The Flesh, It Rots, the Mind, It Evaporates and Everyone is Moving On

Now at the close of the long twentieth century, the indignities of time are ripe for some dialectical treatment

My fifty year old flesh is beginning to show signs of what I can only imagine will soon constitute the ambient odor of finality so easily recognizable among those with more advanced years.

Forget the lines encroaching on my face, the subtle jowls, coaxed by gravity, as though invisible fishhooks were tugging them down. I’ve got more: the varicose veins on my feet and shins, inherited from my father, the pockmarks and wrinkling skin plainly visible on my hairless, piglet tummy and pecs, the thinning of my once ruby, somewhat full lips. (Thank God I live in the era of HIMS, because otherwise I’d be crowing about having a thumb for a head).

The way that when I wave goodbye at somebody I suddenly find two parts of my arm doing the waving—my hand and the pendulous flab of dwindling muscle mass ticking under my humerus like a child’s swing—is a potent reminder of the emergency need for humility.

Life as a winter chicken has arrived. The downward slide has begun. And the panic is setting in.

For it’s obvious to me that I have now begun transmitting that subliminal nod, that almost invisible waving on to passersby that there is nothing to see here and nothing to find here, for the circus has long moved on to another town. My body and my spirit no longer carry currency in the attention economy.

You pass us on the street, we who have graduated, and, completely beyond our control, we already tell you by the desperate and exhausted look on our face that you may go back to your search for social capital, itself another form of desperation, without fear that you may have missed something by lingering a little longer on our aged visage. Fear not and be assuaged, for you shall find greener pastures along your own frantic search for social oblivion than these jaundiced grasses.

This is the odor of finality, the ambient sense of the imminent end of the second act, which hovers around us like a smog others are afraid to breathe in, lest they become prematurely infected with the aging virus.

Of course, the mind is going, too, not just the body.

These days I am setting up reminders for myself along the lines of the tattoos the guy in Memento had to inscribe in order for him to keep his story straight.

“BOTTLES,” says a cryptic post-it note affixed to the door on my way out as I’m leashing my dogs.

For a moment, I’m standing there holding their leads, utterly flabbergasted: what could I have possibly meant when I wrote “BOTTLES” on a post-it note?

Then it hits me and I realize that my trip outside is no longer solely the idyllic one with my dogs I had in mind but the more complicated one involving the disposal of a mass of recyclables that have to be taken care of now before the truck comes to pick them up and I lose my chance for the whole week.

Thank you post-it note—that would have sucked had I missed it—but, man, it’s pretty weird to live in conversation with mysterious, objective signs from an alternative consciousness that had the foresight to remind the future me what he knew I would forget.

Even now, I am beginning to take note of the onset of the loneliness that comes with aging, how the old communitarianism of youthful idealism fades into the realities of lives dispersed, walled off from one another by domestic life, careers, the growing life of the solitary mind. Going down to the bar to have fun with the boys delivers less of the payload of rich sociality, the kind that served for fodder of legendary narratives around midnight adventures, which it was once so blissfully capable of.

Like the body towards the dirt, the mind also longs for its future home, when, after it is dispatched from the carnal, it unites with Absolute Spirit. But I am finding this yearning for the clouds much more preferable of an experience than the yearning for the soil on the part of my body. After my flesh is eaten by worms it will be inert, completely dead, whereas there still seems to be something to look forward to in Absolute Spirit terms, as though some little cloud or little ghost representing my own piece of spiritual real estate will live on in eternity and some sliver of my earthbound subjectivity will persist, now untethered by finite existence.

But I’m probably kidding myself. I’ll be dead.

Though it is still early days with all of this when you are only fifty years old. You are still young, in a manner of speaking. And it is this mixture of nonage and dotage that makes this time in life so painfully rich, rich in complexity, like an old whiskey, painful in its sense of consequence and irreversibility, like a harsh sentence that cannot be commuted.

There are some great things about getting older. (And I’m not even that old yet!).

Flights are so much more bearable. It used to be the case that a six hour flight like I’m taking right now to visit family for the holidays in Bogotá was an interminable ordeal, a cage match with spirit crushing boredom and claustrophobia. Now, like so many things in later life, it barely registers. By the time I’m done reading, listening to a podcast, taking a trip the bathroom and composing this substack, the pilot has already come on the intercom to say we’re beginning our descent to El Dorado airport. That’s a nice perk.

At first I want to cry when I look at Timothy Chalomet’s date of birth and realize that when he was born I had already started complaining about that closet I still haven’t gotten to organizing (maybe tomorrow I will finally do it).

But then I start laughing, because that blissful, cosmic thought enters my head, the sublime knowledge that the mess in the closet is actually a projective sublimation of the incommensurability of finalized action in life and that therefore the “closet” will never get done, will never be organized, for, if it were, life would lose its meaning, since the only thing final is death, a death that has now, by the way, come into view with startling clarity, a clarity that wakes me up in the middle of the night in cold sweats.

With a snap of my fingers, Chalomet is now my age and whoever the Timothy Chalomet of his era is will then start giving him night terrors instead of me (“how does it feel now, Timothy?”) because maybe I’ll just by that point be in a rocking chair and truly be on to more cosmic matters than the problem of the decaying of my flesh and its so-called odor of finality and will be giving this none of my attention (fingers crossed).

The slow sensation accrues like a blob by the time you get to fifty that everyone is getting younger because the ranks of those who were older are steadily dwindling. Full on glorious careers and minting operations left and right are sealed, sometimes involving parties no older than 35. Production and distribution carry on and new torchbearers with plum faces claim responsibility as you try to look at those ahead of you for compensatory relief; but it is slim pickings.

Now, in order to deal with the peopling of cultural spaces by the much younger, coping with the hegemony of the millennials, one must start understanding and begin cultivating the virtues of wisdom, moderation, maturity and leadership. These are what pertains most appropriately to the context of aging and what the aging man may legitimately offer the world which the young cannot.

But I have never really been too interested in cultivating those virtues, at least not in a way that feels natural and like I can exploit them at this time; for I have led a strange life of adventure and intrigue, not cultivation.

Besides, sitting still has never been one of my stronger attributes and I arrive in sheer terror at this juncture in which mobility is the first thing to go.

I have not settled down yet, not even begun, but my decaying body, with its increasing allegiance to the soil which it will ultimately fertilize, has already decided it wants to make its way to its future home and keep crouching ever downwards and no amount of vituperation by the unresolved adolescent impulses within me is going to have any effect on its decision.

One year from now will mark the official conclusion of the first quarter of the 21st Century and the beginning of the second. I suspect that after the next 52 weeks we may be surprised at what has developed in the world, in politics, in culture.

This century is restless in its desire to get going and it has had to make do this whole time with all the housekeeping of putting to rest the vestiges of our long 20th Century. This century is a springy foal and she wants to start galloping along the beach. She is ready and knows where she wants to go. No more holding her back.

Participating in this attention economy now belongs to the younger than me and that’s going to have to be fine. It’s your century boys and girls, sorry my generation left it in such a mess. Even though GenX gets a pass (it was really the boomers that wrecked everything).

It should be fine to just watch from the sidelines and jump in with a substack or an essay once in a while to make it feel like there’s something for someone in my cohort to say about all this, but at the end of the day it matters only a little compared to the vital agency that the younger millennials are now having in the larger culture and in day to day life.

I remember being in third grade and reading about how the Statue of Liberty was being restored and that it would be finished in the far future of 1986. That got me wondering how old I was going to be in the year 2000 and after I did the math and saw that I was going to be the ripe age of 26 I nearly fell out of my seat in wonder about how in the hell would I ever get to live to be so old.

I write about this recollection not just because it’s funny to think about all of the idiocies of youth but also to illustrate that it was always my assumption that the larger part of my life would occur in the 21st Century.

But I was wrong because the 20th is ending only now and I seem to already feel obsolete, like an onlooker more than a producer.

The 21st—with its TikTok scrolls, its AI, its tech overlords, its faded culture, its virality, its impenetrable slang, its techno-feudalism, its geopolitical multipolarity, its asymmetrical bombing campaigns, its zombie cable news, its weird Twitch streams that mix political commentary, sex talk and memoir, its ghastly bro talk shows that all seem to be recorded at neon lit sports bars—looks pretty overwhelming and strange to GenXers like me.

But even if it didn’t, even if this babel of forms and images and texts and bobbing apparitions materializing like solicitous holograms on our screens provided opportunities for communication for the older folk, I still fear there’s little real place for anyone who might also try to keep open the little window of vibrant, inimitable, potent cultural force my generation created, the kind that the Zoomers now turn into portrait landscape, digitized clip-art on zany reels that pop up out of nowhere on search bars.

It’s our culture y’all are cannibalizing for the “algo-poly” of what is nothing more than totalized internet culture. But back when we made it it was stand alone culture and I think it was doper than this, but that’s just my old man bias, I suppose. At any rate, have fun!

Let’s set aside for the time being the very big likelihood that this is utter neurosis on my part and simply give the benefit of the doubt to the fact that Act One is over.

Straddling this divide of fifty years, on top of the peak, I can look across two valleys, Act One and Act Two, the one that I came from and the second and final one to which I am headed. It was a big climb to get to this summit, and it’ll be an equally big climb down to the grave. I see both termini, the birth and the death, with equal clarity. It’s an advantageous position.

This isn’t to say that Act Two will not reap its rewards. There is a lot of promise ahead and I mean it when I say that I am sincerely looking forward to what kind of life is in store for me in the second act.

But none of that is going to happen until some grieving and accounting start.

And I think part of that process of grieving and accounting involves accepting that the 20th Century had more to bear on my life than I thought it would, that I am much more of a Cold War creature than I thought I was.

If there is a New Year resolution to propose and uphold, let it be that I do my best to keep open the gates of vulnerability and credulity in this now beginning 21st Century. Lord, let me be guileless. We need as much guilelessness today as we can muster. Things are going too fast and things keep not making sense and this makes us retreat, but we must resist and find ways to stay open, even in the face of such mind boggling speed and complexity.

Let’s not only give each other gifts around this holiday season, but keep giving those gifts of guilelessness to our fellow man, throughout the next year.

Even as I discover ever more lines, ever more wrinkles, let me not be cynical, let my tears irrigate those valleys on my face. Let my face be restored by the waters of grief, liver spots and wrinkles and all.

Let my face tell the story, whether it be of the 20th Century or beyond.

Whatever it is, let it say it. Let it tell that story.

I could never do plastic surgery.

It would be like clearcutting the land and building a condo on top. The story of the forest that was there before would die with the expulsion of every felled tree.