2011-01-02 Palaver 008 AGE BEFORE DUTY (c) 2011 lostnbronx CC BY SA v3 ========== (INTRO MUSIC UP, HOLDS A BIT, THEN VOL DOWN) For Thursday, January the 20th, 2011... It's the "Palaver Audiocast", with lostnbronx. (MUSIC VOL UP, HOLDS, THEN DOWN AGAIN) Episode 8...Age Before Duty... (MUSIC VOL UP, HOLDS, THEN MUSIC OUT) Hello, this is lostnbronx. It's mid January as I record this. Already deep into a new year, with new promises and new hopes, but it's also the dead of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. And despite my home being located in the Arizona desert, despite the usual lack of precipitation and generally-expected warm weather hereabouts, despite the blasted, arid mountains and occasional cactus, despite all these very true things...baby, it's cold outside! Nothing too surprising in this to people familiar with the high desert. But it's been unusually cold hereabouts lately, and we had about ten inches of snow in a period of 48 hours a couple weeks ago. I know, I know, people in other parts of the country WISH they only had that much, people from different parts of the world where they see REAL winters think, quite rightfully, that we're a bunch of crybabies. Sorry, can't be helped. Besides, this is all about me. So, anyway, we've had snow, and sub-zero nights, and barely about 20 degrees F in the day, at least, for a good long stretch there we did. That would make for some light, powdery snow to shovel, except that anything in the direct sunlight gets warmer, despite the ambient temps. And we have plenty of direct sunlight, most days, you know, with that whole desert thing. So, no matter how cold it is, the snow still melts a bit during the day. On the one hand that's good -- it means the roads are getting better all the time. On the other hand, it means the light powdery stuff becomes heavy, sticky stuff, no matter what temps we're talking about. And that means shoveling snow is an unbridled pain-in-the-ass. I'm too old and fat for this. Not that Mama Nature cares. But I spent two hours in the cold, after the snow fell, shoveling out the car and the road -- they only plowed a single lane's worth on our street, so I had to dig WAY out to connect my DRIVEway with clear ROADway -- and it was harder than I remember. Now, I was born and raised in New England, and I KNOW from snow, and I KNOW from shovelin' it: I done a whole LOTTA that in my lifetime, thankee kindly. I've learned how to pace myself, and I really wasn't much worse for wear. In fact, we actually went out and did some shopping afterwards...and for the matter of that, I was up until the wee hours, insomnia being ever-present and accounted for, despite all. So, no, it didn't wipe me out. What I REALLY mean when I say that I'm too old and fat is that it's becoming increasingly hard to MOTIVATE myself to do unpleasant, if basic, tasks. When there are unpleasant jobs to be done, despite often having more experience at them now and, thus, having a better chance of accomplishing at least some of them more smoothly, I have less motivation than ever to even begin. It's like my -- always low -- store of motivation reaches a major ebb every time such a task is pending. I'd normally point to sheer laziness right around here, somewhere -- and to an extent, I think I ought to -- but I'm not convinced that it's the COMPLETE answer: even a lazy bum can be motivated ENOUGH to make up excuses for himself -- which isn't always easy to do convincingly, I might add, so please give an aging slacker a break. I mean, if it weren't for the slothful among us all, the ambitious wouldn't stand out. The way _I_ see it, all you Type-A old-fashioned work ethic self-starter types...owe me big time -- I'm making you look good! In order to get up and get going, one must have priorities. I mean, if you need or want to do something, it will have to be important enough, on whatever level, and for whatever reason, to actually do it, or attempt to do it. Most of the time this is either self-evident or unconscious. These mundane, unpleasant jobs are just there, waiting to be done. I'M just there, waiting to do them...oftentimes, until they're not so mundane anymore, until they balloon into bigger issues. It's the tedium that gets to me. I mean, I'm bored thinking about those sorts of things: shoveling snow, taking out the trash, doing the dishes, the laundry, the yard, whatever -- I mean, they're killin' me right now as I picture 'em. I'd rather lance a boil most days, than vacuum or fix a leaky faucet. Be that as it may, be my lethargy as IT may, I have noticed in recent years, that this behavior is increasing. In other words, I'm more lazy than ever, even though I have less time ahead of me than ever. Go figure. In fact, I wish you would, because, frankly, I can't. It's a bit of a mystery. I'm slower, less energetic, more generally fearful about the merely speculative...you'd think I was getting OLD or something. See, and there it IS. The crux of it. Age. I have more of it than I really want now. I look at the things yet to be done, the things that are needful in my life, and tend to notice the gaps rather than the seams. I see where things are wrong, or could go wrong, much more often than I see them going right in my head. And since most jobs begin in my head, lately most of 'em are ending there too. I only have this one life to judge it all by (that I know of -- I mean, I'm an atheist, and don't believe in reincarnation, but I've been wrong before). Anyway, I can only base this view on my two score and seven thus far, but I think this creeping mental state is a clear sign of age. Decrepitude. Only the beginnings now! I'm not ready to sit in the rocker just yet or even any time soon, but, yeah...very likely, there's more time behind me now, than there is ahead. It's called middle-age. Billions before me have been here, and billions -- maybe trillions -- are yet to come. But this one, I own. This age, these YEARS, are mine. And thus, my reaction to them is worthy of my attention. My values, too, are my own, but how they have been shaped by these years of mine -- well, there may be tendencies or generalities I could reflect upon that are in common with my fellows...those of a certain age. We are more comfortable in our skins than before, while, at the same time, more concerned about what time has done to them. Now, I may be unusual, because I'm really not nostalgic. Oh, I can tell a funny tale or two from my formative years, and talk about the cast of oddballs who populated them, but I almost NEVER look back on any era of my life with longing. As I've said on numerous occasions, my best years are ahead of me. And I truly believe it. On those rare occasions that I DO think back on the anxiety-laden loner I was in highschool, you gotta know I don't miss him a bit. He spent far too much time worrying about other people. He wasted it all, too, because people were going to think what they wanted, no matter how he felt about them, or himself; because that's what people will do: they have their own thoughts and priorities, and you can't control them. Playing the disconnected psychologist for a moment, I'd have to say that the desire to control my environment was a primary motivator back then; a desire to control the people who walked in and out of my little world. Sounds bad when I put it that way, but...it was all about avoiding pain. Avoiding being hurt. Well, flashing forward to the here and now, I still have that desire, but it manifests in a different way. I no longer care so much about what other people think or say. I'm over that. I have enough faith in myself -- or, more exactly, so much LESS faith in other people's assessment OF me -- to keep my precious hours free of such anxieties. But the unknown and unknowable...that is to say, the future? Well, that's different. That DOES keep me up at night. Precisely because it's in my own hands, to a large extent, and yet, at the same time, hardly at all. And in the end, NOT at all...at all. If I am hurt, if those I hold dear, are hurt, well, maybe I screwed up. Maybe I should and really COULD have done something to avoid it. In other words, it'll be on ME. And that's a frightening thought. It weighs more heavily than ever now. See, I have JUST enough experience in life to ignore the unlikely and unimportant things that could happen, and to see plainly the vital and very possible things instead. Now, that should be a comfort, but instead, these newer fears are all bound up in "maybe" and "it'd be just my luck" and "I can't take the chance". So now I think about the things I COULD be doing when I have...things to do; things that take up time when my time is now in shorter supply. And I think about throwing out my back or having an infarction when shoveling. I mean, I'm not in shape, I'm not young anymore; who'll take care of my peeps? I think about the ever-challenging financial situations I continually find myself in. I think about my SON'S future, and the daunting challenges awaiting him. These are the bugbears that chase me now. They squeezed out the social fears of a child, and they seem likely to remain. Then again, the others didn't, so who knows? These terrors may prove to be just as false and wasteful of energy. I mean, if I gotta have fears, I'd surely be happier if they were largely false. Then again, history has shown that something else is just as likely to take up the frightful space vacated, so I can't win for losin' over here. You know, I always KNEW you slowed down as you got older, but I didn't know it HURT so much. Aches and pains, joint issues, hemorrhoids -- all that. And I sure didn't know it would be so damn scary. I mean, NOBODY bargains for this, but it's an unpleasant, and rather surreal surprise: that while I grow more confident in myself and my place in the world every year, I grow more and more suspicious and wary of the future. Because one of these days, my fears WILL prove absolutely warranted. I like being right as much as the next guy, but in this case, I think I'd rather be wrong. Sorry. Not very funny this time. Okay, how 'bout this? A guy walks into a bar...and then he got old. Ya get it? You will. ---------- Okay, here's an update on my science-fiction audio drama "Blue Heaven". It's essentially done, just have to get my ducks in a row, what with an RSS feed I don't have yet, and a contacts list for promoting it after it's released which is currently pretty thin, and some other stuff. But I'm on schedule for a February release. Maybe the 2nd or 3rd -- not sure. You can check out some promos I put together, and the script for the audioplay is up already. Check those out at: http://info-underground.net/lnb. And I want to thank Deepgeek for putting that shortened redirect address thing together for me -- it does make life easier. Be on the lookout for "Blue Heaven" coming to a media player near you. So, that's it for this one. This has been lostnbronx. Take care. ---------- You can contact me at lostnbronx@gmail.com, that's (SPELL IT). You can check out my site, at the aforementioned info-underground.net/lnb -- that'll put you into the Web side of my gopherspace, which is where I hang my hat. If you want to see it directly in gopher, you can go to that same address,and there'll be a link at the bottom of the page, which will pop you on to gopher server -- but you'll a gopher client or a gopher plugin for your Web browser for that to work. Some browsers still do gopher natively, but fewer and fewer these days. Whatever. The music for this episode is a piece called "Slumlord" by lo tag blanco (SPELL IT), released under an Attribution 2.5 Generic license, and is available at ccmixer.org. "Palaver" itself is released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. You can use it any way you want, just mention my name and share it the same.