Age
(A chapter in You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born, by Dr. Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html)
You turn thirty when you turn twenty-nine. You turn forty when you turn thirty-eight. You turn fifty when you turn forty-seven. The Doctor expects to be sixty by the time he's fifty-six.
Of course it goes by fast.
You are already changing shape. Your neck is shortening. Your shoulders are narrowing. Your flesh is slipping down your chest. The skin on your throat needs ironing. You are not yet gaga, but how will you know?
The whole experiment is failing.
You do everything very slowly now. You concentrate.
Things continue to happen, that's what's really insulting. The young reach new conclusions about beauty. The movie stars in People are caressed by life while you pass your pebbles from pocket to pocket like one of Beckett's wretches.
The Doctor would tell you you're going to get through this but you don't want to get through it! This has gone far enough! Soon, the drawer.
But we cannot altogether hide ourselves in thoughts of our passing. What the soldier fears is not death so much as mutilation. Before what infirmities will you grovel, how grotesque will you have to become before you are granted the mercy of oblivion? (See DEATH.)
Can the God who made the middle finger the longest, who made shit and urine water-soluble but not blood, have permitted this? (See GOD.) This is what you get for relaxing with the given.
You sit there hunched, palsied, impotent, trying to spend all your thoughts, get it over, but the stream is endless. Are you talking to yourself?
The whole thing is inconvenient.
At least you have learned not to appropriate the future to yourself. You have that poise.
Builds character.
Go out and be soothed by a movie or something. Stop bothering everybody.
Age is a club. Find somebody with more or less the same mileage and compare symptoms. Don't just witness magic! Be it! Age is passion (see PASSION), otherwise it's entirely pointless.
You have always been half one thing, half another--half earth, half sky--it's just that now the ratio is more like one to two. The soul is sticking up out of you like a hardon. Life is a delightful surprise!
Housewives, you can buck the old fart up by encouraging him to think of his leathery carcass as been-through-it-all glamorous. Jaded-but-hanging-in. You never know your luck till the ball stops rolling. It all depends on how you sell it, tell him. You may even get some action(see SEXUAL TECHNIQUES).
Guys, the women in our lives have not stopped wanting it. They're still not sure what it is, many of them, but they do know they want it. The marital regime is once a day (see LOVE, INTERIM), even if it's only telling them. Any old state of grace, what the hell.
The Doctor isn't going to complicate your ignorance with some kind of theory but he would like to point out that your experience here, in the sense of, you know, life, is open-ended (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). To try to reduce it to a hieroglyph may not give you the kind of looseness you need to negotiate the turns.
It doesn't matter if it's taken you your whole life to find out how to do things. It's always present time, which is what keeps your chances fresh. And it's not over yet.
You turn thirty when you turn twenty-nine. You turn forty when you turn thirty-eight. You turn fifty when you turn forty-seven. The Doctor expects to be sixty by the time he's fifty-six.
Of course it goes by fast.
You are already changing shape. Your neck is shortening. Your shoulders are narrowing. Your flesh is slipping down your chest. The skin on your throat needs ironing. You are not yet gaga, but how will you know?
The whole experiment is failing.
You do everything very slowly now. You concentrate.
Things continue to happen, that's what's really insulting. The young reach new conclusions about beauty. The movie stars in People are caressed by life while you pass your pebbles from pocket to pocket like one of Beckett's wretches.
The Doctor would tell you you're going to get through this but you don't want to get through it! This has gone far enough! Soon, the drawer.
But we cannot altogether hide ourselves in thoughts of our passing. What the soldier fears is not death so much as mutilation. Before what infirmities will you grovel, how grotesque will you have to become before you are granted the mercy of oblivion? (See DEATH.)
Can the God who made the middle finger the longest, who made shit and urine water-soluble but not blood, have permitted this? (See GOD.) This is what you get for relaxing with the given.
You sit there hunched, palsied, impotent, trying to spend all your thoughts, get it over, but the stream is endless. Are you talking to yourself?
The whole thing is inconvenient.
At least you have learned not to appropriate the future to yourself. You have that poise.
Builds character.
Go out and be soothed by a movie or something. Stop bothering everybody.
Age is a club. Find somebody with more or less the same mileage and compare symptoms. Don't just witness magic! Be it! Age is passion (see PASSION), otherwise it's entirely pointless.
You have always been half one thing, half another--half earth, half sky--it's just that now the ratio is more like one to two. The soul is sticking up out of you like a hardon. Life is a delightful surprise!
Housewives, you can buck the old fart up by encouraging him to think of his leathery carcass as been-through-it-all glamorous. Jaded-but-hanging-in. You never know your luck till the ball stops rolling. It all depends on how you sell it, tell him. You may even get some action(see SEXUAL TECHNIQUES).
Guys, the women in our lives have not stopped wanting it. They're still not sure what it is, many of them, but they do know they want it. The marital regime is once a day (see LOVE, INTERIM), even if it's only telling them. Any old state of grace, what the hell.
The Doctor isn't going to complicate your ignorance with some kind of theory but he would like to point out that your experience here, in the sense of, you know, life, is open-ended (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). To try to reduce it to a hieroglyph may not give you the kind of looseness you need to negotiate the turns.
It doesn't matter if it's taken you your whole life to find out how to do things. It's always present time, which is what keeps your chances fresh. And it's not over yet.
Pretentious Pictures Presents:
Casanova, Come Back!
He’s coming to Oxbridge to give a poetry reading and speak to a few classes…
…and the girls are sort of interested!
(You didn’t know he was secretly married? It happened in England—a nun who had already taken her vows, the Mother Superior outraged, powerful people to please…)
—has the same name, the same weakness for women (and they for him, or at least for his reputation), sports the same drag and is a so-so poet on the campus circuit.
How can he get steady work as a teacher when trouble dogs him everywhere! No one takes him seriously except as a—Except as a—
So when he arrives in Oxbridge he announces that he’s impotent.
Ah, but he’s played here before, and now his past rises up to confront him.
Proposed cast: we don't have our Casanova yet.
Proposed cast: Anna Friel (Henrietta)
He doesn’t remember her but some years earlier he had played Oxbridge and it had worked on HENRIETTA PASTORLY, now a lecturer here with a young son who speaks a private language—one that only Casanova can speak with him. Could it be…
Proposed cast: Donald Sutherland (the ghost)
The GHOST of the original Casanova haunts his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, criticizes his choices and kibitzes the action. No one else can see him and sometimes Casanova almost thinks he’s real.
Proposed cast: Emma Thompson (Deborah)
Chairwoman DEBORAH BLAKE, the no-nonsense head of the Oxbridge English Department, can’t help but be intrigued by Casanova’s reputation. Or is it excited? Or is it, as her husband suspects, in love?
Proposed cast: Brenda Blethyn (Cissy)
LADY CISSY SNABE, a benefactress of the University, falls from a dangerous height into Casanova’s gallant arms, much to everyone’s relief. She’s beyond suspicion in such matters, but who is that mysterious visitor at her bedroom window?
Proposed cast: Tom Wilkinson (Rafe)
Attached:
And the seventh character is Oxford. Or rather Cambridge. Let’s call it Oxbridge, as so many do. Hell for some; heaven for others—like Jack, who could live happily ever after here as a simple lecturer.
Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.
“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”
The Light Touch on Amazon Prime
The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean
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