I'm Old Not Dead
Consider this little snapshot:
“Remembrance of Things Past for an Audience of One, With a Nod to Simon and Garfunkel”
Bridge Over Troubled Water.
Man, that song hit me like a flatiron thrown by a hippie-girl in a floral print muumuu with a giant daisy in her hair.
The Sixties!
I know what you’re thinking: another old guy with the doughnut appetite of a cop and an inclination toward hyperbole.
A guy who can’t quite grasp that long hair on a seventy-one-year-old man makes him look like one of The Three Stooges.
“And lose those sideburns,” some punk tells me in front of the local convenience store.
It started innocently enough with him not holding the door for me and saying something about being blinded by the glare from my bald spot.
I called him a thug, and he said I looked like Friar Tuck, so he was at least well-read. What else could he do?
Beat up an old man?
Instead, he joined a group of itchy-fingered boys who were oblivious to the scuffle about to take place.
The girls were worse, leaning against a red Range Rover bragging about their hairless legs and lip gloss.
It was a knucklehead moment.
All of us frozen in time like a bunch of skinned chickens hanging by their ankles. Someone had to be the adult, so I said, “If there were still such things as winding sheets, our skin would gladly embrace them, so relax, dude. We’re all in this together.”
The last I saw them they were admiring their cell phones, stumbling like blind salmon up a newly paved road.
This prose poem (a genre of poetry I’ll explain in the next essay) is from my latest book called Old Man Howling at the Moon, which follows a Grumpy Old-Guy-Everyman as he navigates a world that doesn’t resemble the one he grew up in. Sometimes he’s funny, sometimes sad, but mostly angry.
“Old Man Howling at the Moon.” When I hear that phrase, I picture a clear evening in the middle of the country where no streetlights can blunt the celestial light show. There’s a full moon out, it’s about sixty degrees, and there’s an old guy (me?) on all fours howling like a wolf at the indignities he and other old guys have to endure. Isn’t howling at the moon like shooting death the finger. That’s what I do. Every night before retiring, I say, almost as a joke, an anti-prayer of sorts. I fold my hands over my chest, imagining a huge sickle-bearing creature in a hooded black robe hovering over me, and I say, with all the serious of a medieval monk, “Not tonight, Mr. Death.”
Then I shoot him the finger.
Naturalists say that wolves don’t actually howl at the moon, that people believe this myth because wolves are night hunters. So at one historic moment in time, some hairy Neanderthal in a bearskin diaper heard a pack of wolves howl, looked up to see a full moon, and there you go.
Their explanation is, of course, false. How do I know this? I don’t, but, for my purposes, I will maintain that wolves howl at the moon, and we old guys are like those wolves. Consequently, every time you hear a wolf howl, know that’s it’s just another old guy shooting death the finger.
Now that the wolf-howling-at-the moon thing is settled, it’s time to explain what series of unfortunate events possessed this old guy (me again) to share my howlings.
It has come to my attention that being an old guy often no longer warrants the respect it deserves. Yes, I can deal with you thinking I am irrelevant or invisible, but I refuse to be disrespected. Here’s one example: Recently, I wrote a novel-in-stories called SHOT, which my agent sent to young adult publishers, who said they didn’t want it because it was “too literary,” which meant, of course, that they think teenagers are dummies. Eventually, my poetry publisher took on the book, but before that, I tried to get an adult agent to represent it. I mean, it’s my best work of fiction, I fantasized that it could make me rich, and that it would be made into a popular mini-series, one much better than Space Force, which really stunk. SHOT is about a sexual assault and a shooting. There are even ghosts wandering around in the book, and everyone likes ghosts, right? Imagine my shock when three different 30-something agents rejected it without even reading it, all of them mentioning my age. One even said, “My agency would never take you on. They would wonder how many books you have left in you.”
I was angry of course, but still wrote her back this playful note:
Dear Thirty-Something Agent:
Thinking about your last extremely short and dismissive email, I have four points to make before I keel over:
I think what you said is illegal.
I’m old not dead.
Writers aren’t like UFC boxers. We get better as we get older.
You didn’t even read the book.
Thanks for your time, Thirty-Something Agent. I’ll be thinking about you the next time I howl at the moon.
Sincerely Yours,
Old Petey
I thought of drawing a little middle finger, something like a proud exclamation point, under my signature, but it’s important to have limits. I also had planned to mention all of my awards to let her know what she had missed out on, but lately, I’ve become acutely aware that to a certain group of people, nothing we old guys have accomplished in the past seems to matter. Even if you’re being honored somewhere for outliving a Galapagos Giant Tortoise, the people at the ceremony will be more interested in what’s for dessert, or the twenty-year-old blond in the tight red dress, who arrived on the arm of an eighty-year-old hedge fund manager, who doesn’t realize he’s become a cliché.
If you don’t believe you are no longer respected, think about the last time someone under forty held a door for you.
Admittedly we old guys can be a nuisance and do embarrassing things. Just yesterday, at Starbuck’s, a barista asked me, “What’s that in your ear?” Indeed, she was correct. I had something stuck in my ear: an orange earplug from the night before. Embarrassed, I told her we’d been having a spider infestation. Yes, it was a spider’s nest, whereupon I removed the object and scurried out the door, imagining smug grins or displays of pity from perfectly decent baristas who, in the past, had witnessed me come in with my fly down or with bloody chunks of toilet paper stuck to my face.
More than anything, I was angry at myself as I drove home. Why couldn’t I have just embraced the originality of a grown man walking around with one orange earplug in his left ear. I may have been the first old guy to ever accomplish such a feat. That had to mean something to someone.
But mostly, I find myself being annoyed or angry. Annoyed by what little time I have left. Angry at the lack of civility I daily experience, and that no one reads anymore or has any historical sense.
What is historical sense? It means believing that the world doesn’t start or end with you, and that you have obligations to those who came before you and to those who will come after, instead of living minute by minute, trying to squirrel away whatever you can, not even knowing why you’re doing it.
So the following essays will have a lot of rants in them, but there will also be raves, and even some laughs. Life is indeed messy, which is why it’s so damn interesting and spooky at the same time. Think of the following monologues as “dialectics,” which is from the Greek word dialektikos, meaning to converse. Dialektikos especially refers to a conversation between two people with differing points of views, which works fine for me since I often feel as if a number of people, let’s call them multiple selves, are conversing inside my head.
So instead of bemoaning this messiness, let’s lean into it, and, hopefully, have a little fun while doing so . . .
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon.
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories.