you are at the end of. Life has a twisted sense of humor.

Maybe you look in the mirror and you see your children laughing through your reflection, and all you know is that they do not deserve this.  Your hair is thin and it is growing grayer.

At the top of the hill lives an old man in an old house with a will to walk much stronger than his legs. He is a series of shuffles and waves and long pauses that feel like a moment and look like forever. His sidewalk is littered with chairs like stepping stones. Each seat is a goal, between them a journey.

I stand on my front step, a witness to his great adventure. Dogs bark and howl. Bicycles come and go. Geese fly over and honk at cars. He cannot hear any of it, but he’ll sit a spell and watch it pass. The pause. The moment.

Once he has gathered enough of himself to carry on he does just that. A breath. A step. A stop. The dogs. The bikes. The geese. It is a play. A game. A lesson learned. It is musical chairs in reverse: One old man, too many seats, and the absence of a song.

I stand on my front step, a witness to his routine. A spy upon his solitary dance. Each chair a memory. He shuffles his feet in a world far away, and I hum a little something for the two of us.

I have no idea who you are.

I shake your hand. I read your blog. I laugh at your jokes over beers and football. We chat during chance meetings at random places in a random world full of near misses and perfect timing. Your kids and my kids play together. Your parents know mine. We were classmates. We worked in the same office. We slept together. You sang in the choir. We’re friends on Facebook. You saved her life.

We are all walking shades and notes of choices and the places we’ve been and the places we’ll go. We share memories. We tell stories. I remember you. I saw you this morning. We’ve lived in the moment and we lost touch years ago.

You know everything about me. You know the highlights and skimmed the details. I saw you at a bar and we nodded with a smile. We couldn’t remember our names.

I read your obituary and regretted it all. You’ll visit this summer and we’ll go to the beach. Please, tell your sister that I said hello.

Life is filled with a cast of thousands. There are masses in the marketplace. There is crying in the library. I heard a song on the subway. Dinner was fantastic.

I miss you and I am sick of your shit.

You are complex and incredible with legs like wine. Society only scratches on the surface. Everyone has secrets and dreams and something worth knowing. Nobody understands me. I can’t find my coat.

Come in and know me better, man.

I have no idea who you are. It is time that we changed that.

Just because I have to tell you that I’m tall, handsome and talented doesn’t mean it isn’t so. It just implies you have a loose grasp on the obvious, and I don’t blame you for that. I blame society. The obvious was much quicker to register when it wasn’t going so fast. We are all George Jetson on the treadmill. We all want off this crazy thing. Eventually. I’ll wait until I’m done winning.

There are things in the works and there are works unattended. It’s a vicious cycle. Like life (see, George Jetson). Once again I am standing at the crossroads and Ralph Macchio is about to blow the top off this joint. Steve Vai will be all, “Whaaa?”

My blogging career is going in a few different directions. I’m guest-posting. I’m speaking. I’m writing and editing at some incredible sites. I’m losing part of my livelihood, along with 900+ others at one site, and I’m in talks to rejoin some old friends at another. Things will be a bit tighter, but that’s been happening for a while.

For example, my jeans just ripped while I was typing this. Because this is an exercise. And I’m getting fat (see, 40). Hard to get much tighter than that.

You may or may not listen to the show we do (even though podcasts of said show are free). I get it, you’re busy.

You may not have bought my book. Don’t feel bad, I’m still writing it.

I have products to review that have been stacked here since Christmas.

What I’m getting at is that there are many paths open to me at the moment and some require more faith than others. They are all rewarding. They are all hard. They are not in direct competition with each other for anything but my time. However, they all draw from the same well, and it leaves me dry and in need of a drink. This is a metaphor, but I’m also mighty thirsty.

The point is that I felt like writing something for nobody, so I did.  I needed to write sentences that didn’t have a deadline, demand a meeting or have pitches pending. Then I published it because I can, and like a virtual message in a bottle of freshly-finished whiskey it has floated, and against all odds it has found you. And that means more to me than you’ll ever know.