Thirteen Years Beyond the Sell-By Date | What I Learned in 2023
For decades I was completely convinced I would die by the time I turned forty-five. Don't ask why, it just seemed so real to me that most of my energy to achieve things was motivated by this ticking clock in the back of any room I sat in, informing me on the regular that it was destined to come to a stop before I took a single step into year forty-six. My own self diagnosed psychotherapy sculpted a shape that resembled someone running away from or toward the inevitable conclusion with an ass on fire. How else to explain the sometimes reckless decision making engaged throughout?
Spoiler Alert: I didn't cast off the mortal coil then or since. Somehow, despite my conviction, I've made it another thirteen years beyond my destiny and, in reflection, those thirteen years have been, well, strange. I joke now that the only thing left to do is to die in some bizarre, spectacular way to effectively end the story with a bang. A kitchen sink conclusion that seals the wild tale of my existence.
As with most of the previous forty-five, these thirteen have been painted with the brush of, as the song goes, looking for love in all the wrong places. Gazing into the slightly cracked mirror of my path, two things are right there up front in the foreground: my oddly random resume of work and art and my chase of women who require chasing. The latter has culminated with a most ridiculous divorce, one so weird and wrong that the only appropriate responses are either a gun in my mouth or hysterical laughter.
Quick hits of the past year include the publishing of two books (the first detailing my stumbling walk past the aforementioned divorce, the second a series of scenes from my eighteen months working as a casino manager near the Las Vegas Strip during the pandemic), the unfolding of a gig in Wichita that was both highly flexible but lacking any challenge whatsoever, and the daily walk between my mother and I as we both crawled out of graves we both had created for ourselves without realizing it.
Fifty-eight years. 2023. I'd call it a year of healing, of figuring out what I want to do with these extra years, less of reinvention and more of reclamation. It was a calendar flip filled with a Great Pause in the road, looking back with one eye squinting forward, standing still in preparation for a final push into a future unknown but familiar.
I've been writing (in one form or another) these birthday lessons since I was thirteen years old. I still have almost all of them (missing only Years 17, 28, 29, and 37) so a recap every now and then is a solid approach. First, a short list of lessons previously acknowledged but not quite learned. Worth mentioning because, hey, maybe I can actually check the boxes on these.
Girls suck. Especially LaDale Walter. (Year 14)
Marriage is a trap from which no one escapes uninjured. (Year 25)
The difference between interest and obsession is obvious when you find yourself losing sight of yourself in the pursuit. (Year 19)
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems at the time. (Year 32)
The person who needs to be chased and won over will always want to be chased and won over. (Year 27)
A transactional relationship will always be transactional. (Year 54)
A pattern emerges. When combined with historical record, it starts to look like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle with the edges framing an obvious picture. My approach to romance doesn't really work for me, does it?
Other notable lessons include:
Embrace your irrelevance in the world; we are not the center because there is no center. (Year 52)
Trust is given; respect is earned. (Year 35)
Compromise with people but never compromise with yourself. (Year 20)
Only love that which can love you back. (Year 45)
Cool is defined by the number of people who disapprove. (Year 27)
Good stuff. Some which stuck in the learning year, others that took years to solidify.
What, then, was learned in this fifty-eighth year?
I. Security and comfort are the safe rooms for complacency.
For the first time in my life, I spent a year and a half at rest. I've been on the move for so long that simply relaxing, spending genuine quality time with my family, and feeling secure in my comfort was unusual and, at first, exactly what I needed. A job that required very little of my mental energies, an apartment that was super nice, every place I needed to be within fifteen minutes away. I didn't feel the pull to create much, I had no desire to foster or build friendships or chase women. The most challenging part of any day was focused on when I'd work out or eat, which movie or show I was going to watch, which book I would read.
This place of complacency begs to be filled with drinking too much, eating too much, consuming too much of anything and everything that fills the time. Self care easily slides into self indulgence.
I recognize that as I get older, I have less energy to push myself, to burn that figurative candle at both ends. In contrast, I also spent a lot of time listening to my parents. My dad has all but given up living any sort of life. Sure, he's riddled with cancers, is forced to endure the medieval torture that is dialysis just to stay alive, and can barely walk more than twenty feet before he's tapped out but he has little to look forward to each day but one meal. He sits in front of the television, the volume maxed out due to his dwindling ability to hear, and complains about the fact that his life has passed.
In contrast, my mom was in that zone herself—content to languish yet required to make that one meal and make sure her husband survived the next day—and she was full of resentment that she couldn't live any sort of life beyond the walls of their home. As soon as I provided the bare minimum in terms of help, she started going to pilates, hungry to go out and do things, be active in her church, go to the symphony, see movies in the theater, enjoy concerts my job provided tickets to, and embrace the truth that she was not sick or dying unless she chose to be. The result of this (in part) included a record-breaking recovery time from a hip replacement and a feature story in a Pilates magazine about her resilience and strength.
It would be easy to take the safety and security of Wichita and eventually become like my dad but there's too much of mom in me to accept retirement. It is the absence of comfort that pushes me to get creative, to get moving like my ass is on fire. The relative ease of certainty is a shackle. Earlier in my time spent in Wichita it hit me—the only way to live is to assume I'll live forever and get on with things. I'd rather die used up than rusted out.
II. I'd rather be a tiny fish in a huge pond than the other way around.
Wichita is a small place. For the promotions assistant I hired earlier this year, it's huge. The Big City. Perspective is forced by association. After thirty years in Chicago even Las Vegas seemed like Mayberry with neon so I can't expect anything less than viewing Wichita as a tiny city with limited opportunities for me. Like Vegas, most of the jobs I might be most useful doing are gate kept by the legacy of small town protectionism and the artistic pursuits I might have leapt into would require that I not only create the stuff but likewise create the market for it as well.
There isn't any question that, if I applied the energy and enthusiasm necessary, I could be a big deal, a mover and shaker, in Wichita. The difficulty lies in that there are so few spots to insert myself and I've spent the time being secure and comfortable in the confines of my bitching studio apartment.
A rolling stone requires room to roll. Turns out I'd rather be anonymous and thriving in a genuinely big city than be a big deal in a tiny one.
III. Broadcasting your greatest humiliation is goddamned liberating.
In February, I published I Didn't Marry a Prostitute... and, almost like magic I wasn't angry anymore. Sure, I was still wrestling with the implications of having what I thought was a solid, loving marriage implode in such a spectacular fashion but the anger at her dissipated like mist in sunlight.
Yes, the revelation that my wife had decided to have sex for both pleasure and cash without cluing me in and my inability to see what was right in front of my eyes for nearly three years comprised the worst experience I can recall in most of my fifty-eight as well as my most horrifying humiliation, the act of writing about how I was feeling and what I needed to do to prevent hopping off the roof of a building was cleansing. My guess is that this sort of melodramatic divorce would end some folks. On this 58th birthday I can definitively state that the book helped me recover in record time and is a lasting thing to keep on my own bookshelf to remind me that the many mistakes I made are both mine to own and mine to avoid in the future.
Simply put, if you don’t have secrets, no one can use them against you.
IV. Why you keep doing something is not as helpful as simply recognizing you keep doing it and stopping.
If it wasn't apparent before this year, it is now. I suck at staying married. Of the four long term relationships (outside of friendships and family) the pattern is obvious. I'm attracted to women who are not attracted to me so I chase them. I'm pretty relentless and, in each case, these women finally find enough about me that works that they capitulate to my woo. I'm not bad looking, I'm driven, enthusiastic, and, for the most part, pretty funny.
Then, after a time, I stop chasing and the reality hits them. Too many aspects of me that they don't like, would love to change, and the game begins.
In the parlance of 2023, I should definitely see a therapist because knowing why I do this is supposed to help with a change. You know what's better, more to the fucking point? Stop chasing women who don't dig me. Just. Stop. Chasing. Who gives a shit why I do it? Don't do it. Problem solved.
Does this mean I'll never have a romantic partner, short or long term? Maybe. Better to be alone than to keep this shit up because the pattern has me chasing worse and worse partners each time. Next up? A serial killer or a Republican. I'll pass, thanks.
V. Solitude has serious recuperative power.
As a child I spent a lot of time by myself. Frequently the new kid in a new neighborhood, I found myself without a circle of familiarity and had to choose between engaging yet another group of friends to be made and all the work that entails or keep my own company. As an adult that sort of solitude has been rare despite the near constant hop from work environments, cities, and social cohorts.
This year I spent far more time alone in my apartment, on the road, in my office, working out, walking. Sans social media, my circle has grown smaller but more significant and I've made no attempt to engage into new relationships.
The benefit has been time to reacquaint myself with my family and to spend some serious time learning about myself. That rolling stone mentality rarely affords the opportunity to stop rolling and look at yourself so the solitude of my Italian prison here in the heartland has given me pause.
Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. I've spent far more time sitting, doing nothing, allowing my mind to aimlessly navigate nostalgia, failures, successes. Going to parks and the mall and just watching people move through the world. There are so many who wander with a deep sadness in their eyes and then, like a song that pops up out of nowhere, there are those walking through the world with purpose and a determination not to give in to the misery. In my moments of sorrow over so many things that both haven't turned out the way I expected them and the sense of almost pathological loss that merely getting older foments, I want to be that song in the chaos of despair.
Without the luxury of the time spent in Wichita, I doubt I'd had given myself that time.
VI. Human creativity is vital to everything.
Very few think about poetry. It's a strange act of human creativity that we take for granted when life is chugging along. It's there but not present in the face of credit scores and cars that need repair. Until you experience loss or heartache. Then it is poetry (and music and film and books) that come to your rescue to remind you that many others have felt like you, have lived through the exact same pain you currently endure.
I've always believed in the power of art but hadn't thought about this desire to reach out and grab onto it when the water is creeping up above the neck until I read a few emails from people—both men and women—who bought the aforementioned book and found some sort of camaraderie and solace in my extreme tale.
I found the same sort of embrace by diving into art this year, men and women who had experienced these feelings of loss, melancholy, restlessness, and doom and had chosen to channel it all into a lyric, a poem, a movie, a book, or even a short story or essay.
Art is a healing salve and a rude awakening. It is essential.
VII. Less drama is a net positive.
A year unplugged garners the benefits of a drama-free existence. I’m a bit of a drama junkie (thus my choices in relationship partners) and the absence of almost any drama whatsoever has had an effect. Time suggests that I’ve had my fill of dramatics in life.
Petty squabbles and frenemies are somewhat sexy in the earlier stages of life but at 58? I don’t have the time to waste. Sure, I might make it to 104 but I have a limited energy level for bullshit in a way that I never had before. Heading back to Chicago, I’ll strive to avoid it as much as possible.
VIII. Family is where it’s at.
I’ve been the infrequent family member for decades. Show up a couple times a year, blaze in, soak in the love and laughter, then head back out. While I’m ultimately going back to that status, this year with my family has been a genuine boon. Movie days, Survivor nights, visiting the gravestones of my ancestors with mom, cooking for birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, you name it, I was surrounded by love and support. I like to think I was helpful and supportive, too.
We created indelible, wonderful memories. Brand new ones in a way that wasn’t possible unless I was seven minutes away. I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world. I got to enjoy some real time with my mom, my dad, and my sister. I feel closer to my niece. I was actually in the room for birthdays. Yeah, this stone’s gotta roll but having my moss in Kansas is something I’ll not forget or neglect.
IX. Time is your ally.
Tom Hanks is sitting around a filmed round table with Robert De Niro, Jamie Foxx, Shia Leboeuf, Adam Sandler, Adam Driver—you know, an actor’s thing—and at one point he says “I wish I had known that this too shall pass. You feel bad right now, feel pissed, feel angry? This too shall pass. You feel great? You feel like you know all the answers? You feel everybody finally gets you? This too shall pass. Time is your ally and, if nothing else, just wait. Just wait it out.”
True words and worth heeding. Hanks has been on top and bottom for longer than a lot of us have drawn breath so it’s wisdom from someone who knows.
This year this lesson became very real to me. I don’t see it as a call to live things passively but more to understand the cycles of life, to take those things that are genuinely important seriously and let those things that are mercurial and momentary wash away like rainwater.
As I leap off the cliff of my 59th year I feel recharged, connected to my family in a way that would’ve never happened without this year, filled with the kind of sweaty anticipation that is the crack cocaine of my strange path in life. I’m looking forward rather than backward because the rearview mirror is great until you realize that your eyes need to be on the road or you run the vehicle into a light pole.
Heading back to Chicago feels like a fresh start despite going back to the same job I had when I left. It all makes me look forward rather than back and that’s a great view, gang.
The Laughing Heart (Bukowski)
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
