RobZerrvations
Musings from a Meandering, Mischievous Mind
The end is always near.
We are born with some measure of immortality. We like to think we will be here forever. In our minds, there's always a tomorrow. But at best, it's only an illusion. I'm sure the passengers on the Titanic had tickets to the theater waiting for them in New York. Yes, our eternal optimism. I've written about the fact that we only have two things that are relatively sure - now and so far. The next minute is not guaranteed. Not tomorrow. Not even next week. At any moment, the ol' noggin' can decide...
Indoctornated.
No, that’s not a typo. We’ll get to why that is so in a bit, but in the meantime, I am still coming to grips with the fact that I have, it seems, been indoctrinated without my knowledge. Oh, I can hear some of you out there saying, “Well, duh, Robb! You didn’t notice that you’re kind of woke?” I guess I was once again way ahead of my time, for my “wokeness” arrived all the way back in the early 1980s when I went to college. It was there that I learned that we’re all different and that we all...
The Last.
As one who spent most of his life telling stories, it recently dawned on me that a lot of the tales I tell are “lasts.” Lasts, you say? Stay with me, and perhaps you will see that your own life is filled with "lasts," some you may not even realized or, in the moment, cherished. The very idea of "lasts" came to me when my dear friend Bobby died a few months ago. For my entire adult life, he was always there. As he approached the century mark, I knew there would come a time when the phone would...
That “special” feeling.
I don't know about others, but the journey through life can be terribly instructive. I just wish I would have learned some lessons earlier in life for they would have come in very handy. I always knew I was different. Since I can't inhabit anyone else's body and peek into their brains, perhaps we all think we're different. All I know is that I spent a lot of my early years (through my 40s) trying to assimilate to a world I never really fit in. I gave it the ol' college try, trying to discover...
Regression therapy.
As a society, we like to think that we are always advancing. The old days seem antiquated and often silly. Instead, we believe that today is way better than yesterday, and certainly way better than it used to be. I mean, who would prefer a black and white TV instead of a color one? This is true, of course, on many levels. But on others, not so much. Who would have known that nearly everything we've been consuming since we were born contains microplastics, including some that are so small they...
The semi-colon.
My wild imagination runs on two parallel paths when it comes to my health. On the one, everything is just fine. On the other path, everything is going to hell in a handbasket and I'm moments away from drawing my last breath. Usually, my labs remind me that I am very lucky to be on the path where nothing is really wrong with me, even after 65 years on this rock. This is remarkable largely because I am famous for doing nothing to improve my health. I don't exercise enough, even though I...
Growing older, but not up.
As we get older in this world, the news increasingly turns sour. No, I’m not talking about wars, pestilence, politics or the many whack jobs running around our world these days. I’m talking about the inevitable loss of the people we all know and love, the folks we grew up with on TV, radio, records and the silver screen. The Boomers are the first mass culture in history. Unlike our parents, we grew up having the same experiences in common. We often speak in a shorthand of song lyrics and lines...
The swan song.
This has taken a while to conjure up. It's not easy to write about the loss of a person so important in your life that you find it hard to categorize his role. Mentor? Besty? Surrogate Father? I can't even begin to put my dear friend and companion Bobby Smyth into a box. His passing was not entirely unexpected. At 98, the days that the phone doesn't ring with the sad news rapidly dwindle. At some point, it was going to happen. I had convinced myself over the years that I would be ready for...
Happy Birthday’s Eve!
My birthday came and went yesterday. I spent it watching mindless TV. My main celebratory indulgence: Rhubarb Custard Pie for breakfast. Not the whole pie, mind you. Just a slice. Gone are the days when I would justify bad dietary behaviors by saying it was my birthday, or at times, a whole month of debauchery dedicated to turning another year older. It's not that I didn't celebrate the milestone. I just did it a bit differently than most folks, for it occurred to me that the real celebration...
A golden oldie?
In 2012, I returned to Washington State from my eight years of incarceration in Florida, doing my penance for trying to find love in all the wrong places. Retirement seemed like a dream back then. It was so far away. It's what old people did, not something I needed to think about. I still had a lot to give to the working world. I wasn't one of those old people who peaked long ago in their career and were marking time until the day they had a slice of cake, received plaudits from their...
The rearview mirror.
I am turning 65 soon. If I were a car I'd be in a museum. Or the junkyard. I've never been one to care much about the vehicles that carry me around in this world. I don't think I've washed my car in over 10 years. I've done much better with the one some would call my body. It gets a somewhat regular washing, but my wife still has to remind me. To be fair, I have never cared much about the body I drive around in. I know others do. I see them applying paint, making sure their headlights shine,...
A good lesson indeed.
In my youth (for me, that is from birth to age 55), I used to assume everyone was just like me. Since the only experience I had ever had as a person was as me, how was I supposed to think otherwise? This, of course, caused issues in my life. I think the fact that I have so few friends to this day is because I held them to a higher standard than they themselves wanted to achieve. It could be argued that I did this was some of my exes. It wasn't my ego at work; I could see the potential in them...