The promise is that there will be no horizon. The final third of our lives will extend into infinity with no assigned purpose. We can do what we want with our time. In this closing phase, we have enough resources that earning our keep through a job becomes optional. My sixty-seventh birthday is in three days. I’ve been retired and living on Uncle Sam’s money for the last two years. I hate it.
Driving for dollars is the career I kept coming back to. Leaving the house in the morning with a need to fulfill. In the cab, I didn’t start earning money until I’d done $100.00 in business. It seems nuts that I would start my workday behind. Yet given the option to play whack-a-puter or driving for dollars, I picked up the rideshare app and logged in. I appreciate Uncle Sam’s benevolence. And I know I’ve lost my edge as a rideshare driver. But… damn, I miss that grind.
I hate it because an endless stretch of unstructured time is too much. I’m not self-motivated. What motivates me is an obligation to someone or something. “Do it for yourself,” and I procrastinate mercilessly. “Do it for me”, whoever me is, and I’m on it.
Hale’s Orbit
Personal Assistant to Vexton Ulyth was a consuming job for Liza Hale. She had an apartment in Oakland’s Dimond District on MacArthur Blvd. But the job kept her at the Citadel most of the time. RooTech carried a lot of the load, but Ulyth was a piece of work. After a year of late-night/early morning phone calls with some other emergency that only she could handle face-to-face, it was just easier to crash at work.
Hale was the assistant who lasted longer than a week. Her predecessors would quit within hours, sometimes days or weeks. None of them stayed very long. She’s hot, yes. She’s also fierce, and she needed that to survive Ulyth. Other qualities that helped her longevity were the relationships she brought to the job, her skill at brokering trades and closing deals. Ulyth’s squat of the former Lawrence Hall of Science was never well funded. And of the funds that he could get his hands on, he spent them on stupid shit.
Two years isn’t long in a normal job where the track ends in a retirement ceremony and a nice investment portfolio. Taking care of the Primaris Solenne wasn’t a normal job. Two years is a career where Ulyth and his Citadel are concerned. Then he dies, the Sheriff evicts them, and within a month there is no reason to get out of bed and start the day. It made no never mind whether Hale started the coffee pot before lunch.
Still Waiting for Godot
Hale created a routine for herself. It doesn’t fill the hole in her heart where Ulyth used to be. It does keep her busy. On Saturdays, she walks from Dwight and Telegraph to Sproul Plaza with a protest sign that reads, “The robot apocalypse is nigh.” It isn’t. RooTech, slang for TavroOS, is in everything, down to medical nanobots that circulate the bloodstream. The apocalyptic claim is Hale’s way of keeping the memory of Ulyth alive. The fear of technology was Ulyth’s thing.
Sunday is her day to visit Ulyth’s sarcophagus at the Oakland Museum. The docents know her. She brings a canvas shopping bag containing candles, a meditation bell, incense, and corn muffins. Ulyth loved her corn muffins. She loved telling him she made them herself. One of those little lies people tell each other. The RooTech stack of robots made them. But Ulyth was paranoid about RooTech, so…
She tried, in the first month of the exhibit, to light incense and burn paper offerings of things she thought Ulyth needed. This set off smoke alarms and got her thrown out with threats of being trespassed. Hale still leaves the paper offerings on the floor beside the sarcophagus. She has a brazier at home that she uses to send Ulyth money and food in Hades.
Oh Happy Day?
Liza Hale and I share something. She’s young enough to find the next job and a new purpose. I am not. What we share is a moment in our lives where it doesn’t matter what time we wipe the sleep from our eyes and get moving. I shut down last spring. Enough so that my son called 911 and asked them to check on me. I was physically fine. Mentally? Not so much. A job gave me a reason to start the day at 6am. It’s been two years since I turned 65 and began living on SSA.
For Hale, it’s the hole that Ulyth left in her life. Grieving him and the resultant loss hasn’t been easy. Life, though, goes on. She has her routine and that helps. I have mine. Hale’s routine is punctuated by her Saturday walk to Sproul Plaza and her Sunday visit to the Oakland Museum to see Ulyth. For me it’s Monday evening when I click on “Publish” in WordPress so the week’s post goes live on Tuesday morning.
Hale and I, doing things for ourselves, won’t put on the coffee and get dressed. We are motivated by obligation to others. She has her trading business on AMEN. I have my final third where I’m supposed to be happy that I’m here, with the first two-thirds behind me. It’s what is promised to me, so what’s the problem?
Always be Cruising
Mai Tais on the beach served by young brown people. Perfect. Am I right? Maybe for you. I grew up in South Jersey midway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. The beach is about an hour from where I grew up. My strongest memory of the beach is sand flies. Sand flies and an hour on each side of the beach visit setting up and breaking down. Too much work to make myself tasty for sand flies. Getting drunk under the hot sun while fighting off sand flies is not my ideal retirement plan.
My happy place is a locally owned coffee house that serves baked goods from a local baker. I order a drip coffee with cream and a croissant. And… a cabin on a cruise ship could be ok for a week or so. But I still want my drip coffee and croissant. Also decent WiFi or a SIM card for my laptop. And do what in the cafe? This: write words in a WordPress editing window. Now that I’m not willing to play whack-a-puter and my son makes a good argument for not driving, writing is my job.
Liza let Ulyth’s presence in her heart fade. That part of her routine became stale after a few months of visiting his sarcophagus. She turned her attention to brokering deals and playing socialite. She cleans up good.
Well… Then What?
For Hale, a full calendar of galas, cocktail parties, political events, and volunteering for Meals on Wheels. She stays busy. I’ve got my three cats, this space, and church. Most places I want to go are ninety minutes from my house that begins with a twenty-minute walk to the bus stop. It slows me down, but it doesn’t stop me.
Writing is bottomless. There is no end. Each time I click “Publish,” two things are true. There is one more essay or story added to the blog. And I need another one for the next deadline. Hale lives in a pool of deals and social engagements. The rhythm is different from mine. I’m more of a loner. I dealt with a dozen or so riders per day in the cab. My rhythm was more serial. Whack-a-puter was similar. I had a half-dozen assigned tickets per day with a requirement that I close twelve of them in eight hours. Writing is completely up to me. I answer only to myself, and what I produce becomes the legacy.
Not everything we do is something we love. I love my cats. I don’t love the cat box. Having cats means having a cat box. Cat boxes don’t clean themselves. I don’t love the lack of a horizon for me. Or this life, where I don’t answer to an employer. But like the cat box, this space doesn’t write itself. The small misery of sitting at a keyboard and adding words to this space is better than cocooning in my bed.
Last Words This Week
I’ve got no shame in my game. 460+ published blog posts, a combined 20 years of professional driving with fewer than a dozen reportable incidents, end-user support at Altria, BB&T, SunTrust, and others, domain owner, web developer, relational schema architect, VBA developer, and father to an incredible son. It’s been good.
Liza scored a trade last month for tiger prawns from Oakland’s Sun Sang Market. They needed register tape and had too many tiger prawns in stock. Deal done. This led to a dinner with the other KAOS members featuring barbecued tiger prawns. Where she met someone in the market for Gravenstein apples. No shortage of deals for her.
No call to action this week. The canon of wisdom literature is strong. Get a library card at a University Library and dive in. You’ll find your path in the stacks. Or this