Not Old

I’m not old, but I’m beginning to have the symptoms of an old person. I don’t mean I’m not biologically getting up there. I mean in my sense of myself, which I’ve had after all for my entire existence, I’m far from old and it’s a mystery to me what all these weird little difficulties are all about.

Eerie things are happening. I am mistaking one letter for another lately. It occasionally creates interesting confusion, like when I read that Robert Novak hadn't spoken to the press about the Valerie Plame matter since his 2006 interview in Jane. Interesting that he gave an interview to Jane magazine, I thought millisecondly, before my eye sped back to read it was June, June when he’d given the interview.

This kind of mix-up seems like a travail of the elderly, yet I’m not old. I’m just getting up there. Another sign is the age of men who are eying me on the street. For several years I’ve had to swallow the bitter pill that I no longer catch the eye of the really youthful men, the ones with the cute, youthful girlfriends who are effortlessly slim, the way I used to be and really haven’t not been for all that long. But I’ve started noticing extremely aged men giving me the once-over and I don’t like it at all. I don’t mean ‘older,’ I mean old. With red-rimmed, rheumy eyes and trembling hands gripping the heads of canes. My God! How dare they? Why would a young thing like me even consider the advances of one of these doddering old gits? It’s cruel to be harsh about a group I will someday join, and by someday I mean, you know, an immeasurable distance away, but it’s very destabilizing to my self-concept when these geezers start putting out the vibe on me.

But other weird things are happening. I can’t hear anymore either. I often watch someone talking and think, ‘Why are you muttering? Do you imagine I can hear a word if you talk like that?’ and I frown at the speaker, hoping they’ll get the message. But they don’t, so I’ll break in, “Speak up, will you?” or sometimes even, yes, I actually have done this, I cup my hand behind my ear to signal “Louder!” I mean, that's an old-person thing, right? Yet I’m not old. Still, there’s this peculiar confluence of experiences that’s becoming a bit hard to account for.

At night, after dinner, I have a weird feeling. I haven’t really done much of anything, just eaten dinner and watched a bit of TV, and suddenly I’m so tired I feel like going to bed and sleeping all night. And I mean sleeping – not reading in bed, not surfing the net. Just turning out the light and hitting the pillows.

Or I’ll be in the city, with friends or on my own, looking for diversion or dinner or a drink, and suddenly I’ll want nothing more than to be on my way home where I’ll get straight into bed and sleep all night.

I keep waiting for this phase to end, but it isn’t, and neither is the can’t-go-out-on-weeknights phase, which is becoming iron-clad. Once the idea of traveling to a rock show and standing for hours in a crowded club was a tedious prospect – now it’s unthinkable. I mean, why would I? And why did I ever? What could ever be better than sitting on the couch watching TV?

I'm not at the hot milk stage or anything. God no. It's warm, that's all. Warm milk, with a drop of rosewater. Mm.

Apples Are Too Hard

Have you noticed that lately, apples are too hard?

Don't Get Me Wrong

Group,

I don't want you to think I've never thought about the questions raised in the post below, touching on foreign policy and our involvement in Iraq.

I can see why it would be upsetting if either of you thought I'd never thought about it till my friend mentioned it the other night. I don't want you to think you're being led through the wilderness by a complete dope.

Because that's how I see this blog. Leading people through the wilderness. "What's going on??" people wonder, distractedly eating corner store pound cake to stanch their fears. Then they turn to Titular Head for some perspective. Granted, the blog often asks as many questions as it answers. But that doesn't mean I don't have the answers. I merely wish to empower my readers to answer questions for themselves, the way a good wilderness leader should.

Anyway, of course I've thought about whether we should have gone into Iraq. I've thought and thought. It seems not. But some pretty intelligent people (David Remnick) say we should have. Some other intelligent people (Andrea Cornacchio) say it's a good thing Saddam (why do we always call him by his first name?) was removed. These people follow the news more closely than me. Though I think hard, I seldom seek out hard facts to sort the situation out for good.

I was raised by knee-jerk liberals. I actually believed Republicans were barely human till I was about 28 and I met a conservative person. Sadly, I fell madly in love with him. He was human, it turned out, but his mildly conservative values drove me away after a rhapsodic year or so.

I feel like I sound like Anne LaMott. What's up with that?

In other news, the lens from my glasses fell out this morning and fell straight down the drain of my bathroom sink. In a soundless second it was gone. It didn't even hit the sides. It couldn't have gone down more cleanly if I'd aimed it.

Well, I was horrified. It's gone, and I'll have to get new glasses in a day, and they cost $100s and $100s of dollars.

A co-worker helpfully said maybe I could get it out with a chopstick and chewing gum.

That's what's good about working!

I Could Fuck a Mountain

New Blogger Full of Bugs

I agree with seventeenfingeredpoetrybird (link here if I could link). The new Google-run Blogger sucks. You can't do a Search on all blogs anymore! I did a Search for Jonathan Ames (a writer I admire) and it kindly allowed me to search my own blog. Gee, useful. I also dislike having my user name be my email address. It takes longer to type, and is something you're sick of anyway. My user name before was neat. It was Thomas Mannian. It was a lot better than the dumb email address Yahoo! stuck me with years ago.

What else ... I'm at a new job, I feel inhibited. There are tons of nice people here, all squirreled away in a few tiny offices in the bowels of this ad agency. There are two screenwriters, a writer of memoir/travel books, several visual artists, a writer/editor/story analyst, a museum studies expert, and we're all in here checking the p's and q's of some of the biggest ads in the country. I can't say more, it's too hush-hush.

Shell Out for a Real M

It bugs me that on my keyboard, Ms are just upside-down Ws. And 6s are upside-down 9s.

Maybe a 6 is an upside-down 9, but an M isn't an upside-down W.

You'd think Apple would have the money and talent to render a real M. It just seems chintzy.

I Could Catch a Monkey

With responsibility comes harsh things.

I now own a camcorder. Becoming a filmmaker is really hard. My old boss just tried to show me how iMovie works. My brain began to fog up early on in the tutorial. "Then you can do this. Then you can do this!" she kept saying, showing me new possibilities. I need to learn one thing a day. That's all I can absorb.

I met an old friend for dinner last night. There's this weird phenomenon where someone comes to New York from out of town, stays at a fancy uptown hotel, asks to know good restaurants and seems exhilarated about being in the city.

My friend and I were crossing the street and he looked down Park Avenue and said "those canyons ... somehow they enthrall me." "Really?" I said in amazement. The canyons of upper midtown seem like crushing slabs of gray nothingness to me. Or they crush me into gray nothingness.

I'm often shocked when people don't feel exactly the same way I do.

My friend is a successful writer. I asked him, "As an artist, do you feel obliged to report on the deadness of life right now?" I'd recently read in a review of an avant garde play here that art has an obligation to report on deadness, plus wake up a sleeping audience, shake them right out of their daze.

He said, "What deadness?" I explained how conformist life feels with a Starbucks every two feet and a shrill daily lifestyle that never addresses the terrible wrongs like the war. He said, "Well, there is more conformity in an urban center. I think the American way of life will end. Other powers, like China, are threatening it." I said, "But while we live in it, while it sputters out, if it does, it's like a horrible sick deadness." He said, "But America has what other countries like China absolutely do not -- a capacity for self-criticism." We do? I thought. "Plus they will do things. I was for the war in Iraq when it started. I had friends I'd met in Syria who had been tortured by Saddam. I was all for his removal. No one else would have done it. France wouldn't do it -- they couldn't care less."

His ideas caromed around in my brain. Was any of it true? It was so different. As Americans, we've learned to hate ourselves these last six years.

France wouldn't do it, but was it something that should have been done?

"Anyway, America is going to rejuvenate," my friend said buoyantly. He's in town for four days.

I guess I have an obligation to report on the deadness of life in America right now. Clumsily. Jerkily. With a choppy soundtrack from the Mountain Goats.

Don't Think, Just Watch

Okay, I hated Pan's Labyrinth.

I should have gleaned more from the words "fairy tale" that hovered around its publicity. What a fool! Instead I settled in to watch the story about a little girl going with her mother to stay at the country house of her mother's new husband, a rigid, militaristic, pro-Franco nightmare, without quite knowing where I was. But soon it became clear: The husband is not just humorless and cold, he's hateful and ruthless. The mother is gentle and helpless. The sad-eyed Mercedes, a household worker drooping around in a white shawl, is a supporter of the Resistance and heroic and doomed.

As it became clear that the characters were simplistically delineated Good or Bad, the way they would be in a children's fairy tale (but not one of the good ones) I felt let down, but the actress playing the little girl was very good and there was some good, tough dialogue. But then the little girl gets called on a quest by a supernatural praying mantis, it looks like, and she follows it down a winding stair, and then the worst thing possible happens. A shape transforms into a CGI'd gooey talking monster. At this point, I check out of any film. Talking monsters with gooey limbs have been stock creatures in boring movies for decades now. They couldn't be more played. Plus they're boring anyway. The little girl has to run back from the Underworld in time to beat a trickling hourglass -- something horrible and CGI'd is chasing her -- will she make it? Will she possibly make it in time? Since it's only 40 minutes into the movie, the answer is clear and the suspense entirely bogus.

I find all this super tiresome. If I had a child by my side, maybe I could suffer through it, though it would be more fun if Mike Myers was in it. I was happy whenever the movie's story left the scary underworld and went back to the adult plot, which involved a cadre of Resistance fighters who are camped near the scary stepfather's house so they can get supplies. But there was something uninspired about the way these characters were portrayed, too. None became a full person, they were Types. And why characterize them deeply? It's clear what's going to happen to them. Might they also not meet an awful fate, since they are camped so near the human embodiment of evil? Why, they might!

Plus it isn't realistic that a girl of 11 or 12 can crawl through a tunnel with cockroaches the size of large dominoes clambering over her arms, neck and even face. Why doesn't she run screaming? What little girl could brush a giant cockroach off her face with just a little shake of annoyance? This ruins the suspension of disbelief still further. But really it's the gooey monsters. To me, they're strictly kids stuff. If they're in a movie, I want to leave, and I did leave Pan's Labyrinth after an hour and 10 minutes. Grumpily going home, I searched the Onion for the review that had led me to believe I might like it -- I read "The second hour is a magnificent demonstration of how the personal affects history." Crumb. Maybe I bailed at exactly the second it got really good. But after that first hour, how good could it get?