Years ago, I heard a comedian – no
memory of who it was, for years I thought it was Bill Burr, but I
couldn't find a record of Bill Burr saying it – that aging was like
a program that ran behind Windows that you didn't notice.
It's something I've been thinking about
as it becomes increasingly difficult to justify myself as a “young
person” in any meaningful way. Not that I ever found youth all it
was cracked up to be, but it was at least a reassurance, a
reassurance that something could change, that no matter how shit
things were right now, they could somehow be better.
And the cult of youth is, of course,
one of the major myths of late capitalism, the idea that no matter
how old you are, you have the ability to feel
young. Ask your doctor if Cialis is right for you.
Everyone
knows, intellectually if not intuitively, about the downsides of
getting older. About the wrinkles, the expanding waistlines and
sagging cheeks and breasts and ballsacks, the introspection, the
hangovers, the sense of failure and unhappiness with one's own
success, the realization – another quote I can't attribute – that
one will never play the Prince of Denmark.
But what I wasn't told was how many
people you'd wind up no longer talking to, and the odd realization,
one night when you're at home, alone, and you hear a certain song
from five, ten, fifteen years ago, and you thought about a party
you'd gone to, a camping trip you'd gone on, a dumb thing you said in
class in high school and their response, and the first thing that
comes to mind in your internal monologue is “what the hell happened
to them?”
You lose friends to marriages and kids,
to the difficulties of trying to make two lives into one, to the need
to keep those kids clothed and fed.
You lose friends to addiction, whether
they've OD'd and departed this planet or simply disappeared into the
ether, last heard talking about their new demo tape somewhere in
Portland.
You lose friends to mental illness,
because maybe they disappeared into their parents' basement in Kansas
City, only emerging to pick up a pack of Pall Malls at the Kum and
Go, or an eighth from a guy they knew in community college, or maybe
you just lose them to a garage filled with monoxide fumes.
You lose friends because you were an
asshole to them and still think you're in the right, at least to the
extent that you don't forgive them, and you can tell your current
friends when you show up to the same party that “it's a little
awkward.” The two of you had both had too much Bushmills that night
when you'd fallen out, and neither of you were on your best behavior.
You lose friends to ideologies and
religions, to their newfound faith in the Pentecostal Christ or
anarcho-primitivism, and their Facebook wall is suddenly filled with
oddly interpreted scripture quotes or something about how a keto diet
saved their life.
You lose friends to careers as
financial analysts and psychiatric nurses, their 14-hour days eating
through their free time, and you wonder if they're happy with these
arrangements, and maybe they are and maybe they're not, but on the
rare occasions you see them, you realize that the two of you have
nothing left to talk about, and you see in their eyes that they know
it too.
You lose friends, probably not many, to
fame and/or fortune, and you realize that you represent a past step
in their life, a step on the way to somewhere else.
You lose friends to what you call
“drifting apart,” but which is you really just being bored with
or pissed off at one another, and neither of you being able to expend
the energy to call the other out on it, both of you ultimately
subject to your own inertia.
You lose friends to their moving back
to Idaho Falls to take care of their aging father, all of their
social connections drying up as they pay more attention to long calls
on hold with insurance companies and the arrangements of feeding
tubes.
You lose friends to a boyfriend you
consider to be abusive, but she says he's just insecure and that deep
down, he 's really a good guy. You didn't want anything to do with
him after the last time you saw him, his last post-midnight blowup at
an Uber driver.
You lose friends to an eyeroll from
your wife after you say you're going over to his house to play video
games and smoke weed, and however that judgment plays out in terms of
your self-loathing, your love for your wife, your occasional contempt
for your friend.
You lose friends to not being able to
face another night out, and looking in the mirror at the lines that
will eventually become the crow's feet around your eyes.
You lose friends to the look the snide
look they gave you when you said you'd done too much coke last
weekend.
You lose friends because of the fucking
werewolf they turned into when they'd done too much coke last
weekend. Or the vodka-soaked mess you left them in the last time you
saw them, and the apologies you had to make to the waitress. Or the
way you saw them after they'd had a vodka-soaked mess, hungover and
having a cigarette on the corner outside a cafe with $4 Bloody Marys
at brunch, and their incomprehensible rant about every fucking
asshole in this town.
You lose friends to suddenly realizing
they've deleted their Facebook account and you didn't have another
means of reaching them, even though you have enough mutual friends
that it wouldn't be too much effort to find another means of contact.
You lose friends because the only
reason the two of you were friends in the first place was because you
were stuck in the same shitty little town and roughly the same age,
so fuck it, might as well hang out.
You lose friends to the 50 bucks they
promised to pay you back, and the fact that the next time you saw
them they were ordering 15 dollar cocktails.
You lose friends to the fourth lie you
caught them in.
You lose friends to the way they tried
to kiss you that one night. Or the way you tried to kiss them. Or the
way you kissed, and then fucked, and then went for brunch, and that
was it, and you don't know what to make of it.
You lose friends to prison, and the
military, and the way they are when they come back from prison or the
military.
You lose friends even when they're
still in contact, and you wonder if it would be awkward to contact
them out of the blue.
You lose friends because they picked up
rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing, and that's all they do now,
and all their friends do the same, and their Instagram is only rugby
or homebrewing or samba dancing.
You lose friends because they went back
to school, and their life now consists of long nights working on
their night-school undergraduate degree or their dissertation and the
vague hope that all of this might someday be worth it, when they have
to somehow have to help the kids with their homework and do their own
homework.
You lose friends because they messaged
you too much and you internalized the Will Rogers line about how
you'd never want to be part of a club that'd have you as a member.
And, perhaps most of all, you lose
friends because you were never really friends to begin with, and the
thinnest of barriers was enough to separate you.
***
And then you're back to
those memories of them, of the things that separated you, almost as
much as what connected you to begin with, maybe more.
This of course supposes that
this was an act of agency on your part, when it quite likely wasn't.
You only know your perceptions. You only see an unanswered message,
only hear an unflattering remark. And you wonder how many boxes on
the list of rationales for distance you tick, and for how many
people.
A quick glance through
social media reveals the ghosts of your past, transfixed in present
time.
I should point out that I'm
generally terrible at keeping up with people over electronic means,
which at the end of the day seem all too ephemeral to form anything
other than a tenuous connection, even if I know that if I was to see
a certain person face-to-face, five years after we'd seen each other,
that within half an hour it would be as if no time had passed at all.
And I know that if I was to
see other people, it would be like the two of you looking at
distorted versions of one another. We slowly change, until, like
photocopies of photocopies, we are no longer recognizable as such. We
could be in the same room, invisible to one another.
But at the end of the day, I
mostly feel like the same person, even as the rest of the world blurs
and shifts.
And so I have to wonder will
I ever become unrecognizable to myself?
