"No one here gets out alive."
No One Here Gets Out Alive
for release 09-30-05
Washington D.C.
Having the realization that your time on this earth is limited makes an incredible difference in the way you live your life. There are numerous ways that this realization can occur. You can be faced with a serious or life threatening health problem, narrowly escape death by accident or injury, watch your friends or contemporaries die in arbitrary ways like OD's or car wrecks. Or......you can reach the age of fifty.
I have noticed that among my generation of baby boom-booms, this is when it finally sinks in. You are not immortal like you thought you were when you were twenty. You realize that this body and this life are temporary affairs. In other words, it's time to get down to business.
I had a version of this realization early in life. When I was seventeen I had a job dipping ice-cream at a local emporium. After a year of working there I started having dreams about working my life away on somebody else's time clock. LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsburg and Jim Morrison were in my head too. One day I decided. I was never going to punch another man's clock again. I had too much to accomplish and enjoy in this life to be, as Morrison so bluntly put it, "Sellin' my hours for a handful of dimes."
For the most part, I have managed to keep that promise to myself and have survived on my cunning or my ingenuity or my skill and worked for myself.
But at about the age of of fifty, most people have a moment with themselves in the shower or in front of the mirror and realize that the vehicle is deteriorating. It might have been a nimble little machine some years ago but now it is like a Camry with about 200,000 miles on the odometer. The tires are a little bare and the transmission is making this sound.
So the thought occurs to you, not the same thought that you had years ago that I can do anything, live forever and the whole world is waiting for me, but the thought that your time is finite and that you had best do what you really want to do, and do it now.
I have watched this, for want of a better term, Midlife Crisis, infuse people with a new dedication and resolve. You see people adopt a new commitment to their passions. Those that haven't touched a brush in years go to the art supply store and max their credit cards buying paints and easels and canvases and you see musicians re-stringing the guitars that had gathered dust for years and poets tuning their language and meter and executives giving up jogging and buying Harley-Davidsons.
I had this realization when I was about fifty. I am, after all, a member of my generation. I suddenly understood, more completely than when I was seventeen, that there was no time left for anything but the things that brought joy to my life. All people or occupations or activities that didn't bring me joy were pointless and a waste of my precious time.
Then the question inevitably arose. I had to ask myself, "What are the things that bring you joy, Lightning Rod?"
After an intense ten minutes of reflection I answered my own question. The things that bring me joy in life are pretty simple: Making love, making music and writing. (but to paraphrase Dotty Parker, I actually hate writing, but I love having written.) I also like to drink and smoke and socialize and in general do whatever I goddam well please.
The Poet's Eye sees that mortality is a blessing and also that time is short. So, whatever it is that puts joy in your life, do it now.
"Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening crawl across the years
Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand
Trying to tell me no one understands
Trade in your hours for a handful dimes
Gonna’ make it, baby, in our prime"
----Jim Morrison (dead at 27)
