I was drinkin when I wrote this, so sue me if it goes astray…

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis:

(I’m trying to learn Latin in my spare time)

Time changes, and changes us with it:

Do you recall youth looking at age? I remember being a seventeen-year-old dishwasher at a fine dinning restaurant and looking at the twenty four year old waitress Pam and seeing an adult, marveling at her farness from me in age and experience. She was a woman who had rounded youth and begun decline. She’d past the marker of adulthood through her story. Pam had a 4.0 grade point average in a nursing program and she dated a coke dealer. The skim helped her study, but deepened the lines in her face, though I understand her addiction was more to him than to his wares.

She tried to kick one time by sleeping with one of the bus boys and then she told me about it as a sort of prurient come on, “I can’t believe I let him sleep with me.” Causatively speaking, she was smart but not wise. The bus boy, Chris, soon left to drive a front-end loader in a Latin American construction company, and now I think he owns a pizza place nearby me. He purchased it on language skills and a clear cutting will.

Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor, though retrospect sees more doors than windows. This is a sentiment often expressed as, “If I only knew than what I know now.” Still I suppose we’re safer for our ignorance, if safe is a worthy goal. The youngest people I know think safe is anathema, but that is a selfish stance is it not? We are rarely safe for ourselves.

I remember being twenty-four at a bar in the ville and looking at a man my age with a prodigious gut and thinking, “Doesn’t he know how bad that looks? Why doesn’t he do something about that?” Now my own paunch precedes me into rooms like a separate time zone, mountain leading central. I liked becoming a bear of a man, grew out the beard, developed the habit of smoking pipes in my sitting chair with my hunting hound at my feet. I passed for “vague age man” – drove a fourteen foot Ford LTD Landau and got eight miles to the gallon. I excessed. R called me “Mr. Excesscivity” as a term of endearment and passive aggressive critique. Paul called yesterday to tell me he saw her in Columbia on Sunday. “Yes,” I said, “She’s there now.” Paul, “In psychology.” Me, “yup.” Our lackluster love languished in libation, libidinal luck was not in those cards. Re-deal please. Shuffle and re-deal.

In the time of the beard I was always being asked by older women to define myself with a marker of chronology, women older than me often don’t mind guts and see them as markers of strength or virility, something of a Papa Hemingway guise. A young man who has aged quickly can be just the thing. Mary calls it my Professor look. I am told I make too much of my weight, as I keep it all in one place, but vanity aside I know now that my heart beats faster than most and so the gut must go or I will, too soon.

Well, I am not prompted to this erudite muse in a vacuum. I have been reading blogs that make me feel old. That for good or ill are filled with emotions that I haven’t experienced in years. And I don’t envy them the unevenness of it all. Eventually the people you hurt weigh more heavily on you than the hurts you sustain, and you try to tread lightly on the rice paper of the temple, lest the tares prevent your progress to the dragon burn my young Shaolin. Yet every time I look back to see if I have made progress, it’s as though we could take a casting from that rice paper in our search for the yeti. I hope it’s an ascending gyre, but it might just be an outward spiral, the most basic of labyrinths.