As of this month I've got a year before I should be posting on this thread. In a lot of ways I feel like I'm just discovering my stride. The older I get, the more I live and learn and feel, the further to the Left I move. One of my favorite things about aging (and thinking and living and reading on, on, on) is the way history begins to invade the present, well up in the head, become less abstract; reality opens up almost impossibly and is all the more deeply felt in the midst of its relentless burial beneath the eternal present of CNN, etc. Time and space expand and contract like they can't when you're young, and the present becomes "thick," like a palimpsest. I never knew how old I was until I started teaching college classes. Twenty-year-olds don't even get
Simpsons references, most of the time.
Speaking of which, another thing I like: being post-drug use, by and large, yet feeling the
strangeness of things. There are specters I didn't feel and couldn't know when I was younger.
My generation and younger--we are the first in modern civilization for whom making new life is honestly seen as an ecological dilemma. We are born into a shitstorm that cloaks itself in glibness and banality.
Meanwhile, I understand increasingly and impossibly what it means to make a relationship work. It seems to come pretty easy for some, but for me this is the
toughest and maybe the most rewarding thing, forging a life in two-ness.
Alain Badiou wrote:As for love, there is nothing mystical or irrational about it. It is the existential construction of a thought of the TWO; it is an intimate and creative experience of difference.
Crazy stuff breaks my heart as I age. Plain things. People getting by, people reaching out, people saying NO, fighting, fighting impossibly.
And I can grow an okay--not great but not completely laughable--beard now. Without it, I still get ID-ed every time.
All smiles for twenty-nine!