THE TRUTH ABOUT OLD MEN - Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

There are many different brands of Hell from which men who live to be old can choose. The only certain thing is that old men get no choices that are not Hell. Many of these suburbs of Hell will be discussed in this examination we’re calling The Truth About Old Men. You can live in Ugly Hell, you can choose Matrimonial Hell. You can choose the Hell your children design for you. You can choose Government Hell, Employment Hell, Dating Hell and, if you escape them all, there is always AARP Hell. Ironically, growing old is growing enlightened, and of all the Hells waiting for old men Enlightenment Hell is the most painful.

Here are a few of the splendid tortures an enlightened old man must endure:

Until we become enlightened, we never doubt the statement that "competition keeps the price down". We believe this so strongly we support laws forbidding monopolies and encouraging competition. Americans are obligated to believe competition keeps the price down until they reach the age of sixty. After that, no one cares what they believe, so that's when the media and the politicians stop speaking to them and enlightenment sets in. That's when it occurs to an old man that competition has shaped American commerce from its very beginning and it continues to define the marketplace up to this moment. During that lengthy stretch of time, the price of virtually everything has gone up astronomically. How, then, could it be true that competition keeps the price down? Obvious answer: IT DOES NOT. The whole thing is pony pucky. But you don't begin to really suffer from the scam until your realize you've been duped, and that is one of the splendid tortures waiting for the occupants of Enlightenment Hell.


It's so sweet to be stupid and it lasts so long. But when you hit sixty it's all over. You realize no one becomes a policeman because he wants to protect and to serve. People become policemen because they love the power and respect the badge and gun help them extort from smarter people. Proctologists do not study the field because they believe the world needs healthier rectums or because there's an exaggerated demand for proctologists or because they had an uncle who died of hemorrhoids. They spend their day examining assholes because it thrills them to poke about in other people’s assholes. Similarly, don't think your podiatrist has a problem with foot odor. It gives him an orgasm. Ever meet a man with amazing self-confidence who has no apparent talent and only a whisper of a brain? Look in his pants. And, in case you didn't know it because you haven't reached sixty yet, television news anchors masturbate by looking in a mirror. All these annoying realizations are waiting for you in Enlightenment Hell.

Let’s not start with a whitewash. The “golden” in “golden years” is a load of crap! The chief beef most of us have is that we invested a lifetime working toward things that were gone by the time we earned them.

The well-intentioned among us, just for instance, threw away a mountain of opportunities for multiple orgasms when we were young enough to enjoy them, spending that time, instead, improving our education just so we could grow up prosperous. That would be our revenge against all the thin-witted high school Lotharios who squandered their teenage years chasing pussy. They enjoyed heavy petting for 4 or 5-years, during which we wiser guys kept our noses in the books, worked our asses off and went without pussy.

The idea was…for the next 60-years, AFTER the education, we’d stretch the boundaries of what human beings can do and remain loose on the streets as we claimed our reward -- a secretary! Also known as a personal sex-slave.

We expected return on investment. But just when we got our key to the executive washroom, she was gone. Where did she go? Why...the corner office down the hall, of course, of course. She’s holed up in there behind her new VP stripes with a barricade of judges and harassment laws blocking the door. What kind of justice is that?

It’s like Bernie Madoff was suddenly put in charge of punishment and the crime was growing old. Bernie liked to say, "You’re going to pay and pay and pay and, in the end, your reward will be bankruptcy."

1964…I’m working two part-time jobs after school trying to earn enough money to buy the thing I want most – a brand new Impala convertible a block long and lane wide with a 427-cubic inch engine. By the time I earned enough money for a new ride, they all looked like matchbox cars and had 13-horsepower. Later, everyone was driving a truck. Where's my reward?

The house we lived in that year was a 3-bedroom rambler in the suburbs. Nice place. It cost fourteen-thousand-dollars new. The same house in the same neighborhood would cost two-hundred-thousand today. Every time I get enough saved up for a new house, the price goes up. What is that? Maybe, there’s not enough competition in the real estate market.

Gilda Radner was right. It’s always something. I wanted to peg my pants when I was a kid. I wanted them so tight only the color would suggest I had them on. My dad wouldn’t let me. By the time I got old enough to have them pegged without interference, everybody was wearing bell-bottom pants. Then they went to MC Hammer/Sinbad balloon pants. Now they wear them so baggy a homeless family could take up residence inside a pair. When are the damned pegged pants coming back?

I ran away to Hollywood when I was a kid. I wanted to be a cowboy movie star. I wanted to ride a golden palomino with a silver saddle and wear rhinestone-studded shirts and a two-gun rig with bone-handle six-shooters. By the time I finished my acting education you couldn’t tell the cowboy heroes from the bums hustling quarters on the boulevard. Not only their horses didn’t have names, but the heroes didn’t have names. And one lousy gun! What the hell kind of cowboy hero is that. I don’t blame Roy Rogers for dying.

One of the phrases I used to hear old men at the barber shop say when my dad took me for a haircut was “day late and a dollar short”. Not only they don’t say that anymore, but the barber shop where the old men hang out doesn’t even exist. Now you have to hold your nose to prevent suffocating on the stink of styling gel when you go to get a haircut. And the magazines lying around have names like Cosmo and Housekeeping. You don’t hear fishing stories and you don’t hear politics. You hear dating stories, unless you turn off your hearing aid and pretend you aren’t there.

I hope I don’t sound like an angry old man…really…because I hate understatement. What I am is vexed, bitter, disillusioned, disenfranchised, disrespected, disgusted, displaced, disoriented and sort of pissed off. But the time for complaining is passed. And the strength for resisting is gone. And the evil merchants at AARP who promised I’d have a voice in the manufacture of laws if I’d give them some membership money have had me for lunch.

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On a more uplifting theme…consider death. Here’s what I want to know: Does congress think I’m going to live forever? Do the makers of law not realize I’m going to die? Do they think it will not be painful? Do they think I deserve the pain? Why is it against the law for me to go to a doctor and say, “Okay, I’m finished. I’d like a prescription for the put-you-to-sleep drug, so that I can go painlessly and happily in a sweet dream about days gone by with my assets intact for passing along to my heirs.”

Why is my only alternative to a protracted, pain-based existence in which everything I own is sold off to pay doctor bills and I am reduced to food stamps and welfare with a closing page that features, a self-induced inscrutable, hanging from the chandelier of his government subsidized two-room rat hole?

There is an answer, ya know. It is but one of the many illuminating pearls that come only to old gentlemen in the twilight of their years…old men who have had a lifetime to see through the mountain of pony pucky in which they have been mired throughout their productive years. THE GOVERNMENT PLAN IS FOR YOU TO DIE AFTER RETURNING ALL YOU HAVE EARNED TO THE COMMON POT.

The government is obviously complicit in arranging end-of-life legislation so that such a selected, serene, pain-free death is outside the reach of all but the wealthiest, if we are to judge the persuasion of the government, and that includes the human beings sitting at the head table during this week’s city council session. The government has had over 200-years to get it right. How complicated can it be?

It’s easy enough for the old man to run it down. Here we go…The Constitution got it right! EACH of us is granted life, etc. as an inalienable right. The GOVERNMENT does not own our lives. According to the Constitution…they belong to US. It’s not the government’s business when we choose to bring our individual lives to a close.

This outrageous position taken by the administration and the congress throughout their history is a clear and unabridged body of proof that a conspiratorial commitment is made by those who serve us in government; a commitment to the belief that a citizen’s claim to his/her own life should be subordinate to the claim laid by the government. Yet, no reasonable panel of enlightened citizens could possibly decide that the government should have more control over HOW and WHEN the individual citizens of the United States choose to finish their lives. And, yet, the government has done nothing effectively to enforce this right for people over 65 during its entire history. Why is it necessary to complain about this?

The CHURCH, you say! Aha! If that is a bonafide answer, let those motivated to live within the church’s doctrine be so guided. Let them also have the right to make the personal decision according to their own priorities. And let that right be enjoyed by all citizens. Let the pharmacists go forward and the doctors be indoctrinated; let the police and the undertakers hear, as a part of their training, education on end-of-life victims. Figure out some fancy branding like they do over at the abortion clinic…something like their “Pro Choice” brand. After all…let’s not forget…if you are granted the inalienable right to your own life, then it belongs to YOU. Let the law facilitate your right to end it when you wish with easy senior access to appropriate drugs.

And there’s at least a spanking due the pharmaceutical companies who profit on the dirty little secret they keep, which explains the seniors in question are a major profit center and keeping them alive as long as possible with expensive drugs is a fine enterprise that will collapse with the introduction of a drug offering a pleasant death for each senior. So, while the interests of commerce are served, the rights of the individual citizen are squashed, and where’s the courageous, eloquent, congressman who will make this case for us? Where’s the articulate lawyer hired by the AARP and what do you want your damn dues to do that’s more important to ya?

Tip of the hat here to the PAC hired by the amalgamated life insurance companies of America. Question for you people. Just how much time and money do you spend helping elected office holders understand it’s good for everyone when people live loooooong lives and bad for anyone who sponsors legislation that gives them an easy way out. The old man believes the issue never arises between you, because after all, it’s implicit in the conspiracy.

Younger people will ask, “How will this peaceful death thing impact my Social Security prospects, if all the old people who don’t want to live any longer, suddenly all die off one day?”

The old man just winks back. Duh, he thinks. It is not possible for younger people to see any affair or any human being except through a very narrow filter…a filter which is subjectively focused on everything inside the next couple weeks.

Meanwhile, the old man’s filter embraces the last 65 years. The whole thing looks different by now. He scratches the skin where the hair used to be. What a wonder, he thinks, that a whole nation full of ordinary folk would be so horribly victimized by the treachery of their congress and betrayal of their commerce. It just got by him in younger days…back when they were squeezing his brain day in and day out. Once, he, too, believed it was better for everyone that the old people were forced to suffer in pain through the thousand infirmities that beset them while all they own is given to doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, people who manufacture dentures and those little devices you can set off with the press of a button just before you draw your last breath to tell the authorities it is time to come collect your bones and free up the space for the next dumb curmudgeon.

That ambition to make you suffer for the profit of commerce, apparently, trumps the ambition of every living citizen to die a peaceful death of their own choosing on a day they have selected. But it really doesn't look that way to ya, until you finally meet that 3-headed monster whose alternating faces you have seen at every dark corner of your life -- the one who decides these things.

He is illusive. But loosely defined, he is an alliance between the churches, the corporations and the lawmakers. Everybody comes out of the arrangement with clean hands because nobody does his own dirty work. Instead, henchmen do it. They will show up in various costumes with bad news for you. They represent Child Protective Services, the school board, the IRS, the media, the union, your boss, your commanding officer, your city council, your warden and your parole officer...each gouging for shelf space in the battle for power over you.

This is why it is illegal for doctors to prescribe a pill that could easily bring about a quiet, peaceful, dignified death for people over 70 who have drawn all the breath they wish.

Guy says, "It's all about your perspective on life." Of course, he's right, but you don't want to hear anything from the perspective of a citizen of Enlightenment Hell...a place where YOU might look like you’ve fallen off the edge of sanity into the black hole of thought and reason and should wait patiently for sound judgment to assert itself in the closing chapters of your life..