That Was Our Time

I had a conversation with my father, in his eighties now, about the sixties, the early seventies, I think, and he said, well, that was our our time. And I knew what he meant, because I felt it too, like the 90s was my time, the swelling of that first tech bubble and the way I was sucked into the beating heart, and febrile mind, of late stage capitalism, taking my part in the Zeitgeist that would breed the quartet of IT monopolies that would shape the next few decades. Living breathing a futurism blissfully ignorant of the coming surveillance oligopolies.

The SF I’d loved my whole life coming true. The Asimov and the Gibson, both at once.

Making a hundred dollars an hour, too. The money pushing away my writing without a ton of resistance.

But time marches on and the towers fell and my kids were born in the swirl of ashes and the future went Abu Grahib dark and flared bright again, in the glowing smile of my favorite Kenyan Crypto muslim robot from the future, and now is darker than ever before, approaching the midnight gloom of the Cuban Missile crisis, into which I was born. 

My time seems to have been brief indeed, the flicker of an eyelid, but I guess everyone’s time feels like that. 

So. I fell off the stage and broke my leg but my eyes were open, on the way down, and I watched my kids, and cared for them, and they were creatures of this time, and so I was sucked along in the moment, painfully awake, prickly and weirded out and exhausted and alternately happy and very very sad, which of course is probably just the bipolar. But who knows. 

So, like all parents, I’ve seen life twice through, all my milestones now a double vision. 

I’m at this age where men can drop dead and people go, “oh, really? What was it?” And the answer is generally, “Heart thing,” and the regret thereafter is tinged with a ‘well that’s life’ kind of vibe.

So it’s hard to know what to do next, with one’s time.

I’ve watched men my age rewrite old stories. Stories that no longer adhere to the present in any meaningful way. I’ve watched them retire, give up, become worse than irrelevant. I’ve watched them become despised, for doubling down on statements they failed to understand as despicable.

Could I be a late bloomer? Or am I just fading out, like Hey Jude, repeating myself as the volume drops and the hiss of the needle in the groove swallows up the murmur of my voice. Before the needle rises from my spinning disk forever?

My kids are older and leaving  home and I feel my attachment to this time and place and world stretching thin. Bilbo’s butter over too much bread.

But… Maybe I’ll be better off in another world. Of my own creation, undisturbed by the noisy now.  Or wherever it is we go when we go, if my next pratfall off the stage lands me at an awkward angle. Maybe I had plenty of time. Maybe I did something.

I don’t feel like I did, but then, that’s probably the bipolar.

At any rate, here is to you, dear reader, to you and your time, and what you do with the time you have on your hands right now. Do something that matters to you. Make something. Love someone. Listen to new music.

Enjoy the light. Your time under the sun.