Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "middle-age"

Tonight I made it from the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to my home in Burbank in precisely fifteen minutes. This will mean nothing to anyone who doesn't live, or hasn't spent significant time, in Los Angeles, but it made me feel pretty damned good. Because at the precise moment I got into my Honda, which is still ash-grey from the massive Sand Fire we had here a week ago, the clock struck midnight and it became my birthday. And zero traffic and green lights almost the whole way back, making for a swift smooth easy ride, constitutes as good a birthday gift as I could hope for.

I am not precisely sure when my expectations for birthdays began to narrow. I believe that it may have been when I turned twenty-five, and my car insurance rates plummeted. Prior to that moment there were milestones everywhere: my tenth birthday (the first with two digits); my thirteenth birthday (my first teenage b-day); my sixteenth, which was technically if not actually Sweet; my eighteenth, which technically if not actually brought manhood; my twentieth, which signaled the end of my teens; and my twenty-first, which gave me the legal right to do something I had been doing illegally for years, which was drink alcohol. After twenty-one the horizon became decidedly more boring. What did I have to look forward to now, agewise? Well, my car insurance payments would drop drastically at twenty-five if I could only avoid tickets and accidents between now and then. That seemed a very sober, a very boring, a very adult reward. No strippers. No streamers. No fountains of absinthe. Just a smaller bill. A little less stress on the wallet. A little more cash to spend on gas and groceries and utility bills. As Colonel Potter used to say on M*A*S*H -- "Wonderbar!"

Today, right now, I am 44 years old. I was told today, by someone who had absolutely no motive to lie and very little tact, that I don't look a day over 37, and I believe this to be true. A lifetime of avoiding adult responsibility and manual labor both have a preservative quality which I believe is underrated. Nevertheless I am 44, and the tug of nostalgia I felt tonight at the flicks merely served to confirm this fact. I attended a double feature at the famous Egyptian Theater -- two Clint Eastwood movies shot in the 1970s. I am old enough to remember the 1970s quite well -- the enormous cars with eight-cylinder engines, the Afros and muttonchop sideburns, the plaid bell-bottom trousers, the big medallions gleaming from within thickets of chest hair, the telephones with their curly cords and rotary dials, the knob-and-button televisions with their rabbit ears and choice of exactly five channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and one local station)...I remember it all, and very much more. But there is no point in trying to communicate the atmosphere of that particular time: as Orwell once wrote, either you were there, in which case you don't need to be told, or you weren't, in which case telling you about it would be useless. I remember, in 1989, talking to an ex-Marine who had lost an eye on Tarawa atoll in 1944 or 1945. He described to me in vivid detail how, during hand-to-hand fighting on the beach, a Japanese officer had hacked him open with a samurai sword, and how he had beaten the man to death with his M-1 carbine, which was either empty or had jammed. This same man lost his eye in a grenade explosion moments later, and woke up on a landing craft hauling a heap of dead Marines to a hospital ship just offshore. Some sailors noticed him moving and dragged him out of the heap of mangled, bloody, fly-covered corpses, and called for a doctor. His life was saved, but his parents had already been notified of his death. They had to be re-notified that he was in fact alive, and on the same day they got this notice they received another, telling them that their son, the Marine's twin brother, had been killed in combat somewhere else. I remember this conversation vividly: it took place in a restaurant near the National Press Building in Washington D.C. Yet at the same time it is just a story. I don't know what it is like to wade 100 yards through chest-high water under machine-gun fire, or fight another man to the death with my bare bleeding hands, or to lose a twin brother, or wake up half-buried in dead bodies with one of my eyes missing. Some experiences are incommunicable.
Middle age is one of them. When you are twenty-four years old, having a complete smokeshow of a girl thrust her phone number into your hand unsolicited is worthy of note. When you are forty-four, getting from Hollywood to Burbank in fifteen minutes, instead of the usual thirty, is worthy of note. The scale is a sliding one, and it slides downward.

Do not think I am feeling sorry for myself. I look pretty good. I'm healthy. I'm strong. I'm active. I can do everything I want to do. My two sources of income are playing video games for money and book royalties, and in a few days -- it was supposed to be today, but life intervened -- I am going to release my second novel and a collection of short stories. I have it pretty goddamned decent. I am just very much aware that the simple things -- the verysimple things, have greater weight for me now, as a middle-aged man, than they did when I was a young one. Perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps it is not a lowering of standards but an increase in the capacity to appreciate life -- that is to say, the very act of being alive. This morning, when I was hiking around the Hollywood Reservoir, I encountered four turtles and three deer and a whole host of birds -- gulls, ducks, cranes both jet black and egg white. Not one of those creatures needs to be told the meaning of life. Not one of them has to take Prozac or Valium or see a shrink or go to church to answer the questions of existence. They don't have to ask any questions because they already know the answer, that the meaning of life is to live it.

I know this, too; but I forget sometimes. It's easy to forget. So many things conspire to make me forget. Like alarm clocks, and traffic, and the rent payment, and the sort-of job, and the sort-of girl (there's always a girl, sort-of or not), and the parking ticket I forgot to pay but just remembered now, this second, as I sip cheap whiskey and tap these keys. There are so many petty logistics on the journey I forget the fucking destination -- which is not death, but life. Living. Existing. Being here, now, doing this. The scale may slide downward, but as any veteran rollercoaster jockey will tell you, it's the downward arc that sells the ride. Perhaps what middle age has over youth is simply the ability to appreciate. Not to lust, desire, imagine, demand or expect; but simply to appreciate.

I want you to do me a favor. I want you to take a moment for yourself and think about where you are in life, what you are doing, and what you really want to be doing right now. Where you want to go, and how you want to get there. Disengage from the bullshit, the everyday, the devilish details that suck up most of your time, and realy consider. Really be.. Just for a moment. Think. Ponder. Contemplate. Dream. And remember that you were not just born to pay taxes, buy products and die. You are here to live.

Humor me. It's my birthday.

Yesterday I went to my barber, Olivia, for my tri-weekly haircut. I estimate the hair I have was perhaps a half-inch long at the most, but it was too much: a few swipes of the electric razor later, it was nothing but stubble. Marine recruits have more hair. Before I left, I decided to come back not in three but two weeks: I don't want even that barely half inch. Just Kojack me.

To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.

I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.

I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.

Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.

I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?

Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."

It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.

Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.