We do age. Death is something that our species has a difficult time dealing with. I've seen many other animals die...they avoid it as far as possible then accept it. I remember a cat we once had that would always come to the window to beg for food. It was a sickly animal with almost no fur and no ability to meow. It would still try to vye for our attention.
We would welcome this cat into our house if it still was continent. Unfortunately, it just reminded us that nothing is permanent and molecular dysfunction will dissipate the passionate perfection our bodies experience in youth. However, the cat never seemed sad. It just waited, patiently, for us to bring food.
One spring, after not seeing it for a while, we were walking down to the lake. Washed up on the concrete side was the bloated animal. Its eyes were open.
Part of our perceived humanity is the revulsion and absolute disparity with death. It is our adversary. In our religions we construct tropes to protect our minds against it. In our mythology we idealize beings that are exempt from it. In our lives we often sacrifice what we perceive as most important for survival. Money, friendships, and the well being of the world around us are secondary to our quest for immortality.
I share the same feelings, as a man, toward death. However, every winter I think about it. I think long and concentrate my energy toward thinking about mythology that would preserve my consciousness. I think of religions as secret codes that I must choose to keep myself here. I always arrive at the same conclusion: regardless of how you live you will die. Immortality is, in all likelihood, a construct to keep this fear staved off so that we may consume and continue with little apprehension about how we spend our finite hours, minutes, and thoughts. We should love and produce as the major religions say...for the mutual benefit of all life around us.
If everyone thought about how finite life is I bet no one would be OK with putting plastic shells on those presidential coins at the factory where I worked. I know I wasn't.
I'm thinking about death right now. My grandmother just died when I came to Madrid. I shed no tears but nodded to the fact when I learned about it from my sister. Pictures of my mother and the funeral didn't shake me the way they probably should have.
Right now I'm writing a story inspired by age and death. People say we live 100 years but so many deny those last years their proper glory. Perhaps the most adventurous always die young. Maybe those last few years really are joyless because everything to experience has already happened. We won't know until we get there. Right now, I'm going to put something down about it and reflect on my perception in this moment as I age.
Several times I have been with or dated women who were older than I (all pre-menopausal...so not more than 21 years older than me). There's something elegant about years impact on a girl. They embellish the stong and motherly qualities of them. The experience makes them tough and sexy. The tight skin and perky breasts may be beginning to fade, but the dialogue, the maturity, and the experience compensates more than enough to make up for the doll-like qualities that young women have.
That's not to say that I would turn down a sexy young woman who came my way with something interesting to offer.
There's just something mystical about being closer to death that changes people for the better.
Memories change us. I've had my fair share of experiences. Skydiving, drinking in the barn, feeling the pain of betrayal from family, experiencing life under a different influence in Barcelona and at Strouds Run, scurrying to all the major cities in the eastern US with a mystery girl, playing on stage in front of hundreds, drunk punching windows to test the (paper-thin) glass, sledriding, breaking bones, raging parties with over 100 people to celebrate my 21st birthday, kissing 6 girls and going to bed with 2 with no recollection how we met at a party (and where was the one I was actually interested in?), riding out the flooded river in a paddle boat with my dad (we never got that boat back from the barbed wire and electric fence), and so many other memories that may or may not have happened shape me.
They seem like fiction compared with the present.
Right now I know a girl. We spend our Thursdays together. Platonic. I want to keep it that way. Winter is the worst part of the year for that.
Winter is time for pause and reflection.
I would like to be in shape right now. I mean. In the shape I was when I was competing in judo with a 6 foot 220 lb. guy last year. Stuff gets in the way of that.
It's impossible for me to hold a thought. My fingers are freezing. It's the perfect time to write this story about an old man thinking back on his life as people around him go about their days.
All our lives we're bombarded with these ideas of temporality and the flight that we must take. You're born helpless and attached to your mother. Step 2. Step 3: you die.
Given my neuroticism I approach this discourse as something true and apply it to my everyday thought and experience. Right now I'm thinking of a women I was falling for who was, incidentally, not falling into the pattern of things. I have trouble digesting stories that go from beginning to completion. I disdain stories that last through just one phase of a persons life (I'm looking at you bildungisroman novels) and then drop it like everything else was benign.
In my attempt to understand and enjoy this apparent divide between experience and understanding I have fallen into the comfortable coat of a detached scientist. I like it here.
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