on aging
Music: Lyle Lovett: Live in Texas (1999)
I put on Lyle Lovett tonight for two reasons: the mood of the music and the thoughtfulness of the lyrics. Lovett is funny, but reflective and often fiercely brave (or simply comfortable with making it naked), and his lyrical expressions convey the depth of someone who often looks to catch your wandering eyes, as if to say, "be here now." To say "depth" sounds cliché (well, anything I say I worry sounds that way---rhyme and sway), but I don't mean the word in that sense. I mean the word as a moving reflection (not still, but still compared to the rush of magnetic stripes swiped across devices I don't understand---not up and down, kids, not up and down). He takes a roll toward the dying like Ry Cooder, a hankering for the slow amble or a steel cylinder on the slow-make with a curiosity for the "outside." The slide is on in his groove, but he seems to take the time to see all the people he moves past despite that side-sucking sound of commercial gravity, the force of recognition today that makes almost everyone else dismount with a thudding "ta-dah!" with arms outstretched and then the demand---always a demand--- for a check, or at least hits on YouTube. Lovett is an amazing musician because he is both talented and honest. Even with commercial success, he writes (about) what he wants and sees.
It seems to me even in his twenties Lovett sounded like he was middle-aged. He's always sang that way, anyway.
The exigency: my birthday looms, and it's closer to official mid-agedom than what is considered "youth"---despite the stunted growth diagnosis of my ilk and the patterned life-plan that should have begun, more or less, with rearing something with someone (a sore spot, to be sure, but more so for the parents of an only child than the only child hisself . . . I think). And so I've been thinking about aging and (my) mortality---"health," construed more broadly than my weight or the organic greens in the fridge or the fish oil. For me, being 35 meant you had a gram scale in the kitchen, and not for nickel bags but portions of blue cheese. I'm both flummoxed, at least in a body that does unexpected things now, and pleased to still be able to cogitate about my age and the significance of boundaries: how did 27 become "almost-forty?" It's not a blur, mind you. There are regular and still felt punctures of pain and joy in reacting to the earnest faces of not-getting-carded and strange gray hairs in my eyebrows. Every once in a while I'm reminded I'm older than I think---or better, behave than---I am; my appearance is more dated than the gestures I find myself making or the questions I find myself answering (like when an acquaintance asks me if I'm working on an advanced degree). I'm fortunate that I'm assumed by the new and yet-familiar to be incubating for some metamorphosis, I reckon. But that stranger assumption cuts another way, too: at what point in living does transience give way to settling? Part of me, the 27-year-old part, abhors the thought of routine unmovement (this is why I love the academic job; every six months is a different rhythm). But part of me is also hankering for the "enough already, let's sit still and enjoy the front porch." I don't, regrettably, have one of those (anymore). How to achieve the Lovett mood of being-here-now?
Like many folks turning the corner on 38, I find myself asking myself (again, in the kitchen): does that self-same metamorphosis look and feeling ever plate-up in a medium rare? I just heard the sound of distant thunder, and the sound still gets me excited, expectorant and wanting to sit outdoors. I want to say "no," that the metamorphosis is the thing, and to find solace in that thing-ing, but at some level or remove one can't quite give up the hanker: Gregor Samsa was a warning about going inside fearing a coming rain, but I recognize there is some comfort in knowing, finally, at least I'm a roach.
Pregnant and mixed metaphors, I know. But I like to play pregnant and get mixed, because it bespeaks possibility, even with the cliché police. I sometimes worry when waxing in public someone will go to tea leaves; I'm just delivering affect to some words to share, nothing much more than that. You know. You know what I mean.
I'm at the tail end of that generation named for a drug that didn't quite arrive until it was a little too late (I missed the hand-massager raving by a hair). I remember going to a dance club in DC with a best friend at the turn of a century (though we have not talked in years) and feeling somewhat out of place; I was sipping on my standard buddy while the throngs around me were "a rollin'"---and with angular elbows thrusting to music without a melody but an unrelenting, tyrannous beat. My friend is my age, but took a different path, which means he pulls a salary double that of mine, and that he is collecting the kind of wine I could never appreciate or afford, and crossing town in leather interiors. In some sense he was much more removed from the x-riddled crowd than I should have been, at least within that classed structure-of-feeling, but mobility is often more an issue of intoxicant access these days than it is a recognition of shared, material interests. The organ is a bloated cynicism, and some simply have it cut-out with money.
I'm not there yet.