Ode to a Sunday Morning...

Y’know – and here’s some phenomenal profundidty – I am not as young as I used to be.

It’s true. I am no longer wandering the earth, heady with the primitive, verdant juice of potency, prowling like an uncoiled jungle cat, spraying territorial markers and building a dynasty. Those particular days are things of my past, though I am still filled with the glory-seeking of the adventurous explorer. But these days my body isn’t always operating in orchestration with my wild animus.

I am on that delicate cusp between youth and encroaching old age; teetering ever so precariously along the outer edge of middle-age Tartarus, one foot raised and poised for the next step into that mist-filled vacuous space before me, the other so daintily balanced upon a precarious nail head protruding from the gunwales of my whirlpool engulfed brigantine. Sauntering past the hallway mirror in the morning I am caught by my reflection and wonder what happened to the lithe youth who used to appear there, before the days of white temples and burgeoning man boobs.

Flashing a grimacing smile at myself I take notice of my teeth, wondering if some future archaeologist will uncover my skull in what he would describe as a “late twentieth, perhaps early twenty-first century burial pit containing the singular remains of an elderly homo-sapien who we can deduce, by the wear on his incisors and rear molars, to have been a man of possible northern Eurpoean descent who lived, primarily, on a steady diet of various grains, seeds, Crunchberries and broccoli…”

Zounds! Think of what distant future conclusions will be drawn by the condition of our earthly bodily leave-behinds: broken bones, missing teeth, titanium joints and metallic bone ligatures. Such an age of technical advance must have granted us a quality of life unparalleled in any time before. Yet, we still aged and we still died, albeit much further down the time scale than our ancestors before us.

And then there’s the drinking. There was a day, not so long ago, when distilled and/or fermented beverage was a necessary lifeblood of existence. Drunkeness was base and common, so we referred to it as “playing the inebriate,” a necessary function of the highest order that precipitated hob-knobbing banter between myself and my brother wizards as we as we rode the unbridled calculus of the universal esoteric. A tawny port or a heady stout were the necessary chasers of the aged single malt Highland Scotch that was centerpiece of our intellectual gravitas. Absinth, though a fashionable drink, was right out.

I used to be able to drink like a fish. Hemingway was a categorical hero and I oft quoted his exploits regarding the imbibing of whiskey. “Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares,” Earnest said, “If you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.” So, the art of the drink was the fuel of our private cultural fire.

Now-a-days, alas, after a beer or two and six shots of a well-aged single malt highland scotch, I feel somewhat unstable in the morning. Perhaps cutting back to no more than three shots per sitting would be a stalwart step toward refining the wisdom I hope to attain ad I enter the realm of the sixty-year-old man.

A dear friend, just this morning, reminded me that I am a vessel for youthful curiosity. That’s the difference between me and my peers who, while falling into the same age bracket as I, seem so much older. Curiosity always seeking to expand out knowledge, to continue to dig for new things is the hallmark of youth. I don’t look or think “my age,” nor do I act it and that exposes the downside, however, in that most of my peers are no longer looking. They look at the world with only a soupçon of curiosity.

I possess the wisdom to know that I am eternal, despite the fact that the temporal altar on which I so often and unwittingly sacrifice sometimes takes over my mirror.

Coffee… where’s my coffee….?