The sci-fi writer William Gibson’s proverb, “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” is the obverse of Faulkner’s “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – Justin Taylor
Going boating with the neighbors tomorrow, so I was thinking about an American’s median life expectancy.
Turns out it is 76.4 years.
I am 76.5.
As my mother Norma Jean (nee Moore) Welch never said, ‘Dude, you definitely no fuckin’ median American.’
Digression. I come from an uptight background. Myself, not uptight. No, not since about age four. Obedience To The Norm imprinted when I was a young pup. Okay, beaten into me, so comes and goes. I try to toe the line, I really do. One reason I think corporations aren’t people and healthcare is a human right. I got so many medals from church, I looked like Audie Murphy for you old people and Sgt. York for the dead readers.
Anyway, a favorite joke of mine was to say something completely scandalous, often scatological, maybe sexual, crediting my mom’s mother, “As Katherine always used to say, I’d blow two Popes to be ten years younger.”
Grandmother – never Grandma – used to clean my ears with a wooden stick and a dry wash cloth. Surprised I didn’t bleed.
Mom: “Oh, you.”
I was still doing it sixty years later.
Full disclosure – I took early Social Security.
That’s where you bet the government you won’t live past 78, if they will give you 75% of your retirement three years early. Like when you might need it. Like then.
Google it. Males: 73.5 years. Females: 79.3.
Making 76.5 looks like I am willing to go the distance, so to speak.
Will not hate losing my bet with the Feds when I skate past seventy-eight. Nope.
That reminds me, somebody early on told me of a can’t lose proposition where you bet against yourself.
If you want the Yanks to win, bet on the Pirates. Yanks win, you’re happy. Pirates win, you can pay for the drinks to forget the Yankee defeat. It is fool-proof.
Still not over Billy Mazeroski’s homerun in 1960. Freshman football. AM Radio ringing off locker room walls. Cost me everything, but it’s okay, didn’t have much.
Truthfully, I declared victory on my seventieth birthday. 70. The rest seems like overtime.
Imagine This Is As Good As You’re Ever Gonna Feel.
Well, what did YOU come up with?
A digression is a digression only if you were going somewhere.
And I ended up right where I am.
Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones tell us ‘time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me.’
Oh, crap. Shit.
You know Grandmother probably thought that, too.
Many, many times.
But she never said it out loud.
“Hell, no.”
Oh, you.