Clogs and Curmudgeons: Caught in the middle of life

Excuse the graphic nature of the following sentence. The other day I got out of the shower and caught a glimpse of my naked body in the the bathroom mirror. I was shocked. I wondered who was the middle-aged man staring back at me. What cruel funhouse mirror was swapped for the one in my bathroom? This person with a soft waistline and gray chest hairs was not me. Where did he come from; or better question, when did he arrive? Gone was that beautiful face with youthful intensity, temerity and arrogance. When was it replaced by this haggard weapon looking back at me now? The collateral damage of time creasing my cheeks with not very subtle lines.

I just read an article in the The Economist that finds the age of 46 the year with the highest cases of worry and depression. We who are in this age group of mid-lifers are literally stuck in middle age. Bookend between the calamities of raising teenagers and aging ever more needy parents creates a tsunami like effect on our emotions as they pour over the shores of our mind. Coupled with a bad economy we are indeed clogged in the bottom of a pipe with little hope of immediately relief. What happened to us? We are suppose to the be trendsetters. The story makers. We are the X-Generation. We were suppose to just Do It! I was never suppose to punch a clock or fall into a lock-step with any company's dogma. But here I find myself dancing to a corporate master's whip crunched into the small crevices of middle-management, the very cliché my peers and I put down and ridiculed back in college.

Mid-Career Workers Squeezed Off of the Street blared loudly at me from the screen of my computer. I learned reading this piece on Fins website that the down turn in the economy where "middle-aged, mid-career workers have borne an inordinate share of layoffs and cuts by attrition". As if we didn't already have enough on our plates. So now we're fired not because of the high-level of expertise or tons of experience (or lack thereof) we bring to the table, but because businesses can make bigger profits with younger, less smart and willing to do anything for less workers. We are out of work longer and once we do find a job its usually at salaries significantly reduced from what we were making with very little benefits. Reading these abysmal statistics I was at first disconnected from them. Those poor people I thought before realizing they were talking about me. Aren't we suppose to be living in a post-generational time period. An epoch where liver spot removal and midnight runs to Duane Reade to pick up a box of Just for Men (have to look bright and young for that management meeting in the morning) was no longer necessary.

To a certain extent I enjoy the aging process. Though the boldness of that young gamblers spirit may be gone, I've realized great risks can be taken as long as they are armored with clear strategies. Sex grows better because I am now at ease with my body. I've long passed the point fear motivated me to the gym. Now I workout for myself. At this certain age you understand that you will always be too-something. Too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too light, too dark. So therefore you accept the skin you reside in and that opens the doors to amazing exploration. Things you would now do you deemed too kinky or too contrived when you were 25. Your focus becomes razor sharp. Gone or ignored are the distractions that used to tatter your time and days. Like a Times Square card shark we can move the pieces of our lives in and out of view rapidly trying to trick life into finding the wrong card in our reductive game of monty.

But all too often as those cards which symbolize the itinerant pieces of our lives grow larger or multiply into many more parts and we start to spend the vast majority of our time maneuvering things. Moving things from one shelf so we can dust only to put them back into an ever more crowded space. Our lives lose their fluidity as the cogs grind and connect and the viscosity of youth and dreams dry up; leaving us commanding a lumbering machine that only moves forward from its on momentum rather than from the true locomotion of passions or ambition. Gravity seems to pull us closer to the bottom of that u-bend.

As I gradually look more like my parents and less like my nieces and nephews a pall sometimes comes over me. I think I can deal with the frenzy of gray hair or the list (which is getting longer by the day) of foods I can no longer eat without repercussion; being called "Daddy" by horny twenty-somethings hitting on me or even the slower pace of my step. My biggest grief with middle-age is what I feel is a loss of options. Responsibility chokes my life. An endless Sargasso Sea of good intentions and doing-the-right things. Even now the simplest decisions must be weighed against dire consequences. When I was 25 I could thumb my nose at work. Who cared? The sun and the pier called my name. But now the notion of missing work causes paroxysms that spread through my soul from an epicenter of doom in my brain filling in the gaps of my end of times imagination. I can't miss work. I need that paid time off to go to North Carolina to see my in-firmed mother. What if I don't get paid for the day? How will I pay my rent? I need the overtime and I won't get it if I don't go in. My life's course is not a multi-lane super highway with on/ off ramps galore. It is a tight narrow black top flowing straight into the horizon with no exits in sight. My life has become a slow turning thumbscrew of banality.

Now without soundling like a complete whining asshole there are somethings middle-agers can do. We can take this huge amount of experiential life we've amassed and put it to good use. If I'm going to be under-employed let that time off benefit others. I've started volunteering at an LGBT homeless shelter. I'm going to move my mother to NYC and hopefully make her happy in her declining years. I'm going back to film school to finally follow that dream I abandoned so many years ago that it now seems unforgiving. I am going to continue to write my novels and short stories with the hope that one day somebody will actually read them. That there will be one day that the clog in the bottom of the u-bend will not be me.