CSotD: Prufrock Agonistes
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I am not particularly obsessed with age at the moment, despite having just hit the magical Sgt. Pepper milestone, which I noted the other day with some links to prufrockian thoughts of the past.
Still, the issue of coming into the home stretch is there, and, while today's Beetle Bailey made me laugh in a "there you go again" way at the "please, take my wife" gag, it also made me think a bit.
I would assume that the Walkers, Mort and Greg, likely thought of this gag in reaction to the movement, spearheaded by Ellen Goodman, to have The Conversation, which garnered a fair amount of chat on radio and on-line a few weeks ago.
It's certainly worthwhile. I've told my kids that I don't care if they gather at the family plot at midnight with a posthole digger as long as my name goes on the stone in something more traditional than Magic Marker.
And, in looking to see how often I've already said that here, I came across this posting that not only repeats everything I was about to say but is absolutely loaded with video links.
I'm not going to improve on it and it will prob'ly make you laugh more than once.
Basically, my wish is to be disposed of with a little dignity in a place where descendants can say, "Yep. There he is." And I wouldn't want this to mean somebody standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot saying, "Back when his ashes were scattered here, it was a beautiful meadow."
My oft-quoted grandfather had been a relatively prominent member of his community, and so left a letter behind to be read to a few trusted friends after his death, in which he specified no wake, no church and only, if the family wanted, something like Psalm 23 read at the graveside.
So my dad asked a pair of key people from his father's social group over to the house and read them the letter, to which they expressed relief and confessed that there were already rumblings of "the family is depriving us of the chance to mourn," which the old fellow posthumously gave them authority to squelch.
Though, given my standing in the community, I fear more the opposite, "And now his goddam family is making us put on our good clothes."
Not my intentions, dear friends. Not my intentions.
Meanwhile, on this side of the turf …
Freshly Squeezed today hits me with a completely opposite take than that of the father-in-law.
One of my young readers asked the other day what I like to do in my spare time, and the question made me (A) reflect and (B) laugh, because what I like to do is write, and, as a result, I don't have any spare time.
I spent my adult life avoiding things I didn't want to do, not just the drudgery of a job that didn't involve writing, but also the drudgery of writing jobs that were soul-killing.
Even the low-level freelance ad work I did for a low-level ad agency in Denver makes me totally uninterested in watching "Mad Men," much less living it for real, but I also never wanted to leave small, community-based newspapers to go to the more lucrative but cut-throat world of major metros.
Some people slave to save up for retirement, and I envy their ability to go spend the winter at their other home in Florida or Arizona, or to go to Paris on a whim. But they put themselves through a lot to get there, and I made another choice.
So I don't get to retire because I can't afford it, and I'll have to spend the rest of my life doing exactly what I want most to do anyway.
Obviously, the people to envy are the ones who had a job they loved that was also lucrative, and I do envy them.
But those who sacrificed for 45 years so they can retire in comfort at 65, by my calculation, need to make it to 111 in order for the effort to pay off.
I'll play these cards, thanks.
Speaking of the kids I work with …
Scenes From A Multiverse cracked me up this morning, because, well, yeah. Exactly.
When the Denver Museum of Natural History hosted the interactive Mythbusters exhibit, my young reporters absolutely inundated me with requests to do the review.
It's good to help put popular myths to the test, but I think you'd find your work pretty depressing if your mission were to wipe foolishness and credulity from the face of the Earth.
We'll find a cure for cancer before we find a cure for stupid, and I'm not advocating that anyone take up smoking.
And besides, you're competing not simply against invincible ignorance in general, but against entire, well-funded cable channels dedicated to profiting from the dependable gullibility of suckers.
However, if you define your mission as blowing stuff up, well, blowing stuff up is not only cool but an achievable goal.
I mean, if I had a job blowing stuff up, I wouldn't want to retire from that, either.
In fact, now that I think about it, I reckon we've done circled right on back to the topic of "How I Want to Go."
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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