The sameness of every day begins to wear on me. Very tired. Difficult to become excited about much of anything. Truck repair, $600 today which Sandi was nice enough to add to my running $200/month total, was not a big letdown. Just glad it wasn’t more. No, my lack of energy, which seems would be to no particular end, weighs down the ideas I have, ideas that no one cares about. I envy those who are driven to create in a vacuum knowing that their work will be seen by no one or if seen will have all the impact of a stale Twinkie. I just can’t get going, started. It’s a self-serving why try malaise.
I see myself in this empty Florida landscape for the remainder of my life. Sandi has no desire to leave, or at least no motivation to, and she is the key to a move — money and property investment. So the days fly by with nary a notice. I wait till my next check without anticipation beyond paying the bills and maybe purchasing a book. I spend hours with computer games to no end other than filling the space that depression would otherwise.
So, I spend evenings with my post 5 p.m. five to seven shots of brandy, sugar, and milk, zoning into the early morning hours. Normal bedtime I shoot for three a.m. It boils down to this: Nothing I do matters, and though I’ve never fully admitted this to myself, it’s a lack of recognition. Pathetic sounding. Where is my ego in this? My ego is fed by ideas and concepts and dies periodically in the relentless sequence of days empty of significance.
Is it youth I lack? Possibly. The advantage of being young isn’t all the crap about strength and stamina but about having a menu of possibilities in the world ahead. In my senility, I sometimes lapse, just for a moment, into a vision of taking up archaeology, going on digs following another college course degree. Then, no, I’m seventy-seven. And this beautiful idea evaporates like the snow dreams I have in which I think, wow, I’ve finally made it to Seattle, I’m actually there. Then, all too quickly, the new dream reality sets in. I’m still in Florida and the exhilaration of being in this new place fades like your misreading the number on what you thought was your winning lottery ticket.
So I smoke and toddy away the evenings and wake up to a new day, which, despite all of the above, I am grateful for. Hey, hot coffee and cigarettes and my great animal friends and WQXR and all is well until I begin . . . to think.
I need friends, coffee house nights of idea trading and mutual reflection. I need friends who aren’t tired of my parade of spoken notions fetched from a solitary imagination. I begin to understand why retired people still work. Not the bucks. The interaction. The trade off is the mundane atmosphere, the environment that I longed to escape before my retirement from career and restrictive day-to-day mediocrity.
