So here’s my thesis. I think old men are undervalued and unseen for the most part. So for the past few years I have been watching old men, observing them in their natural habitat. That became all that much easier the moment I became an old man myself.
This morning when I got up I made a sound. No not that sound. That sound squeezes from all of us no matter the age, from an early age. No this sound is more like an ‘Ooooph’. It started a few years ago, I’d say around sixty-five.
I have to say though that watching the unfolding campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has triggered memories of a time when I tried politics. It was 1967 and I ran for Student Council at the University of Victoria.
I hope you’ll accept this rather weak, shallow and opportunistic explanation for this week’s blog. You see my wife Mac and I have been moving into our new townhouse. Is there a more loathsome task? That is a rhetorical question and in case you’re not good with rhetoric, the answer is NO! I should acknowledge lest you think I am just a miserable old man …
I tell you what, this getting old thing is relentless and has changed the way I think. There are endless euphemisms of course, usually employed in some desperate attempt to avoid the ‘old’ word: The Golden Years, Well Seasoned, Experienced, Mature.
My ass! The word is ‘old’. Time to embrace it.
As I write America may be on the verge of the most impactful social, cultural and political change in a century. Vice President Kamala Harris may be elected as the 47th President. It is change long since past due. There will be pain and disruption of course, there is too much at stake for power to be handed over easily.
“My mistress, the Countess Bubna-Litic does not dither around the question. She has had a dream for some time now to build a magnificent destination resort hotel on the shores of Lake Okanagan. She has picked out the land and now she wants to build her hotel and that is what she wants to talk to you about.”
I told you he was eighty, his body the predictable vestibule for things that ache and break in any eighty year old. But he wasn’t eighty, nope in that moment he was twelve, if even for just few minutes he was the twelve year old boy who had always loved being Silly.
Writing for profit is a fool’s game. I don’t, I write for myself. Some of my writing is profound, some is important, but most of it is neither of those two things. I am at my best as an observational humourist, filtering the mundane through the ‘amusing’ lens and writing.
David Sedaris is a great American observational humourist and he has unknowingly guided me as I spelunked my way through many a dark, confusing writing tunnel. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration. He says that human beings are very funny, hilarious at times. The knack he says is to get better at seeing it. He is right, if I have grown as a writer it is because I am better now at ‘seeing’ us as we are, simple and complex, shallow and profound, tragic and hilarious. We are endlessly fascinating, a never ending source of writing inspiration.
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