Life's Dilemma

There are significant moments in life that you can't avoid.  One is coming up soon that has me by the balls.  I mean, I just can't get over it.  I have never liked birthdays, but this one is cataclysmic for me. Maybe I'll feel better when it is over and done with.  I don't know.  But I am entering the last age bracket.  I will have achieved that last and final glory.  It is the last frontier.

There is no more pretending.

I may give up reading the paper.  There is too much research and health news that does not cheer me. It is perhaps better for my peace of mind if I let the world do what it is going to do while I think about other things.  I don't seem to be able to shift the course of history.  Maybe I haven't tried hard enough.  I tried, but I could have done better, I think.

Everything changes.  When you are young, or even middle aged, you can wear a guyabera shirt and seem cool.  When you get old, you just look like a Cuban barber.  There is not preventing that.  It just happens.

Maybe it is the same with the course of history.  Maybe we can't change it after all.

Last night I lay in bed thinking about the coming event.  I've been doing a lot of that lately.  It occurred to me that I should do something significant for myself.  I should be allowed--no, encouraged--to do something that I shouldn't do.  What might that be?

I need a lot of things.  Chief among them is a new computer.  I'm working on an old Mac that really doesn't work.  Yes, there is that.  But there are a lot of expenses coming up with the house (which I think every day now about selling as I don't seem to be able to keep up with it any more), and not too far from now, I won't have the same income stream that I now enjoy.

But what I want is terribly impractical, so much so that it borders on idiocy.

I want to buy myself a Leica M10.

It is ridiculous.  But, and here's the thing, I have an almost new Leica M 262 that I can sell.  I can get about half the money I need to buy the M10.  The thing is, the M10 is not twice as good as the M262, so it doesn't make sense.  And I know that if I buy it, I will feel guilty and not use if for a year.

But, I tell myself, people buy themselves Porsches or Harleys or some other expensive thing.  It is what people do.

I don't know.  I'm all freaked out.  I am probably losing my intellectual capacity and need to be relieved of all responsibility.  I'm more than likely a danger to myself now.  I half believe I should be institutionalized.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.