For the second year in a row, I am giving up buying stuff online for Lent. Because that has again become a distracion, a form of self-medication and an expensive one. I don’t even really have justification for the moleskin trap blazer, except that it’s part and parcel of my search for 100% the right thing that ends up with my owning half a dozen 80% things.
Thing is, I have so many of those things that I don’t actually use, some of which I didn’t even get out of the packaging for a while. I have Nerf blasters that need to be shot. I have modular 3-d printed Nerf blasters that can be made new with a different $4 barrel. I’m finally down to one “everyday” lightsaber, although it’s no Mace Windu. I ordered a handful of stray Nerf parts and added them to the refuse of my advent calendars to craft my own little creation, complete with a Lego version of myself at 60 trying to recapture my youth in DC. I have more Yeti stuff than I could possibly use, mostly limited to two in regular use: a 25 ounce mug for work and short range drives and bringing home ice in the evening, and the 16 oz moon dust that is my at-home go-to because of the way the tactile feel reinforces the feeling of not-at-work. It adds to the escape.
Because you have to make a hole in the night to hide from the world. I keep trying to pare it down – the nearer dive bar downtown is a cheaper night out than the pub in Cupertino, and walking to the local and back for one pint is cheaper still, and cheapest of all is home in the shed on a Sunday night. There are plenty of books to get through, the fire pit is replaced and works, the Olympics are back for mess and distraction for two weeks…
I’m bearing down on 54. Next year is another step into the transition – one with more discounts, perhaps a couple more legal protections (for as long as those last), the age at which I was prepared to decamp to Cañada Cove and work remotely for the rest of my career. Which, honestly – if they’d just let me go back to working remotely even three days a week, my quality of life would be so much improved. If allowed to work from home permanently, I would almost be willing to keep this job to the end. And that is the frustration: it would have taken so little to make this the life I have grown to want, and instead we have to struggle through this madness.
so 54 is about learning to make a hole in the world and hide from the misery. Not escape, because as i said once before in this space, it’s not escape if you have to come back. There may be no escape, but there is a way to live deliberately in spite of everything. And that is what I hope to craft in the next year so that when it’s time to start clicking the 55-64 category, I’ll have things to do there.