{"id":2113,"date":"2014-02-27T15:43:10","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T23:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2014-02-27T15:43:10","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T23:43:10","slug":"life-the-universe-and-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2113","title":{"rendered":"Life, the Universe, and Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c…when you get right down to it, our lives aren\u2019t measured out in easily-demarcated years. They\u2019re measured in random eras \u2013 places lived, loves lost, championship seasons, cars driven, a million overlapping criteria that let us look back and try to gauge the distance we\u2019ve come…<\/em><\/p>\n


There\u2019s not really anything I want for my birthday this year. Nothing I can buy with money, anyway. I have had everything I wanted in my life, even if I don\u2019t have all of it anymore, or want all of it anymore, and even if I would like some more of what I already had… For today and tonight, though, I\u2019m content with another cup of coffee, dinner with friends, and turning in early to snuggle with my sweetie. Tomorrow will take care of itself. You play the days like you play the games: one at a time.”<\/em><\/p>\n


-Feb 28, 2011<\/em><\/p>\n


<\/em><\/p>\n


<\/em><\/p>\n

“The only problem is with trying to find the solution is that this time\u00a0there isn\u2019t one. At some point, you have to find a way to acknowledge that shit happens, that life is full of randomness and it doesn\u2019t always work out or even mean anything, that we live in a world of chaos and entropy \u2013 and you have to find your own light. \u00a0And for someone whose worldview has always depended on consistent rules and logical solutions, the real world is ever more difficult to cope with\u2026 The goal is to live in the\u00a0now, in the moment \u2013 free of both the tyranny of memory and the trap of expectations.
That\u2019s not a problem with a solution either. \u00a0You just\u00a0do\u00a0it, and hope nobody looks too closely at how\u2026\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n


-Feb. 28, 2012<\/em><\/p>\n


<\/em><\/p>\n


“Aging sucks. \u00a0And yet I suppose it beats the alternative. \u00a0Yes, the sleep is more fitful and the pain lasts longer and the drinks hit harder and the stairs knock the breath out quicker, but fuck it, you\u2019ve been dying from the instant you slid out of the birth canal. You just never paid attention to the fact. \u00a0Dwelling on it now isn\u2019t going to slow the process down \u2013 just do what you can to stay healthy and get on with your life. But every February it\u2019s the same story, and I\u2019m starting to worry that I keep looking back because I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m looking forward to. \u00a0If it\u2019s not going to be a long slow grind of the same thing every day until the grave, I need to find something to shoot for\u2026”<\/em><\/p>\n


-Feb. 28,2013<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Huh. Well. \u00a0If that ain\u2019t a show I\u2019ll kiss your ass. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Here we sit, 365 days on, and everything is just as it was the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. \u00a0The goal is the same, but I seem to be falling shorter of it with every passing orbit round the sun. \u00a0Ever more cognizant that the world, or God, or Loki, or whoever – nobody<\/em> owes you a happily ever after. \u00a0Stephen Schwarz\u2019s Godspell<\/em> notwithstanding, it\u2019s not always all for the best. And the days may be long and drag on, but the years go flying by, each one faster than the last.<\/p>\n

I felt it more this year than ever before. \u00a0Friends and family leave town – over the hill or up the coast or across the country. \u00a0Others fight through health issues, of increasing seriousness. Work becomes ever more intolerable, to the point where I not only despair of it ever getting better, but despair of it being any better anywhere else. \u00a0I feel like I\u2019ve been spinning my wheels for too long, marking time, treading water, abiding by what\u2019s safe and secure even as the safe ground slowly crumbles beneath us.<\/p>\n

Right now, if the Old Scratch himself appeared before me, offering to jump me ahead to age 60, but I\u2019d be retired, with my wife and a healthy pension, and a cottage in a cold seaside town where the cops still carry revolvers and the coffee shop is still where you go for bacon and eggs and gossip, and where the one dive bar in town has a fireplace and doesn\u2019t sell anything more exotic or complicated than Guinness, and where the sputtering air-cooled VW can get us around without the hassle and strain of walking on a bad back\u2026I\u2019d have to think long and hard before turning it down. \u00a0Assuming I would.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s the challenge: what can I do to make the next twenty years something that I\u2019m not better off just fast-forwarding through to get to my dotage? \u00a0And if I had to guess right now, I\u2019d say: do the things that make me happy.<\/em> \u00a0Go ahead and make the coffee in the morning, go to the public house on the nights they have trivia or live Irish songs, find someplace to sit by the fire and read, sleep in and cuddle with my sweetie, take a walk in the fog, just spend the $20 on the damned Nerf gun, turn off all the devices and watch the Prozac channel on UVerse with the lights out, take the time to meditate with nothing but the rain app or the shipping forecast in the background, buy the books and read them, use the vacation time, go away to Tahoe or Portland or Boston or Ireland or Japan. Cherish the things I enjoy, because – like Dan Brown\u2019s Lounge, or the Antarctica video that the DVR ate, or the Franklin era of Vanderbilt football, or pie beer at Tied House – you\u2019ll always lose them in the end, and be sorry you hadn\u2019t taken the full enjoyment of them when you had the opportunity.<\/p>\n

And for the love of everything, if there\u2019s something in your life that sucks, that makes things worse, stop doing it. <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>I guess we\u2019ll see how well that works out…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c…when you get right down to it, our lives aren\u2019t measured out in easily-demarcated years. They\u2019re measured in random eras \u2013 places lived, loves lost, championship seasons, cars driven, a million overlapping criteria that let us look back and try to gauge the distance we\u2019ve come… There\u2019s not really anything I want for my birthday … <\/p>\n

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