Don’t tickle the proverbial ivory much anymore but the mood struck tonight; my family got me a new laptop for my 57th birthday last week. My old one had a lot of defective parts and they would all keep asking me how I put up with a keyboard with some unusable keys, a sound card that gave me AM radio quality sound, and wireless that cut out randomly.
I’d laugh and try to blame them for hogging all the bandwidth, but as my oldest kept saying, the other dozen devices around here all seem to work fine, I think it might be your machine.
I’m old and cheap and don’t believe in throwing shit out for the hell of it, for fuck’s sake, we’re literally drowning to death in our garbage around here, we’re choking out our own home, the last thing we need is yet another piece of electronics to bury.
I held them off for as long as I could, but last Saturday, after my own family and my brother’s family and one of my sisters and her husband had finished gorging on the pulled pork and potato salad I had cooked up in honor of the occasion, after I had blown out a bunch of candles that stood alight on top of my birthday carrot cake, after we had laughed ourselves silly the way we do, Good Lord, my brother has to be the funniest man in North America, get him wound up right and he will have you gasping for breath from cracking up, after all that, Bailey handed me a box, grinning from ear to ear, and said, “here’s your birthday present from us. I think you’re gonna like it.”
What could I do? Tell him I didn’t want it?
We hugged and I took it out of the box and he said, hey, this one actually has a battery that works, you can sit out on the porch at night sometimes and listen to music, you’re not chained to a wall outlet anymore. Sheila told me he had picked it out himself, and he looked so proud of himself, and, well, what can you do? Turn it down?
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The very first time I wrote in these pages, I said:
I type these words with an energy-guzzling air conditioner blowing a refreshing cool breeze across my back, while listening to music on some tiny music playing device that somehow stores thousands of songs. Perhaps I should just shut the fuck up and get the fuck out of the way.
Hard to believe that I typed that out seventeen years ago, in the aftermath of my fortieth birthday. I thought myself wizened and worldy at forty, but I didn’t know shit, didn’t know the disaster that awaited us right around the corner, and almost two decades later I realize I still don’t know shit, but the difference now is I know I have way less time left to figure it out.
My Dad died at 75, and he lived far longer than his own parents did, so, yeah, I’m thinking I’m down to two decades, tops, and that doesn’t seem like that much, at least not tonight, when I can almost still feel that air conditioner blowing that sweet breeze over my back, can almost see myself sitting there throwing out some words without wisdom, my wife and three young children fast asleep nearby, I can almost put my arm out and touch that night.
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Somewhere about ten, twelve years ago, I forget now, a dear friend of mine proposed getting the crew together at least once a year, and we all met upstate on New Year’s Eve. We turned it into a tradition, and every year, maybe not on New Year’s Eve but real close to it, we gather together at her place down in the city, one night, just us, food, music, wine, and reminiscing and shittalking.
At last year’s gathering, someone pointed out how few of these nights we had left.
I thought about that alot around the anniversary of my Dad’s passing and I thought of turning 57, 57, 57, something about that number struck me: not mid fifties anymore. Late fifties. Sixty standing there down the block, laughing. If I was lucky.
So I reached out and put it out there: once a year wasn’t gonna cut it anymore. Nor was twice a year. And we were gonna start this year.
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And so we did.
The weekend before 57, we gathered down at Lucky Town again, to, as Chachi put it, “Heinz 57 the shit out of this one.”
And we did. And I needed it.
My friend and her husband have mastered the art of creating this little cocoon for us, and though it’s only for a few hours, from the middle of a Saturday afternoon until the later hours of a Sunday morning, we gather and we laugh and sing and talk shit and all my troubles disappear.
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We’re scared.
There’s something about getting a little older, you don’t, or OK, we can’t speak for everyone, but me and Sheila, we don’t feel so sure anymore that everything’s going to just work out. For years, we’d tell ourselves everything would work out.
Like pretty much everyone else in the Land of the Free, we don’t have any money, not a pot to piss in as my Nana used to say, and though we’re both gainfully employed, and even looking like successful professionals on the surface, both of us face precarious employment situations; I won’t speak of hers, but in my case, massive changes at the top have me with no clue whether I’m hanging by a thread or in decent shape.
Sometimes at night one or the other of us will wake up in a cold sweat and sit up, and the other of us will rub the other’s back, and say it’ll be alright, but we believe that a lot less than we used to.
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So I type this out on this new machine, and yeah, the music sounds good coming out of these new headphones. There’s this song my boy Dan brought to the reunion last week, “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard” by Lana Del Rey. There’s something magical about it, to me at least.
In the old days, I would have gotten the link for it from YouTube and put it at the top of my diary. Hell, in the old days I would have probably just lazily named the diary “A Tunnel under Ocean Boulevard” rather than just lazily naming it “57.”
I used to embed all the time, but now on my new fancy machine, when I copy the embed link and try to paste it in here, it doesn’t seem to work. The new laptop has some sort of AI thingy that keeps suggesting words and phrases that I don’t want, and I keep pressing keys that lead to unintended consequences.
Still, the song sounds good.
And even after all these years, and with some sort of terror of what may and what will come, it’s still damn good to be alive.