Chagal4's Blog

Well, I turned seventy five last week and I’ve been sitting here trying to think of something clever to write about it…but to hell with it…I just don’t feel very clever right now. I mean how clever do you have to be to wake up one morning and you’re seventy five? It just happens doesn’t it? Besides it’s been raining for what seems like weeks and the entire area around here is flooding because the soil is saturated and the water-sheds are over loading the rivers. Hundreds of people are watching the water climb out of their basements and into their living rooms. Folks are being evacuated and they say the rivers haven’t reached their peak yet…even after the rain stops the run off up stream will still keep flowing into the rivers and they will continue to rise. I’m listening to the rattle of rain on the windows right now and I’m thinking that maybe one day people will ask me if I remember when I turned seventy five…and I’ll say “Oh yeah that was the year the Ottawa River flooded.” Clever not…bummer yes.

Aside from that, the past year or two have served up a porridge of political misery and mean-ness that swept the world like a cold brown fog and seemed to suck the air out of every bicycle tire on the planet. As I write this, most of the people in France are fast asleep…but two days from now they’re going to have to choose between two people that seem to have all the charm of carnivorous plants…well dressed but lethal. It’s as if France along with many other parts of the world is suffering from some kind of battle fatigue. The terrorist attacks, the refugees, the slipping and sliding European Union (Brexit), the rising tide of youth unemployment, the fear of senior citizens falling into old age with not enough resources…and the constant hiss of the hot air escaping from the mouths of politicians. And let’s be honest…some of these people open their moths and flies come out. So, ordinary people are pissed off and they seem to be ready to vote for anybody who comes with some new bullshit as long as it’s not the same old bullshit…and of course even self delusion has it’s limits…so people certainly do know that it’s all bullshit.

Being seventy five provides no clever insights to any of this and as I look around I see a world that young people have inherited that I really don’t know much about. I’d love to be able to offer some small pieces of wisdom and I know that I have some tucked away in the corners of my mind but I haven’t the slightest idea which pieces might be useful to them.

I hear myself sometimes railing about “When I was young” followed by some faded story intended to illustrate a nugget of truth…and I think…”Christ! what a bore I’ve become!” Maybe this little insight is the clever thing I should write about being seventy five.

I’ll probably keep telling the stories though because they entertain me as much as they do my listeners…and really, at my age boring isn’t the worst thing you can be.

This entry was posted on May 6, 2017 at 1:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.