I know it is an odd thing when I say Jesus talks to me. But somehow, he finds a way.
If I do good, I am kind, thoughtful and giving, he inflates my senses of self-worth and joy.
If I do bad, he loads me with self-doubt and roils my brain in the darkness of a sleepless night.
It is because of him, I never think of harassing, bullying, abusing or grabbing a woman by the pussy.
He talks to me about supporting the poor and needy, not judging or condemning others, or seeking revenge or retribution, or promoting conflict and division. All spot on with what he said and exampled in his life.
He also talks to me of the modern-day temple profiters pointing to their new leader who warps his every example into the most grotesque deformities persuading acceptance of a smothering of all he lived for.
I do not believe there has been a wholly original idea since someone said, “I think I will stop using my arms as legs and stand the fuck up.”
Those of us thinking today flow from that original thought and have merely borrowed from it and wrinkled it into an incalculable number of permutations over the ages.
Everyone copies, plagiarizes, and hopefully grows the efforts of others. If there were other wholly original thoughts, they are now lost to us, buried under the passage of time and the infinite number of embellishments that were born by it.
As a plagiarist and absolute center of all that I know, of every experience ever had and the few that remain to be had, the diminishment of my aspirations seems unavoidable. Aging has settled me into a slowing dance between spasms of desperation and quiet resignation. I’ve never had an original thought. A few good tweaks were the best I could hope for.
My ego has become an uncomfortable thing. Un-stroked by recognition, awash with influence or at least a lot of cash, it gnaws as I age.
How can a life that began with extraordinary good luck, mostly happy and honest, surrounded by love, be unfulfilling? I think it must happen to many of us as our lives are stretched out in the rear-view mirror, and we see the attainability of so much more that now the loss of time and energy has rendered unobtainable.
As a six-year-old I knew time was short. It was on that birthday that one of my always wiser older brothers informed me that life expectancy was 60. Just ten more, six-year birthdays and it will all be over I was told. I am fairly certain not a day has passed in all the days that followed that I have not thought about the time I have left. Time now left? Well, that past none fourteen years ago.
I now live on lucky time. In my youth I responded to that calculation with a spasm of discomfort but would quickly recover and head out for some more play, always thinking that I would make my life worthwhile another day. When another day finally arrived, I would be 31 and about to be born again but not in any Christian sense.
Everyone has a story to tell, and this is mine. No great drama, no epic events, no marks to be recalled by anyone but me. Telling your story in a way that would have anyone else give a damn seems farcical. I have no confidence that I will tell mine in a way you would give a damn, but it has some interest to me and there seems some value in thinking through all that has been me and imagining what might have been. So why not? Hell, now in the retirement I wish I had never attained, what else do I have to do?
In the end, what I see of human beings is what little it would have taken to make life so much better than it is for all of us. If only we would recognize and invest in the obvious, that one precious difference that sets us, as humans, apart from all other species: our ability to know.
In case you missed it, I am as close to a miracle as you will ever know, and so are you. If the teeniest difference in time or circumstance had changed in your line of ancestors from the very first time a cell split, 3.8 billion years ago, you would not exist. Having been given such a fantastically improbable chance, you would think we would make more of it.
If you are getting on in years, do you worry about having a bad ending, a long and painful one. Does it trouble you that you cannot find a peaceful means to pass on, on the internet? If you look, what you will first find is some message that amounts to “Don’t Do It!” followed by a jaw droppingly number of (cover my ass) equivocations, and finally a listing of the two gruesome options most of the 49,000 annual U. S. suicides are funneled into: blow your brains out or hang yourself.
This is due to the power of cults or what we think of as religious leaders. A power given by most of us seamlessly devoted to those claiming to be God’s representatives on earth, all of whom insist that regardless of your agony you suffer through it.
So silly is the notion that God is all powerful but cannot get it up to talk to each of us without some self-anointed mediator.
I for one hear God’s messages every day: pleasure, guilt, contentment, misery, happiness, sadness, anxiety, longing, pride, humility, jubilation, terror, sorrow, hope, on and on. Messages bounce off me like my tennis ball on the backboard.
But I digress. All I asked the internet was a simple answer to what are the most peaceful methods for ending one’s own life should one enter terminally agony.
NO! I have no interest in taking my own life, but many suffering do, and I may one day. Many elderly, such as I wonder about it, think about it and worry about it for a multitude of unselfish reasons. Do you know the answer?
It was the late 1970s, I think. Ed, Tim and I, college buddies, returning for our university’s Homecoming were just getting on with our careers in business, law, and politics. As we walked a street popular with college students a group looked at us and passed by mumbling to each other, we picked up on a single line, “Ugg, old people.”
That was 45 years ago. Now they, if they have been lucky enough to live as long as we have, are in their mid-sixties wondering where all the time went and wondering why their pee pees have to wee wee all the time.
Even with the wrinkles and sags glaring at them each morning they won’t yet get it with a brain insisting, “You’ve got this, you’ve always had this,” while their bodies cringe and mumble, “What the fuck were you thinking.”
After a recovery of a month or so that once took a few days, they might consider their brains inability to adjust to their bodies slow decay. Not likely yet, as they struggle to hold on to what they once knew.
It is not until the brain starts giving them hints, like the time at breakfast not long ago when my wife suddenly remembered that she promised to call someone. Not knowing the number, she jerked up from her seat went to the counter asking, “Do you by any chance have a phone book?” “Well no,” they responded but went into the kitchen to check. A few minutes later, delivering a small miracle, they had an old phone book and handed it to her. She fumbled through a few pages and then with that puzzled look known to all of us in our 70’s, she returned to our table to ask, “Who was I going to call?”
Or that favorite example of me, when I needed to rush to the bank before it closed to get a document notarized for a grant request.
I frantically looked around my desk. Couldn’t find it. I went up to the bedroom, thoroughly searched the car, the patio, the living room, the kitchen, both bathrooms and storeroom. Nothing! I then did it all again. When it was too late to make it to the bank even if I found it, I flopped down on the couch spewing every vile expression I had collected in life, just as the document appeared. There it was in the one place I had not looked, flailing in the air in my very own hand.
No, it would not matter if I ran into those youngsters calling Ed, Tim and I old and tried to tell them how their bodies and brains were trumpeting that the end was coming.
But it is, and I just feel lucky to have lived long, known many, enjoyed much, besides, like Mark Twain, “I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
A bit of time and patience and they will learn, and you will have what we all crave in life: loyal, devoted, adoring, loving friends. Even if others think you an ass.
Ah, for that time when people sought their elders, not because they ran fast or thought fast but because they were contemplative, thoughtful and steeped in a long life of experiences that nurtured a thing called wisdom.
Lots of older people have it. You likely have some in your neighborhood. I remember one living next door named Jack. He had led a Forest Gump life, only with a brain. Starting with nothing, as a kid he shagged balls for Babe Ruth and Lou Gerig. Then later when hitchhiking to Washington DC, he got picked up by Eleanor Roosevelt. Working his butt off, he got degrees from two universities, practiced law, served in the Maryland state legislature, and eventually became Dean of George Washington University School of Law. That was just after his Marine days were over, where there was nowhere to sit but on the dead body of Japanese he had killed. Then a guy named Earl Warren asked him to come straighten out the administrative mess at the Supreme Court as the Clerk, where a painting of him still stands in thanks.
After that he became president of two universities, while also serving as chairman of the boards of three of the world’s largest corporations.
One day, after one of my program directors took a swing at me because he had been fired, I retaliated with a left directly on the nose.
An hour later, I saw Jack working on the pool pump behind his house. Very upset, with my heart still pounding, I walked over to Jack for some wisdom. “Jack” I said, “You have been so successful in life, how did you handle it when you had to fight?”
He thought for a moment, then looked a bit confused and said, “I don’t think I ever fought with anyone.”
Unknown to most citizens, the U.S. Senate had a Candy Desk. Generally staffed by Republican senators and managed by tradition, it existed for half-a-century and was responsible for secreting sweet snacks onto the Senate floor. It was perhaps one of the longest standing circumventions of their own laws-in this case, the Senate law that prohibits food on the Senate floor.
It started back when senators once got along, even liked each other. But about 15 years into it, Democrats decided to have their own Candy Desk.
Kindness, friendship and cooperation left Congress long ago.
The original Candy Desk was begun back when members of congress and their families often lived in Washington full-time, instead of rushing back home at every opportunity to politic and raise the $10,000 a day, 365 days a year needed to win re-election.
Back when money was not King and families and friendships were, members of congress got to know each other, even like each other. If you are old enough, you might even remember a few famously odd friends: Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan, or Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater.
Washington was different back then. Members of a Congressperson’s family often lived there, you were in the same social circles of dinner and Embassy parties, members stuck around, their children went to the same schools. You were just less likely to call the father of your kid’s best friend a lying bastard.
Civility could win the day and won a lot of good government.
Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder — still learning — my blog is coming
Given all that we have done to each other lately, it can be difficult to be proud of ourselves. But as a citizen would say and every patriot knows, when disaster strikes some distant land, the people there won’t think, “Russia is coming to help us.” No, they won’t think, “We can count on China’s aid.” No, what they will think is this, the people of the United States of America are on their way. And for that and that alone you can be immensely proud of your country this 4th of July.
We say the most hateful, despicable things about one another, we are armed like no other and willing to kill. Enemies we once worried about across the world, have now moved in across the street.
Thirty-four years ago, I promised Presidents Ford and Carter along with 38 other national leaders of their day that I would not utter another word about politics. I would simply focus on building a system to which any conservative or liberal could turn for the facts about those who governed or wanted to replace those who do. In turn, they would support a national system, using students from universities across the nation to build an immense database of facts covering the over 40,000 politicians running for office and their power to govern our lives.
For a time, the idea grew and had a chance to pummel dishonesty and dishonor to death. However, current events have rendered honor irrelevant both without and within and thus that system is on life support.
The result of 34 utterless years? Twelve thousand, three hundred and eighty-eight days of corked, unstable explosiveness about my fellow man.
My blog will be eclectic, with comments about the present, the past, a bit of humor, and a good dose of learned philosophy, along with occasional chapters of the autobiography I am writing called, “The Life and Times of a Nobody.”
It may please and anger you in equal measure and be absorbing to no one but me.
