The Existential Dread of Retirement

Retirement is a brutal business. I know a man who retired recently who had been in business for fifty years. Now he doesn't know what to do with himself. He enjoyed the driving off to work and being involved with people and the camaraderie any work environment brings. He always put work first. It was the most important thing to him and he would always tell me about the projects he was involved in.  He was happy in his work.

But now he is retired and the existential creep is settling in. Most people defer this until the day they can no longer. Staying busy and workaholism is very American. A busy person is a successful person. All those writers staying at home pity them. What they must do all day? And how can they stand not going off to work? But then...then work betrays even the most diligent and vanishes over the next hill like a bad uncle.

And you are left standing there alone. And all those years of never considering your place in the universe come crashing in. It is not just not having anything to do it is the existential dread of the moment put off for years and years. Death seems to be lurking in the closet or the bathroom or the garage. All one can do is take a deep breath and accept the moment.

It has really been there all along. You just didn't know it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....sometimes a dream is all you have
 

The American Dying Grounds

Florida is the American dying grounds. Dress it up how you will but this is where our people go to finish out their lives. The modern corporate state needs lots of workers and once the workers are finished they go down into the boot of the country to watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and wait to die. Of course American retirement is not painted this way. It is painted as the Golden years or the time to do what we want. But Florida belies the lie. Here is where people are parked under a tropical sun among the alligators and swamps.

It is our modern Casa Blanc with no flight out except for one. The final flight to the great unknown. And so there is no culture. There is only what people bring to the dying grounds and  while away their time trying not to become senilitic. Because America is for the young. On this we can agree and our country has a funny way of disposing of old people. Forget the Death Panels of Obamacare. The Death Panels were here long before in the form of a people without purpose in a land without soul under a scorching sun.

We are a funny country. We have decided in the American Dream our lives should begin at the end. In truth our lives are what we live during the working years. This is the real retirement in all its connotations. This is the best years of our lives. Banished to Walt Disney's Swampland with nothing to do for years on end is the hell capitalism has created and sold to people looking for the golden watch at the end.

And so we will play Bachi ball and smoke our cigars and drink our wine and watch the sunset. Take our meds and get our operations and trundle down to the Southern most tip of America. The great boot full of the last gasp of our collective effort; the American dying grounds.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Talking About Age

Some people just cant get over that they have gotten older. You know who they are. The same people who went into a bar when they were thirty five and complained everyone was younger. No shit. Gee I guess people do age don't they. Hope I die before I get old has not worked out for the boomers. Now they are being chased down by commercials galore for getting it up to wearing diapers and not shitting themselves in public. The whole youth culture thing has gotten really nasty now that the whole country has gotten old.

Since we quit accepting that people become adults somewhere back in the fifties when Elvis started gyrating we now are a people at sea. We have committed the ultimate sin by aging. In America no one ages or haven't you heard? Except for Judy Dench or Maggie Green or Helen Mirrah. They have aged and done it magnificently but for the rest of us it is a dirty sin. And the whining is disgusting. I now have to listen to people say...WE"RE OLD. Gotta love the way they include you in their sweeping declaration.

But it happens all the time. People who feel old figure everyone must feel the same. And it is simply not true. But our culture shames people when they age. They have betrayed our culture and have passed from youth into something dirty and unspeakable. An adult. Whoa. Stand back Jack. Once  upon a time people were allowed to be adults. But since Roger Daltry said he hoped he died before he got old we are all screwed. By the way Rodger did not die. He sang at the Super Bowl. But we are left now with the whiners.

And it is pathetic. People age. People don't stay young forever. People die. Get over it and enjoy the ride.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

Be Glad You Aren't Retired

Grooving with the Greatest Generation makes me glad I am not retired. Retirement is an antiquated term. It brings up the thirty year job and thirty year mortgage. It brings up death. You should be glad you are not retired. In Florida the ritual is one of steady dementia. Rise and shuffle to breakfast with your oxygen and take your dog for a walk and sit by a pool and read the local paper. The world goes on while you drink your coffee and have your bagels and orange juice and you read and read because this will kill the morning. Clean up your dishes and get ready for your mid morning nap after a fist full of drugs so you can keep breathing.

Then it's off to play cards or bingo or shuffleboard. Maybe swim in your small pool. Probably not. Take your dog for a walk in your complex in your golf cart. The dog runs along side of you. You come back and have your lunch and take your afternoon meds and then it's nap time again. Get up and head for a blue light special or start your dinner. Food is the thing. Food is your drug now. That and the glass of wine or the martini that puts you on your ass because you have very little resistance to anything. But you get  buzzed and eat whatever the hell you want because you are already on blood thinners.

Then its Jeopardy. Back to back shows. You have already finished the days Crossword Puzzle to keep the noodle rolling. Jeopardy is your final intellectual excercise. Then maybe Cash Cab. CSI. Who Wants To Be Anything. Then it doesn't matter because you watch it all at rock concert levels because you are stone deaf. You watch hours and hours of television because there is simply not much else to do. Finally you decide to go to bed. Roll your oxygen into the bedroom, take your meds, let the dog out. Then its goodnight Irene to start all over again the next day. You have been parked in the boot of a country that hoped it would die before it got old. Be glad you aren't retired.

www.billhazelgrove
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

Writers Never Retire

Retirement. Where does that come from? Some sort of hangover from the World War II generation. Certainly the people who grew up in the last Great Depression never thought about retirement. Something companies and stock brokers came up with so people would invest their money. Whole generations working based on the dream or the promise that one day they could hang it up like Mr. Jet Blue and just say screw it, I'm done and now I am going to kick back. Asta La Vista baby. Then again, maybe not.

New York Times says people are really frightened now they won't be able to retire. The massive unemployment is draining savings and 401Ks and the houses aren't worth half their value anymore and the stock market crashed. Bottom line, people who assumed they were going to retire are thinking they may work until the day they die. Grim reality and very frightening for many, but for writers, it is something we have always known, because writers never retire.

It is write until you drop. That is the writer credo, if there is one. Once you commit to the road of the writer then security goes right out the window. You make peace early on with the fact you will never retire, in fact you don't even recognize the concept. What? Sit around and do nothing? If retirement is doing what you want then writers are already retired. The road of the writer is constant struggle. And if you aren't down with that in the beginning then pick something else.

So in a way the writer is recession proof. No one becomes a writer because they crave financial security. They crave something else. A walk on the wild side, a life less certain perhaps. But the promise of a nirvana at the end of years and years of writing. I don't think so. The only promise for the writer is that he will get up the next morning, sit down, and begin again.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out this month.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Great American Payoff

A man lifts his garage a third of the way and lets his dog out. I can see his ankles and hear the baseball game on the plasma he has mounted on the wall. The dog sits in the driveway in front of the home identical to a hundred other homes and driveways. A man pulls in his garbage can and it takes him a good fifteen minutes because he is in pain. The drugstores are overrun, a flood of humanity rolling toward the pharmacy as it opens. Sun beats down on the empty streets and bungalows, the pools heating, no one swimming. Inside thousands of people take refuge from the sun and live in television or cyberworld. In the evening people emerge in Escalades and Mercedes for the Blue Light Specials, flooding downtown Naples briefly, but by seven PM the restaurants are mostly empty. Empty shopping malls bake under the long sun and foreclosure signs abound. Welcome to the great American payoff

We work for one reason so that we may one day do what the hell we want. My apologies to all who work for passion, mission, a greater good. But by the main the American worker is looking toward a day when he can kick back, make the twenty four drive down into the boot of American and call it a life. Naples is the destination for many. Here are the people who have truly cashed in on the American Dream. They do have the money to do what the hell they want. They have worked and built up sizable nest eggs. You see it in the cars and the smart half a million dollar bungalows with pools. Here then is the great American Payoff. Kids launched and savings intact along with pensions bonuses and good old cash, this group of people are cashing in on the promised pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

After years of thudding toil they have the ability to tell the world to stuff it and while away their hours doing whatever they want in neighborhoods built over swamps that resemble the old Midwestern neighborhoods they spent most of their life in. This group of people have won the lottery of jobs and 401 Ks and the vicissitudes of the market and the sacrifice of putting money aside for the great American retirement. The only problem is that ninety nine percent of these hard working Americans have become too old to pull in their garbage can. The Great American Payoff has become a mirage in the tropical heat of our Disney World state.

There is something wrong here. We are in our prime in the so called working years, able to love and laugh and enjoy life. But we are told in our culture that the real party will begin once those savings are cranked open and we can golf and swim or read a book to our hearts content. But the truth is that by the time it arrives, most of us will not know what to do. Like the man who raises his garage by a third and lets his dog out and watches television in his garage, the promised leisure settles into a routine established by the working years. We don't suddenly become bohemians who can enjoy life's nectar in wild abandon. We put that part of our self away long ago to get through the thirty year grind. We turned off our hedonistic pleasures in favor of the Puritan ethic that promises reward at the end, not the beginning.

I think with this recession a lot of people will not reach Mecca anyway and maybe we should rethink the whole thing. Who held out this carrot anyway? People who invest money that's who. Isn't our time now? Isn't this the Golden Age when we are physically able to enjoy the fruits of this life? What is all this guilty deference anyway? Surely with 401K falling by half or two thirds and AIG executives laughing to the bank we see the game is rigged anyway. Maybe what John Lennon said is right, life is what happens between the things we plan. Maybe right now is the Great American Payoff. Maybe we better get living.

http://www.billhazelgove.com