About Seven Lifetimes

Q: You know what I like about getting old?

A: Thus far, it still beats the alternative.

About a year ago, a good friend relayed his experience about turning...a certain landmark age. (That's as specific as I'm gonna get.) Suffice it to say I was "celebrating" a landmark year. He's a couple years ahead of me - so he'd already crossed that friggin moat.


He said that within a few weeks of hitting that age, three things happened to him:

1) His back went out on him and he was sprawled out for a week - unable to move, like he was in some sort of invisible traction.

2) He underwent his first root canal.

3) The optometrist told him he needed bifocals.

Oh yeah...did I say "three" things? There was a fourth: a doctor deflowered him with a long, greasy, inquiring finger.

I laughed my arse off at the time...then spent the next few weeks worrying about the karmic repercussions of my belly-busting guffaw. And then I forgot all about it.

Funny thing about karma: it doesn't care about time...it could be instantaneous (I guess that's "instant karma") or 218 lifetimes from now. Infinity is all-encompassing and is therefore outside the realm of time and space (I think). In this instance, karma caught up with me about 10 months later.

Last week, to be exact.

I'm about 2 months shy of one year past the aforementioned landmark. And last week, without any (known) singular catastrophic precipitating event, my back freaked-out (as the docs these days like to refer to it). This provided me and Sweetness (run, Lola, run!) a glimpse of the glorious future. I was a whining, creaking, groaning, bent old man for several days. In case you've never experienced debilitating back pain, let me explain something about anatomy: the back is connected to everything. I drive a manual 5-speed and I couldn't shift that sucker without a great deal of pain racing through my whole body. For fuck's sake, just sucking in a deep breath hurt like hell.

The doc kinda fixed me up: even though I am nowhere near 100%, I am at least not in constant pain.

A co-worker, empathizing with me in his own odd way, said something at the proverbial water cooler that stuck with me. "It's such a relief to know that we are gonna die!" he said. Dude is still in his mid-twenties.

So on the one hand, death probably seems far off and fantastical to him. But on the other, how can you be that young and already have experienced enough life to think that death is the existential Tylenol for this angst-riddled veil of tears? Death as something to look forward to? And it's not like he's a Mormon or anything - with his own universe to look forward to lording over. He's not religous and doesn't believe in any kind of afterlife. He has a great job, a great wife and is as healthy as a California wildfire. No addictions...no major demons. None of that torturous crap. It was odd. Yet awfully prescient and wise, too.

Given the current limitations of science and the human body, I have no doubt that at some point in the next four or five decades, I will feel the same way.

But if we were able to age only, say, 15 current years for every 100, I think I could probably hang around in this incarnation - on this wonderfully strange and occasionally infuriating blue water sphere - for five or six hundred years before I got tired of it. Hell, I could live in different countries and continents, move every 20 or 30 years and start a whole new career each time. Sign me up for that gig! I dig life - even with the aches and pains (physical and otherwise) - a heckuva lot more often than not.

The only stickler to living that long is the whole monogomy/marriage thing. How would that work? (Sweetness?) We love each other as much as any couple, I believe - and we have a pretty darn healthy relationship that encourages each of us to live and be our best...but four or five centuries? I doubt she'd put up with me for that long.

But if everyone lived to be 500 or 600 years old, maybe you'd only be able to get marriage licenses in like, 25-year increments: 25, 50, 75 or 100 year marriage licenses...with an option to renew, of course.

Whatever. Even if I haven't worked out all the kinks to living for half a millenia, I'd still take the deal. And really, if Sweetness were part of the deal, I'd take that in a heartbeat! (With asterisks, fine print, and parenthetical options, of course.)

The Secret to Long Weekends

Ususally, if you are anything like me, Monday morning rolls around and you are thinking, "WTF happened? Didn't I just leave work?" (Don't get me wrong: I actually don't dread heading to work...I dig the people I work with and I love what I do for a living...nonetheless, I am a huge fan of "free time.")

Well, I inadvertantly discovered how to make the weekend last forever.

A typical weekend consists of time outdoors doing yardwork, playing some sort of exercise/sport (also outdoors), a movie (at least 2 a month), dinner with friends (also at least twice a month), and (this time of year) vegging out in front of the tube for at least 3 hours of some baseball or football. This doesn't take into account the time spent doing laundry, giving the animals and Sweetness the time they deserve, or any of the other joys of homo-ner-ship or family obligations that inevitably crop up.

But a recent weekend was a little different. Sweetness left me in charge of the homefront while she spent a joyful weekend moving her mother from one house to the one next door. Aside from watching a ballgame with Dr. DoLittle on Friday night, the only time I left the house was for about 45 minutes to the grocery store.

By the time Monday rolled around, I'd felt like I'd had four or five days off.

Now, normally, I don't recommend doing nothing. It ain't easy. It's not for wussies. Amateurs should never try it at home without supervision. It's just flat-out hard work being lazy.

But it sure does make for a nice, loooooooooooooooooooooong weekend.

Boys of Summer

I realize this will only be of interest to Kansas City Royals fans...and only of nominal interest to most of those. So, after dilligent market research and a great deal of polling, I've concluded that this one goes out to all 87 of us who really dig Royals baseball.

Me, a bunch of yahoos and Sweetness attended the final game of the Royals' baseball season on Sept. 30. Their season has (depressingly) ended with the start of meaningful baseball in October. This has been the case for OVER 20 YEARS now. That's right: The Kansas City Royals Baseball Club hasn't even tasted the postseason since winning it all in 1985. Man, I know the Bo Sox and the Cubbies (and others) went (or have gone) longer without a World Series...but that is one long-dong-daddy post-season drought!

To put this in perpective, consider:

* At the start of post-season in 1985, the number one song was Dire Straits' Money for Nothing. The week the Royals actually won the series, Stevie Wonder's Part-time Lover topped the charts.

* Best-selling books that year included: The Mammoth Hunters, Lake Wobegon Days, Cider House Rules and Iacocca: A Biography.

Those of us for whom the 80's are mostly a blur (and all the friggin kids born in the friggin 80's or later) probably don't remember this at all, but there were five separate terrorist attacks targeting Americans or American interests - just during the the 1985 baseball season. (And I guarantee the fear-mongering Repugs don't want you to remember this. "What? terrorism isn't a new kind of threat?" Without our collective American amnesia, all sorts of interesting questions with uncomfortable answers might pop up...) These incidents included car bombs, machine gun attacks, a hijacked plane and a hijacked cruiseliner. Scores of Americans died in these attacks. The only death in the hijacked cruiseship, however, was when the hijackers threw an elderly, wheelchair-bound American overboard. Nice guys, eh?

* On the cover of Time Magazine the week the Royals won the Series: "Turning the Tables: The U.S. Strikes Back at Terrorism." I guess the more your shit changes, the more it stinks just the same.

Wanna guess what I was doing the night they won the series? I drove around campus drunk as a coon in a moonshine vat. I mean, literally around campus...like where cars are not supposed to go. On sidewalks. I kind of remember these 10-foot high mounds of well-manicured earth that had wide sidewalks circling around them. Man, they were fun to squeel the tires around! Anyway, campus police chased me in their vehicle for awhile before I lost them.

Or so I thought. When I arrived home, Springfield, Missouri's finest were there - along with campus police - to arrest me. I spent the rest of that night screaming inside a jail cell. It being the first time I was ever arrested, I thought (because of watching TV), they HAD to let me make a phone call as soon as I demanded it. Little did I know they only have to do so within 24 hours of your incarceration. Hey, I was a rookie and I made a rookie mistake. I became a seasoned veteran rather quickly. Like I said, the more your shit changes...

The world keeps spinning and we've all gotten older, were born or died. It's also been a long time - since Brett retired after the '93 season - since the Royals kept a player for more than a decade. Following the strike-shortened '94 season, Mike Sweeney made his major league debut in a September call-up with the big team. He ended up being a stud with the bat...albeit an injury-prone stud-with-a-bat. Although the pickings were admittedly often slim, he made the All-Star team 5 times. He could have left the Royals for more fame and money (and a better team) but he didn't. He likes playing in Kansas City.

He played what is probably his last game as a Royal on Sunday. It tugged at my heart. I don't know what it is about me and baseball, but it's one of the things that can easily make me sappy and weepy. He obviously wasn't the best position player to don the Royal blue - but he is probably in the top 10. And he is a fundamentalist Christian. I'll be honest: most of the time, I have a problem with those people. But in this era of professional jock wife-beaters and murderers and roided-out jerks, having a fundie Christian on your team doesn't seem so bad.

We gave him 3 standing ovations during the game.

They also played a highlight reel on the video board of Sweeney's career...and that choked me up a little. But the real kicker came afterward, when they opened up the infield (as they do after very Sunday home game) for people to run the bases. Mike took the hand of his 3-year-old daughter and the hand of his 5-year-old son and ran the bases for the last time. They played "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys...and another summer officially ended.

It was friggin sweet and I don't mind admitting that tears welled in my eyes. Even if he is a fundie, and even if he was hurt a lot, he is a good guy. I'll miss seeing him at the stadium next April.

I guess not even Jesus can help this team get to the post-season...so next year, I will be praying to the Bowiesattva.