Exhaustion All Around

I'm searching for the connective thread today, the thing that will tie my disparate concerns together.  Age, I think, the act of human aging.  I am not, nor have I ever been, an agist.  Some may not agree, but for reasons I needn't mention here.  No, I do not think I'm an agist, but I am "age aware."  

People now talk a lot about "age appropriate" things.  Q likes to tell me I should be watching age appropriate porn, for instance.  He is joking, I think, but one never knows.  And there's the rub.  

Or "a" rub.

Don't take that the wrong way.  

I saw an article in the Times today about someone famous, maybe, who says she gave up wearing bikinis after forty.  "This is the bathing suit I prefer now," said the caption below a picture of her or someone supposed to be her sitting on a blanket in a stylish one piece.  Good for her, I say.  It is foolish to try to pretend about such things.  

Though, perhaps, I am foolish.  Not in the sense of wearing a bikini which I sometimes did in the appropriate places when I was much younger, when the gay men would stand on the dock and call to me, Tarzan. . . oh Tarzan."  

Yea, they did that.  Those were different times.  I am more likely to wear a shirt to the beach now.  And yet, I go to the gym everyday like I am going to recapture my youth.  It is foolishness on my part, sure, but it serves me well in some ways.  Had I not been strong, for instance, when I was run over on my Vespa, I am certain I would have died there in the street.  

O.K.  As I've often said. . . maybe it would have been better.  But I am not here to be morbid. 

Yet. 

But for someone with about a dozen of their 206 bones remaining unbroken. . . yea, the workouts are important.  I still look better than most men my age whose biggest injury has been tennis elbow.  

But I stray.  My mind is not what it should be today.  I'll get to that.  

So. . . the No Kings Protests.  I didn't get to go to any of them.  My mother is still in the hospital and is in worse, not better, health.  She is largely narcotized most of the time.  A weekend hospital stay is total bullshit.  The nurses seem to have no oversight.  Doctors do not roam the hallways.  I just deleted a detailed account of my mother's suffering, but I have deleted it knowing it would only turn some stomachs.  What I will tell you, though, is a 93 year old woman does not get the attention she needs, and it is only my intervention that gets anything done at all.  I do still own a bit of diplomatic charm.  I know not to get angry with the staff as it will have the complete opposite effect I am desiring.  But my mother suffers from a lack of care in a hospital run by MBAs looking to maximize profit.  

I am spending my days and evenings there and am exhausted.  I had hoped to do a bit of traveling once I was cleared by my surgeon.  That isn't going to happen.  

I have seen many deaths now, and I am watching many end of life things play out before my eyes, my mother and others, and I can tell you this, if you don't already know or have not yet guessed--it is never pleasant.  And, of course, people want to put the dying in a box somewhere in order not to see it.  

The end of life is very poorly planned.  One wishes to be Roy Batty in "Blade Runner."  He didn't get more life or avoid the final suffering, but he did get his hands on his god.  

"I want more life, fucker," he says before he crushes Eldon Tyrell's head with his bare hands.  

Selavy. 

Maybe, however, he should have simply asked for an easy, pain-free death.  That would somehow come in a close second if not really a first place finish.  

Today is going to be a make or break day for my mother, I think.  

Somehow, I kept up with the protests going on around the country.  I was sent photos and videos from protests going on around my own hometown.  There were many.  I guess people didn't want to travel too far from home.  From the images I received, most of the protestors were older--old, really, what my mountain friend called "the CNN crowd."  The images I saw on t.v. last night and in the papers this morning rather bolstered that view.  I guess I got used to protests in the '60s.  So, too, I'd guess, had many of the current protestors.  

Trump has opened a Pandora's Box, of course, and the genie or whatever will not be put back in the bottle.  I've mixed my metaphors, I know.  But my point remains.  Sending troops to L.A. did not stop the protests.  Of course.  Still, I think, like the protests of old, if the soldiers begin firing into the crowds as they did at Kent and Jackson State, people will head indoors and reinvent disco.  

I've been saying, both here and elsewhere, that this summer the streets will be bloody.  It seemed obvious and inevitable once Trump took office.  It seems even more so now.  And here's the thing--I don't think he cares.  

But the coalition of protesters we saw yesterday is not a cohesive block.  If there were young protesters out yesterday, they did not have the same goals as their elders.  And do not doubt that there were paid protesters in the crowd meant to disrupt and sow violence.  Their agenda is at odds with most of the marchers.  And herein lies the same old problem we've had before.  The left is not a cohesive group.  MAGA morons are.  And as we saw in Minnesota, MAGA nuts are not afraid to shoot.  While the left sit in meeting rooms and convention halls hashing out workarounds between various (tedious) ideologies, the right goes to military parades and wave flags and cheers.  When lefty protesters meet MAGA resistance, they want to take their ball and go home.  They will march through the safer parts of town and watch as paid participants burn cars and trash businesses.  

I'm suggesting that right now, the left cannot be counted on for unity.  Arabs and Jews, libertines and WOKE, the devout and the unbelievers--they may all be marching on No Kings Day, but not for the same reasons.  

The diversity of the left is working against them.  The many cultures are not coinciding so very well as the multiculturalists had imagined.  There is not much diversity on the right other than the obvious one that just doesn't seem to get exploited--the haves and the have nots.  Once the left can turn the workers against the billionaires, the right will crumble or at least be in as much disarray as the left.  

That is my bleak take on the state of things, anyway.  I'm sure many of you have found chasms in my narrative galore.  

But I have to get back to my mother.  Things are pretty bleak here, and again, I'm going it alone.  I can hear that voice--"That's what you always touted"--but it isn't true.  Sure, I've believed in a smaller world, but you know it was always a universe of two.  I have no envy, I promise you, but I would enjoy a little succor right now.  I would like to be able to lie in the lap of my own true love.