When looking back seems better than looking ahead

“Can you imagine us years from today,

Sharing a park bench quietly?

How terribly strange to be seventy.”

 – From “Old Friends” by Simon and Garfunkel

I’ll be 69 years old in a couple of weeks, give or take a day or two, and my best friend will be 70 a few months after that. I’ll “catch up” with him for a short time next year before he pulls ahead once again. We’ve been friends since first grade so reaching age 70 – assuming we both do – will be “terribly strange” indeed.

These days, when we get together over a beer, we invariably talk a lot about the way things used to be because it’s so much more enjoyable than bitching about the way things look moving forward. Maybe we should take Paul Simon’s advice and go sit on a park bench somewhere. Or maybe not.  

Anyhow, it’s not so much the number of my age that’s important to me, it’s the quality of my life. After nearly seven decades on the planet it seems strange to realize that for the most part, life has already been as good as it’s going to get. That doesn’t mean it can’t still be good – and I don’t mean to depress anybody – but logically speaking, the chances of life getting better from here on out seem remote at best.

Physically, I’m guessing, none of us who are 69 or 70 years old are in the best of health. Am I right? I know I’m not, and I won’t bore you with a list of ailments that plague me because I’m sure you’ve got problems of your own. Suffice to say that, as just one example, a doctor is going to stick a needle in my right eye in a few hours to prevent a degenerating condition from getting worse. In all likelihood, it won’t get better, so as I said, the best days of my right eye are over and done.

See my point?

Still, I see people all around me who are far worse off than I am and I’m thankful that I’m in the condition that I am. I can still see well enough to write this essay, although the words are a little bit blurry, and I can still stand on two legs, dress myself, drive a car, walk my dog, read, write, talk, eat, drink and be merry when the situation demands it. An old man in the doctor’s office yesterday had to be told which way was left and still couldn’t negotiate the turn without help from his daughter and another man. I can still turn left on my own initiative.

So physically, I know I’m better off than millions of other people my age or even younger, and I’m thankful for that, believe me.

Mentally, I think I’m good. Thanks for asking. In the past few weeks I have finished writing three books, including one I started roughly 15 years ago, finished, rewrote, finished, rewrote, sat on, re-edited and finally completed last year. Two of the books I have written are at the publisher’s right now undergoing a critical review. I’m pretty sure that at least one of them will be published and maybe, if I’m lucky, two of them will. You’ll be among the first to know.

The third book is called “The shieldWALL Volume 1” and is a compilation of nearly every essay I have written since I started this blog in 2016, copied and pasted into book form, printed out and placed in a three-ring binder. I omitted a few that were, shall we say, not too good. It’s more than 500 pages long, ending at the conclusion of last year (I had to stop some place) and will probably never become a published book. For one thing, it’s out on Blogspot for free and anyone could read it, including about 1,700 Russians who continue to be my second biggest audience by far. Most of the people who care what I write there have already read it, so why would anyone pay to read it again as a big fat book?

As you can see, I’m still writing, so apparently my brain is still functioning fairly well. The other day I wrote a comment to a Facebook post that I swear came straight out of my own head with no help from anyone else, and a few hours later a political commentator said the exact same thing on MSNBC. I say it here, it comes out there. I should be on TV. Or not.

Finally, there’s my emotional health. I was actually awake at midnight on December 31 when 2019 rolled in, unlike most years when I was sound asleep. I think I was writing book pages at the time. The sad thing is, it was just another night to me. No champagne, no streamers, no confetti, no loud horns and no fireworks of any kind. I didn’t even watch the ball drop. It was just me and a keyboard and a book I had extracted out of my own, active imagination, which still seems to work as intended, even at my advanced age.

I might have been excited on NYE if the term of our current president had expired or if he had been arrested for running a global crime family or if the military had overthrown the government and exiled him to the island of Elba (see Bonaparte, Napoleon) or if he had tendered his resignation because the job was too big for him or even if he had lied (imagine that) and said, “I am leaving office tomorrow because I have kept my promise to make American great again and now my work here is finished.”

But none of that happened, and it’s another year, and we’re still under the “governance” of the crazy man who commands our nation’s military and treats it like his personal police force, has the power to shut down the federal government so that hundreds of thousands of decent Americans don’t get paid and now thinks he might have the power to fabricate a national emergency to keep a campaign promise that no rational citizen ever believed from the first day he uttered the word “wall.”

I wrote the other day that years from now, psychiatrists or other learned doctors will write entire textbooks about the phenomenon of the Donald Trump presidency and a condition I like to call “Trumpaloonic Narcissism.” I wrote those words after watching a video clip that went on for several minutes in which Trump said things like, “No one has ever done (fill in the blank) as well as I have.” I didn’t think a word existed for such an extreme version of the malignant narcissist condition so I made one up. Feel free to use it any time, free of charge.

Let me just say that like my right eyeball, I don’t think things are going to get better before they get worse. It still boggles my mind how 62 million voters and virtually the entire Republican Party can go through life allowing this president to run the country like his fraudulent university or his failed casinos or his questionable real estate business, all the while ignoring his history of having sex with porn stars, evading the military and the tax man and mocking decent people who dare to disagree with him and now, it seems, driving the country further into autocracy while chipping away at everything good about America.    

I don't always pay attention to memes, but I really liked the one that said, "If you can't see that Trump is a con man, congratulations. You're the mark." 

So how is my emotional health, you ask? Well, I wrote this essay, didn’t I? What would be your best guess? It looks like the shieldWALL is back with a vengeance for 2019, so stay tuned, my friends. I’m thinking there just might be several more to come.