There is an older gentleman at my church who appears to be suffering from some degree of dementia. The first feeling I experience when I see him is jealousy. His non-present presence. His sublime unperturbedness. Then I feel sympathy for his wife and daughter, who tenderly care for him, explain what is happening even though those words won’t land, and guide him from donuts and coffee to the sanctuary. But still, more jealousy, to be cared for that way. Then I realize that I’m part of the way there already–the social awkwardness, the inability to remember much of anything anymore, the wandering mind, the lack of drive or feeling of any real motivation. If any of those continue to progress the way they have been for the last decade, all that will remain will be the clinical diagnosis.
Anyway, last Sunday, as I ate the last bite of my blueberry cake donut and gulped the last dregs of my coffee before I found a seat, he looked at me and stared into my soul. I felt significant discomfort, so I looked away. Then I looked back, and he was still staring. Not at me, but directly into my eyes. Not directly into my eyes, but through them, into somewhere deeper. I looked away again, and then a few seconds later checked in on his stare. It was still there. This cycle repeated itself a few more times before he looked away.
Life feels like it is spinning away into the distance, carried by a newer, more physically capable, and less haggard generation. I’m staring down the second half of this unremarkable life and realizing why so many artists seemingly go quiet later in life. I used to think that many of them just ran out of things to say, lost the muse, or maybe became too comfortable or too self-aware to throw any more cultural detritus onto the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of our collective consciousness.
Last week as I bemoaned my physical ailments to my parents and sister, I said, “We were all meant to have been eaten by a tiger by now.” My sister reminded me that I was the youngest person on the call.
Now I realize that there is something more insidious about life that explains why the people I see doing stuff later in life are only at the extremes of either complete capitalistic parasite or total monk-like transcendental. As if the only option for continued productiveness is complete surrender to either the devil or the literal words of Jesus Christ. Although the latter strikes me as being more likely to result in homelessness and insanity than a life isolated and comfortable enough to accommodate any higher planes of existence. Now I understand people who decide to end things themselves even though I would consider them successful and, by extension, I would assume, happy. People like Robin Williams and David Foster Wallace.
I’m not suicidal, but I am constantly carrying a duality of being overcome by the requirements of my life (especially at this stage) and the utter meaninglessness that paints all of it. The frustrating thing is that despite those requirements, many of my activities are not materially different from the things I did earlier in life when it felt like they were drenched in meaning. I ride my bicycle with friends (although that is currently inhibited by a foot injury). I am putting together a live music show, and dusted off my rock and roll Rolodex, convincing a handful of actual musicians to help me out for one night. I’m working on what is essentially a public-benefit venture to provide bicycling programming for school-age kids, for which there is currently a dearth of options. I’m still writing software with a user-centered focus.
But I’m doing it all through a fog of exhaustion and a feeling of incompetence stronger than I’ve ever felt before as if my entire life is a Dunning-Kruger graph and I’ll forever live in the nadir. I am an Average Man.
Or maybe I can cultivate the crazy and develop an ability to stare into donut eaters’ souls.
If I was a farmer
Instead of a faker
If I was a realer
And not just some raker
Raking through a memory
That just doesn’t belong to me
Just someone I could of been
If only I kept walking…