Slogging On

Many times I’ve thought of pre-composing Aunt Janet’s eulogy. And I picture myself standing before the “mourners,” dumbstruck. But I won’t be there. I’ll be gone. I’ll book a flight to anywhere. I won’t be there for the funeral. It won’t matter then. Nothing will matter. The rest of the family be damned. They are undeserving of anything further from me.

 

When Janet dies I’ll sell her car. I’ll empty the bank account and cash out as beneficiary. I’ll disappear.

 

No I won’t. I’ll be sad for some time, remembering. I’ll show up at the funeral and say a few choice words. It will all pass in slow motion. Then it’ll be over. I’ll gather up my life, my thoughts, and consider my granddaughter. Her middle name is Janet. It seems I’ll forever have a Janet to take care of.

 

I’ll drive around in my ’74 MGB sports car, wondering which way to go, what to do. Maybe I’ll take an excursion to Africa, a safari. As ever, I will have too many options and will make seemingly nonsensical choices. Those choices will take me to more useless places, more collected experiences. Yet these choices will be tempered by Faith.

 

I’ll be somewhere warm, at a café overseas, sipping a drink and looking out over an expanse of sea. I’ll be wondering about life, then, as I am now. I’ll rent a room above a cantina and go down from time-to-time to play the piano. I’ll have girls come visit me every now and then. I’ll take long, lumbering walks to nowhere in particular. I won’t have a cell phone. My computer will not be wired up for internet; it will only serve as a machine to produce more writing, more useless drivel that no one will read.

 

No, that’s not the way it will go. But I won’t eke out a living anymore as I have been. I’ll rid myself of that horrid mortgage. I’ll move on. My house here on Ednor Road will soon be just another memory. But what of my marriage? Will that, too, be yet another memory hole? Perhaps.

 

What will be the shape of society when Janet bites the dust? Will a civil war be waging? Will Trump be dead? Will globalism descend like the shadows of buzzards’ wings over our once great nation? Will there be too much turmoil to get out?

 

What will become of this old guy? At almost 65 I’m finally feeling frayed at the edges. My working life is behind me. I work only fitfully now, trying to stay in shape. It’s all just a lot of tail-chasing, really. But I’m as tired of the alternative take as I am the old fake-stream news.

 

Where can I go where
Alumni magazines
Won’t find me?
Where can I hide
From the zip-boom-click-bang
Evening news?—
The pittledy-poo-da
Newspaper punditocracy?

Life has been one big practical joke. The world is laughing at me, but I don’t care.

No, I don’t care about much, except that I worry for loved ones coming after me. How will they manage? How can they cope with the madness of this world? Do they know that they are Spirit-beings devolved into debauched human form controlled by THEM? Shouldn't I say something? No, we must all find out this frightening truth by ourselves; it will do no good to say anything; experience is the only true teacher. But can’t I, shouldn’t I tell everyone I care about that THEM-that’s-got-is-THEM-that-gets?

Yes, I’ll say something. I’ll let the truth out just enough to linger in the backdrop of their minds, just like Granpap did with his old morality tale, that poem: The Two Roads.

…A shooting star disappeared athwart the churchyard

    Such are the wasted days of my life…

Such is the sad truth of the world today. Success breeds more contempt than failure, though failure is contemptible in its own right. How we struggle to tell it like it is, only ending up falling into the illusions of our own dreams. And fall we will, hoping for the gift of grace, though forever falling away from it in fits and starts.

 

In the end, life grinds us down. We must delight in the folly of it all. Yes, I must laugh and say to myself, “I did my best”—and be done with it. Oppressively sad or true? Don’t fret; just smile and move on. Keep moving on, tired old soul, keep moving. Slog on.