health – Page 6 – Hopeful Romantics

When Exceptional People Grow Older

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Years ago, when I was first starting out as a writer, my agent in the Los Angeles had a small second floor office in the old Writers and Artists Building, in Beverly Hills. On several visits to her, I would run into the notorious gangster, Mickey Cohen. He was one of my agent’s clients. Jane was new in the business and maintained an eclectic roster reminiscent of Broadway Danny Rose, only with class.

Since we shared the same agent, Mickey and I would nod at each other and maybe manage a few words. He was sick and dying, preoccupied with getting his book to press, before he passed on. He didn’t have much time for chitchat, or maybe I read it wrong and he nothing but time. He looked lonely and out of touch, out of step in the modern world. His old bookie joint on just off of Sunset Strip had long been converted into a leather shop and finally a hair salon.

I thought to myself that this had been one of the most feared men in America. He ruled Los Angeles and was said to have been one of the luckiest gangsters, having dodged several assassination attempts. He made his enemies pay for such transgressions. He lived long after them. And now cancer was taking him down. He was old and fragile, not the fearsome sort of long ago.

Since that time I have been fascinated by the enigma of age on exceptional people who performed extraordinary deeds. Age can eventually make us all appear frail and marginal. Age can disguise our pasts and the things that took place when we were young, virile and a little bit crazy. But with people, ordinary or not, who committed themselves at one time or another to extraordinary acts, it is so strange how time and age can all but eradicate any sense of the deeds we performed.

On many occasions I found myself staring at persons of some notoriety, waiting for their remarkable character to break through the layers of camouflage and some how reveal itself. You wait for that projection of energy. Sometimes you can catch a glimmer, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes, depending on life and its fortunes, enough of that character remains, albeit in a slightly muted form.

I was reminded of the vagaries and cruelty of age, recently, when I sat down with an old friend who had been ill for some time. Here was a man who served as a war correspondent in countless third world garbage dumps, who had interviewed potentates and politicians of every stripe. He was a man who has investigated some of the greatest scandals of our time. And now, as he sat across from me, it was tough for him to talk. Over time and a couple of drinks, however, that special glimmer of significance did overtake his earlier reservation. He became more animated and under pain and duress projected some of his old self. Still, seeing an old an ill man in front of me, I had to search of evidence of a greater past.
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There was a former member of the Navy’s Underwater Demotion Unit. A frogman, before there were Navy Seals. He was old and moved slowly, but was a wealthy man as a result of having bought and sold enough real estate to develop a good part of Los Angeles. There was no indicator to what acts of courage this man had performed. He was just another tired old man, still moving forward in the quest of making a buck. But he still had the skin burns from the demolition cord he used to blow up enemy submarines that were docked in their bases. Swim in through the protective netting and swim out again. A few less submarines.

Some people still retain that sense of character. Old actors. Rock and Roll Stars. Performers still manage to put on that face and put on that show. An aging Mick Jagger still looks and appears like Mick Jagger of his youth, albeit, a little slower and a little more craggy. Anais Nin was dynamic almost up to the time she grew terminally ill. She had that special grace and allure, moved across the room like she was gliding on wheels. From what friends say, Henry Miller, her lover of yore, maintained his special presence. Beatrice Wood was still going strong into her 100’s. She was a world class potter but also the lover of Marcel Duchamp. Maybe it’s love, exotic romance at its best that keeps some vital and young in spirit. And delightfully crazy.

I remember meeting the Newton Boys. They were old time bank robbers, cowboy types who still retained their wit and sense of humor. With them, ironically, I could see them as they were, holding up a bank. If they thought they could get away with it.

And then there are the ones we are left to wonder about. What would Marilyn Monroe have been like at eighty? Would Amelia Earhart be dynamic and special, projecting that special aura when they periodically honored her as a pioneer for women’s rights? John Lennon?

So the next time you see someone who is elderly take a second look. Before you judge them merely old and frail, pathetically marginal, look for the signs of an exceptional character . Not everyone will have it. Let’s face it, while we can be kind and classify everyone as special, there are some of us, a few of us, who in one form or another have gone the extra mile. We may not even like what they did. We may not approve of it. But we can recognize that at one time or another they did something extraordinary.

Under the layers of personal history, trials, and disappointment, age may have obscured that special character. But it can never quite remove it entirely.

Strap Hangers for Chinese Airlines?

This seems like the makings of what is almost a good idea. A Chinese airline is considering allowing standing room passengers at cheaper rates for shorter flights. That’s right, standing passengers on the airline. That way the airline could cram some 40% more passengers on its Airbus 320 airplanes. As if the airplanes are not crowded enough.

The standing passengers would be the ultimate no thrills ticket buyers. Pure economy. Already the recession has left the ariliens searching for new ways to cut costs. You can just picture this. For takeoff and landing they would be strapped into what is described as a bar stool-like stand. They will be fasted in on seatbelts. Should a crash occur, I suppose, they will be left hanging around like so much meat in a locker.

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Flying as it is, anymore, is painful on the best of days and under the best of circumstances. This overcrowded little voyage, what with the body odor, the chattering, and shifting and turning has to be an unforgettable experience. Then there is the extra time for boarding and deplaning, going through all the metal detectors and sensors, drooling into your tomato juice. And this is before we get to the air turbulence or mechanical troubles, with passengers bouncing around, losing their balance, screaming, whatever.

Before we pick on the Chinese airline, realize that Airbus is also considering this option. Ah, the romance of travel.

Live Naked and Save the Planet

The new green is nudism. Or so says Kathy Blanchard on her The Naturist Society Website. According to an article in the New York Times and on Ms. Blanchard’s website, the tough economy is causing many potential vacationers to look for cheap spots where clothing is optional. A good choice, opines Blanchard, since going nude cuts down on the laundry bill, saving energy and the repurchase of clothing. You keep the planet clean by not dumping as much soap into our water systems.

Who am I to argue? It is just that I don’t relish seeing Al Gore and others who cross my mind lecturing me in their birthday suits. In fact, anyone who has been to a nude beach can attest it may be a freer way of catching the surf and sun, but hardly the sexy tableau that invades our imagination. But then again, according to the naturalists, going nude is not supposed to be sexy. It’s supposed to be natural. And green.

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Especially those ornery two inch long, urinphilic Candiru, that are know to inhabit the Amazon River. These little Catfish-like buggers are spiny and painful and can penetrate the human urethra. That’s the penis and vagina to the medically less informed. They then start snacking on mucous membrane. This was enough of a problem that the indigenous people often wore some type of cod pieces, a coconut shell.

Okay, like most of us, I have no intention of swimming in the Amazon. It’s hard enough to go to Santa Barbara, what with traffic on the highways and the nonsense at the airports. Most of the swimming I do anymore is in a swimming pool, where I could swim in the nude. I guess. I would just have to change my paradigm. I wouldn’t be scaring the neighbors; I would be saving the planet.

Miss California Makes Hay on the Gay Marraige Issue

Carrie Prejean made her television commentator debut recently on Fox News. Prejean, otherwise known as Miss California, graced the airwaves as a host on the Fox News Show, Fox and Friends. Her two male co-hosts were apparently smitten with her as they heaped so much praise on her as a visionary and in possession of the hearts and minds of the people. I thought I was witnessing a pick up scene in some Upper East Side Watering Hole where the two stiff suits were trying to woo the hot babe from the eighteenth floor.

Carrie Prejean, as we all know thanks to the media overload, stirred up some controversy when she while running for Miss USA that she opposed gay marriage. She talked about family values and the way she was raised. She talked about morality and virtue. She didn’t discuss the racy photos taken earlier in her young life that later appeared all over the Internet. But so what? We are in the age of digital cameras. And blind ambition. What’s going topless in quest of fame?

But being against gay marriage and showing off your much smaller, non-implanted boobs was too much red meat for either side of the issue. The liberal left reflexively hated her guts. The conservative right adopted her as a love child and couldn’t support her enough. Even Sarah Palin stepped forward in support of her fellow Beauty Queen. Talk show pundits rambled on as they are wont to do, getting paid for their scintillating insight into such matters.

As for me, I can’t get all excited, either way. I realize the media is a circus and unlike spectacles like wrestling that openly wink at its play acting and entertainment value, the news media still pretends there are shreds of authenticity left in its tabloid soul. I realize that while I may disagree with Carrie Prejean’s opinion, vehemently, in fact, I will defer to Voltaire in defending to the death her right to it. Well, maybe not to the death, but you get the point.

Besides, what brand of idiots would resort to a contestants in a beauty pageant for insights into the complexities of social and political issues? I mean, to take seriously the geopolitical perceptions of a beauty queen is in and of itself an oxymoron. Other than their traditional desire for world peace, there is little to offer other than a sneak peak at their silicon boob jobs and a few minutes of mediocre talent. I swear if Carrie Prejean or any other aspiring beauty queen came out in favor of inter-bestial sexual relations, I wouldn’t feel anymore upset than her view of love being long walks in the moonlight.

What does interest me is how Carrie Prejean can parlay her controversial position into one of a bonafide celebrity. While she may have done it from the platform of the Miss USA contest, it is still remarkable how she joined the growing list of limited people making the celebrated move from there to here. This in itself, if not an art form, at least qualifies as something worth noting.

I am not claiming that Carrie Prejean is particularly talented or that a brain trust lives in concealment under that lovely blond hair. In fact, it is safe to say she is no rocket scientist and that no missiles will be launched from that brain. But then her two fellow hosts on the show are far from what you would deem an Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite. And yet there they are…commentating. Or whatever.

Besides, Prejean has the Big Mo going in her favor. Her momentum based on the fact that somewhere around half the nation supports her. Americans love a pretty face and a girl that’s both traditional yet spunky. It’s the natural combination for big time appeal. This is, after all, nothing if not a country that for some strange reason usually prefers its leaders be mediocre. Perhaps that way they are less intimidating and more accessible. There are a number of reasons, but that is the subject of a different feature.

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Ironically, or maybe not, it seems to be the conservatives who best repurpose adversity. You can name a few. There was Oliver North who was convicted of violating the Congress and the laws of this land by allegedly engineering the elements of what would be the Iran-Contra Scandal. He became a talk show host who was revered by his followers. Same goes for G. Gordon Liddy who was convicted for his participation in the Watergate Scandal and went on to be a talk show host.

Jessica Hahn, church administrator, was spotlighted for being sexually abused by Televangelist Jim Bakker. She had a radio show, however briefly, made dozens of guest appearances, and posed in Playboy Magazine. Not bad for a conservative girl who was supposedly a virgin at the time of her abuse.

Rush Limbaugh, famous already, after telling his adoring listeners what harsh treatment was levied on drug users was in fact a major drug user who violated the law. His punishment was higher numbers and, arguably, the title of the Republican spokesperson for this era. He was famous already, but after the drug scandal, he was promoted within.

Then there is Dick Morris. Morris worked as a political adviser to President Bill Clinton, but who resigned after it was discovered he sought out prostitutes for mutual toe sucking festivities. He is now a Republican Pundit, appears on countless shows and waxes critically on the behavior of others. It is fair to say Morris is more famous after the hooker told all about the toe sucking than he was as merely a political adviser.

The Democrats have very few who knew how to turn adversity in their favor. There is of course Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky Scandal. But he was already the President and therefore famous. In Clinton’s case, adversity cost him. Influential people distanced themselves. He faced public embarrassment, including a vote to impeach him.

Gary Hart, leading presidential hopeful, got caught doodling Donna Rice, and he had to drop out of a race that surely was his to lose. He lost it. He dwells now in Media Limbo, making appearances here and there but living overall in relative obscurity.

So at the end of the day, it’s fair to say the Republicans do it better. They can sin and ask G-d for forgiveness, and remarkably he seems to do it every time. He even gives them a talk show. So in the end, contrary to the common opinion that that Republicans are dead or dying as a party, I would say they are far from it. They are only on hiatus.

As for Carrie Prejean, should she lose her conservative backing, there is always the Weather Channel.

Boomers’ New Commune for Retirement Post-Recession

Increasingly, I have listened to my Boomer friends tell me that the economic meltdown has caused a serious decline in their pensions funds and portfolios. The standard refrain is, “I’ll never be able to retire.” Some are joking, or trying to put a good face on a rotten time for a Recession, and some are hardly joking at all.

Couple the loss of savings with the potential loss of your job, and Boomers are wondering how they are even going to make it to retirement. It is no secret that the Boomers are generally higher paid and not as willing at this point in life to work the slave hours as their younger counterpart. Then there are the others, who can’t find work and have given up trying. They are taking earlier retirement. Maybe they are getting less income from their Social Security and Retirement funds. But at least they are getting some money. And some money is better than no money at all. I guess.

It is a lousy economy for everybody but especially for a generation that thought it would never grow old, and now it has. It’s a harsh reality, for sure, especially when you feel the first ailments, the aches and pains, that make it harder to get up and harder to get it up. Friends are starting to die around you. It seems too early, but nevertheless life has its way of telling you the time of the season. As Bob Dylan sang in one of his songs, “It ain’t dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

All right, not to be morbid. The fact is for most Boomers there is still a long way to go. We are overall in better shape than any other generation. We are better educated and more or us exercise and eat right. We try to stay vital and relevant, even when looking vital and relevant is a full time job. We have sex on a regular basis. Or at least some of us do. We accept the new realities that our friends and associates in trying to find themselves found sometimes that the boys liked boys and the girls liked girls. Hey considering that our parents at our age looked like Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, this ain’t too bad.

We look for second careers and go into business for ourselves. We wear funny tee shirts and buy CD’s of our favorite bands. We try to understand our children and maybe we do a better job of it than our parents did with us. Or maybe we have no more of a clue about how and why the younger generation behaves than the old fogies who tried to ruin our youth.

So now hear we are, at least eyeballing retirement. But in this economy we are increasingly aware, despite the assurances to the contrary, we may be faced with some serious downsizing. Social services and entitlement may not be there like we thought. We sure can’t take it for granted. Instead of the government and our nest eggs providing us with economic and psychological sanctuary, we may be left to our own devices. There are cracks in the system, the same system we once deplored and then finally embraced. We were victimized by stupid wars, again, and watched a bunch of white collar thieves run off with our money. Some of us are those white collar thieves, but I digress.

We have handled it well. So far. Rather than man the barricades and storm the government institutions, we just grouse about it. Maybe. Or we take mood elevators and try not to notice. Perhaps the storming part is best left to younger people as all that climbing and running would causes pains in the places we would rather ignore. Who wants tear gas all over our brand new designer jeans?

As for the younger people, they accept their fates with a mix of apathy and lethargy. It’s that or they are remarkable stoic. The thing is if they are this apathetic about their own fates, then for sure as hell they are not about to care too much about us. Even if we are their parents.

So I started thinking of solutions to our possible future challenges. I realized we are liable to end up living on communes. Talk about karma with a capital “K.” We are going to chip in or in some other way cluster into workable communities where we can put food on the table and take care of each other. Maybe it’s nuts to think this way, but it is no crazier than believing all those years of working fourteen hours a day would guarantee our economic security. That is starting to look like it was really insane, wasting our lives, most of us, in jobs we hated. For trinkets and beads.
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I write this never being a big fan of the communes of old. I had visited a few in those times and it always seemed oddly humorous that the commune dwellers in search of democracy voted on just about everything from cooking the ubiquitous brown rice to sexual sleeping arrangements. all that deliberation was just too overwhelming. I realized there need to be certain arrangements in order for these communes to survive, but some of the rules were more draconian than the rules of straight society. In straight society you just needed money, and people would tend to leave you alone, if you wanted. Not at the communes. It seemed everyone was into everybody else’s business.

I remember living in Santa Fe, New Mexico and sitting in my favorite restaurant as a gaggle of hippies and their gaggle of kids partook in their weekly restaurant experience. they may have been rich kids looking poor for all I knew. The men and women were often dressed in muslin. Dirty muslin. Dresses, skirts, mens’ shirts. Their kids, too, were adorned in muslin. Set off, as they say in the fashion world, by dirty faces.

I forget the name of that particular commune where this group made their home. It was up in the mountains and over the years was transformed by new owners into Ten Thousand Waves, the Japanese health spa. Talk about changes and things. The commune did enjoy the rare distinction of surviving longer than most.

So now here we are, perhaps about to reexamine the commune experience of our youth. While most Boomers never set foot inside a commune, maybe a good thing, now it may loom as one of the principle means of our survival. Of course the new communes would hardly resemble the old communes. For one thing the sex acts would be far more limited. Even with Viagra.

The good news would be that the residents would be far more accomplished than those who lived in the communes of our youth. Despite all assertions to the contrary, we we largely young and inexperienced, lacking skill sets we have developed over time. We may actually have a clue and know what we are doing, which back then was often not the case.

Things have changed. We live in a digital world with the Internet. Survival and setting up a business or series of business that may bring in income is a lot more realistic than the axiom of merely growing one’s own food and inseminating the barnyard animals. Power lines reach into even the more rural areas, so running computer and appliances is not that much an issue. Besides, some of these communes may be in urban areas, even blighted urban areas that can be reclaimed on the cheap. Or perhaps they will exist in suburbia, in communities that have fallen apart. Old factories. Who knows.

Needs will be different from those in our youth. Once upon a time it seemed like every third hippie woman took up midwifery. Noble enough but hardly necessary with a group facing its own mortality. People will need nursing and hospice skills instead. Some people will need retraining. People will need entertainment. Some will come over the Internet and through satellite and cable, but if there is leisure time it cannot all be spent in the pursuit of metaphysical enlightenment or listening to a poorly played guitar.

Then there is a matter of benefiting the surrounding communities. When you have this many skilled Boomers clustered into one area then it is only fitting devote some time to going out into the community. It wouldn’t hurt to teach the kids to read and write. Teach classes on real issues, things that we have learned along the way. Be the mentors we as kids thought others should be. Maybe put a little something back in the world, even if our experience in it was less than satisfactory.

It can’t hurt. And after all, it beats working.