Commentators pointed out to me that man is a very suggestible animal. That is the sort of thing that is worth cogitating on a lot. In fact, very little is said in BUGS that is not applicable to a lot more than politics.
Wordism is a danger in every phase of life, but people have never before even NAMED it. People getting older, and everyone is, often complain about how they must rest a lot and that keeps them from doing what they WANT to do.
That is the power of suggestion AND a form of Wordism. These people have been raised to believe that doing things is all that is fun. They really believe it.
But I have realized that resting is what I WANT to do. Young people do not enjoy resting as much as we do. They have all that energy pumping in them, and they feel that any time spent resting and not SLEEPING is wasted.
To them, it is. It is hard for a teenager to just rest and it is impossible for a baby to do anything but go into what for us would be a coma.
I was a workaholic. I either passed out from exhaustion or drank myself comatose.
As usual, with all this buildup, my conclusion sounds very anticlimactic to people who are glued to news and Jews. I have made a major discovery. Everybody is afraid of getting old because you are tired so much.
But, in fact, that is the major PLEASURE of old age.
My brother once offered my other brother, about eight years old, five dollars if he could sit still for five minutes. Back then, in the forties, five dollars was an unimaginable amount of money to anybody, much less a kid.
My brother didn’t even TRY. Torture would have at least been more exciting.
But when you get my age, your innards seem to throw off endomorphs if you just lie there and close your eyes. I tell you from experience it is something to look forward to.
This is important, like my other basics. No one will tell you you have something to look forward to as you age.
Until you are in your teens, you probably never have a time when you say, “I’d rather just sit here a while.” But when it happens to you, you can see it is the greatest pleasure there is as you get older. I have never heard anyone talk about this as a pleasure. But then again I don’t hear anybody mention the basic points I do.
Old people would rather impress youngsters with what they DID. It isn’t an ego trip to tell kids that resting is a pleasure for them.
In fact, the ego trip is telling young folks that if you weren’t so old and tired you would be in Afghanistan catching Ben Laden single-handed. The theme of most retired people’s rhetoric to young folks is how, if they wanted to , they could go out and get any job they wanted.
But that doesn’t do the young folks any good.
You don’t feel sorry for the oldsters in porch talk. Sure, we brag a lot, but then it’s open season for BS on the porch. But there is nothing like porch talk for lessening one’s concern for growing old.
Porch talk is the one place which really REQUIRES an old party or two. You can’t get up a baseball team without more kids, and you can’t get up a porch talk without old people. I remember when I had to study for exams and my old uncle and aunt were outside talking with the rest of the family.
It was AGONY! I wanted to be let out there the way a dog wants to be let in just to sit there with the family and just lie there with his eyes closed.
That is one reason I hate the phone. When I am having a Skype session with BoardAd, he lets me go instantly when I feel like resting. If you’re in a mood to rest at my age, you want to enjoy it before it goes away.
I tell BoardAd I’m tired, which is true, but it isn’t the “poor old guy is tired” young people always imagine. Sometimes it is after I’ve written a couple of pieces for BUGS, but just as often it is something I am looking forward to.
If you don’t know this, aging looks like an unalloyed curse to you. So this is important.
Resting actually puts out pheromones for us older people, in exactly the same way exercise does for you. Very young people seem to have a huge supply of speed in their innards which gives them their pheromone. But a healthy old person gets his pheromones in that very period of lying down that makes young folks sorry for them and, more important, that makes them dread aging.
You don’t feel sorry for a dog just lying there. He probably feels sorry for you.
#1 by BGLass on 07/03/2010 - 11:11 am
There’s nothing worse than an old person trying to be useful in the way a teenager is useful, but people are just used to seeing on t.v., wise old darkies and Indian sages and worldly jews. But you never hear about old White wisdom, although there’s lots of it. Still, all an old wise white needs is at least one listener.
#2 by Dave on 07/03/2010 - 11:19 am
Life is a descent into injury and descent itself is Mother Nature’s mechanism for coping with that issue.
But the pleasure you feel in old age tiredness is simply the ember of life that so resolutely insists on persisting. That pleasure is a manifestation of the whole thing, the whole of life that is going on outside of you.
Descent into injury goes for entire races also, and the white race is certainly in that trajectory.
And Mother Nature has all kinds of mechanisms for coping with that issue also, the central one being that the child of a white person and a non-white person cannot be a white person.
That is how Mother Nature keeps it pure.
And white people who know the value of that blond blue-eyed child will have won the game hands down.
#3 by Wandrin on 07/03/2010 - 12:10 pm
“You don’t feel sorry for a dog just lying there. He probably feels sorry for you.”
Dogs feel sorry for you. Cats gloat.