When you’re young you’re always completely alive, but as you get older this is no longer necessarily the case.
Beyond a certain age, as you start to feel how things could break down in this way or that, possibly even catastrophically on any given day, you start to spent much of your life feel as though you’re just a bit dead, or at least, a little more dead today than you were yesterday.
At times this can be very pronounced, to the point that just how dead you are right now can wax and wane over the course of a week, or even over the course of a few hours.
— § —
This month, and especially this week, and super especially today, I am feeling quite a bit more dead than has been typical thus far.
I tested for my black belt almost a month ago now. Yes, I’m too old for it. But the thing is that I’ve given a decade of my life to it, and made promises to the people around me (most notably my coaches and my children) that I would do it.
And I saw the window closing, and did the “it’s now or never” thing.
And I left it all there on the studio floor, every last bit that I had in me. And then, afterward, I couldn’t walk. I still can’t quite properly walk and it’s almost a month later. The hips aren’t quite right, the ankles aren’t quite right, the feet aren’t quite right, and the knees are frankly so, so wrong that I feel a lot like I think 80- or 90-year-olds feel.
It’s tough to move without some amount of pain, so you go slow, and you can’t just “power through” the pain because not only will it hurt, but in fact you’ll drop as though you were shot and land on your face because you’re muscles and bones just aren’t working properly and won’t hold you any longer.
Yes, I know, I should see a physician, do physical therapy, etc., etc. At some point we’ll have to try to get to that but I’m also a father and a person with a very intense job that I need to do right by (after all, that’s where my health insurance comes fro), so it’s taking a moment to get there.
But at the moment, it gives my a kind of tense appreciation for just how late in the game it is right now for me.
— § —
You work enough years, and you have enough success, and you paradoxically also have enough failures and it all causes you to lose touch with reality.
I don’t mean that you go insane or start hearing voices or trying to buy souls from bus drivers with spare change.
No, I mean that the real stuff right in front of you starts to dematerialize. Or, to put it another way, you start to dissociate.
I know, I’m not really supposed to say this, but I think that pretty much all white collar office workers actually do this over time. I have that suspicion because I’ve known so many of them over the years (most of us have) that have clearly lost touch with the concrete, sensual, ontological existence of:
- The world outside their window
- Their pencil, paper, and desk
- The person standing in front of their desk (e.g. you)
- The person behind their desk (e.g. themselves)
What’s real? The stuff on the paper they’re looking at. The stuff on the screen they’re looking at. Information. Ideas.
There is this nasty trick that Plato has played on a lot of us whereby we actually believe in the platonic, in the solidity and importance of thought, ideas, information.
We’re so sure about these things that we built an entire information economy and a basically infinite universe of billions and billions of pages, profiles, articles, videos, and megagigapetamargaritabytes of data, and we’re convinced that all of it is really there, unlike the mountains and the trees and the nuclear stockpile, which obviously aren’t.
— § —
No, I’m not here to give anyone a hard time or to look down on anyone, I’m one of these people. I’ve been in the white collar world of work and day-to-day long enough now that I go years at a time without encountering any non-informaticalisms that have the whiff of reality about them.
But every now and then—every now and then reality breaks through.
— § —
Today I was driving the kids to school and I just happened to glance out my window for a moment to the left as the world slid by and I nearly jumped out of my seat.
Thing was, the hills and the grass and the trees and the frost that were streaking past the window as I drove were real today. It was all real.
And it has been so long since anything was real that I almost didn’t know what to do with myself; I found myself being tossed on sudden, emergent sea of feelings and confusion. The shock was nearly overwhelming. There it all was—grass, frost, dirt, cold, air, earth. There it all was as clear as day.
And then the moment passed and things were back to normal. The world was a virtual one again. The work to be done was information and service again. The important things of the morning were times and data again. My destination, the point I needed to reach and at which I needed to settle for work, was once again what we used to call ‘cyberspace’ but we now don’t call by any special name. Or maybe we just call it ‘work’ and ‘shopping’ and ‘dating’ and so on.
— § —
When you have one of those days or indeed one of those nights where you’re more dead than usual, where you can feel how old you are and how much time you may or may not have left, and feel the sand slipping through the proverbial hourglass, the slight whiff of reality (which still hangs in the air for me right now, hours later) is all the more assertive.
I am sitting here tonight surrounded by no reality. I’m a single guy, alone in a house, no spouse, no significant other, no close friends ready to hand, no particular projects other than work ongoing, but I’m just a bit haunted.
I’m haunted by my own mortality, and I’m haunted by the fact that there are still things out there that exist, even if most of the time I can’t see them.
— § —
The dog was asking to go out about half an hour ago so I took her outside to pee.
I took a flashlight and a camera and I was looking around the entire time we were outside, pointing them all over the backyard. I was desperate to find some trace of something that was real.
Sadly, none if it was real; all I have left is the memory of this morning and the yearning for a sensation that I can’t quite grab hold of any longer, an encounter with what was once commonplace but what is now the numinous and not amenable to literal remembrance or recall, only a kind of echo in metaphor.
— § —
Moments ago I abruptly came to. After typing what precedes this, I had somehow come to a state of rest sleeping, sitting up but drooping forward awkwardly, my hands pressing on the keyboard and generating hundreds of pages worth of apostrophes—that have now been erased once again.
None of it is real. None of it. I’m left with a vestigial thirst for something that’s slowly—but surely—slipping out of existence altogether.
Like me.