What is the nature of the catastrophe?
I’ll tell you what the fucking nature of the catastrophe is - this morning at the gym I looked up to see a middle-aged bloke staring back at me. The problem? I was looking in a mirror.
Catastrophe, it would appear, is both gradual and sudden. For instance, burning tyres for a few decades in your back garden contributes to the catastrophe of global warming (and your neighbour’s washing always smelling faintly of rubber) but you won’t get a sense of impending dread and doom from it. You probably won’t get a sense of impending dread and doom from the water lapping round your front door, up the stairs and into the bedrooms. You probably won’t be truly worried until you’re standing on your roof and it’s lapping at your ankles. Then two things will occur to you - the first is that you should not have burned all those tyres, the second is that it probably won’t be the water that kills you - what you’re really worried about is the cholera epidemic that will follow because you have a sneaking suspicion that if Boots sell cholera medication at all, it’s only going to be in the larger stores.
Of course, sometimes catastrophe comes with no warning. Amid all the background-level dread and fear of global warming, AIDS, bird-flu and consumer angst there is the occasional surprise - I can remember watching the news on Boxing Day about the Tsunami and thinking ‘oh shit’. Or 7 July in London.
Your basic catastrophe though has a long build up and then - ker-pow. I guess the long build up to this morning’s episode was down to a number of contributing factors. The first is getting old, the second is perhaps not getting a haircut as often as I might (hence rather a lot of grey), the third is choosing clothes for comfort rather than style and the last is that those clothes, when worn together, have the effect of magically transforming me into the very image of a professor of modern languages at a small East Anglian polytechnic in 1978.
I am, without a doubt, fucked.
This was rammed home in grand style when, decanting from the train and bopping through the station concourse listening to ‘House of Love’ (ahhhh, the 80’s, say what you like about heroin raddled bands, they rocked) I saw a traveller - obviously caught in that no-time/no-place transition between one journey and the next, backpack, puffer jacket and sense of going somewhere interesting - chowing down on the biggest sodding burger I’ve ever seen. Christ alone knows what time zone his body was on, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was evening for him but looking at him I knew, I mean knew, that I’d never be able to eat something like that.
Not, ‘I can’t drink like I used to’, or ‘who really wants to go clubbing all night anyway?’ - this was me thinking ‘ooooh, don’t fancy that’ about a BURGER!
I put it down to my Old Man’s Jeans. Generous of waist and dark of colour - the only time a young woman is going to be interested in them is when she was finishing hemming the fucking things.
I need some sort of coping strategy. I don’t want to embrace middle age but there’s nothing more pathetic than fighting it. Booze, I think, is the obvious solution.
Catastrophe, it would appear, is both gradual and sudden. For instance, burning tyres for a few decades in your back garden contributes to the catastrophe of global warming (and your neighbour’s washing always smelling faintly of rubber) but you won’t get a sense of impending dread and doom from it. You probably won’t get a sense of impending dread and doom from the water lapping round your front door, up the stairs and into the bedrooms. You probably won’t be truly worried until you’re standing on your roof and it’s lapping at your ankles. Then two things will occur to you - the first is that you should not have burned all those tyres, the second is that it probably won’t be the water that kills you - what you’re really worried about is the cholera epidemic that will follow because you have a sneaking suspicion that if Boots sell cholera medication at all, it’s only going to be in the larger stores.
Of course, sometimes catastrophe comes with no warning. Amid all the background-level dread and fear of global warming, AIDS, bird-flu and consumer angst there is the occasional surprise - I can remember watching the news on Boxing Day about the Tsunami and thinking ‘oh shit’. Or 7 July in London.
Your basic catastrophe though has a long build up and then - ker-pow. I guess the long build up to this morning’s episode was down to a number of contributing factors. The first is getting old, the second is perhaps not getting a haircut as often as I might (hence rather a lot of grey), the third is choosing clothes for comfort rather than style and the last is that those clothes, when worn together, have the effect of magically transforming me into the very image of a professor of modern languages at a small East Anglian polytechnic in 1978.
I am, without a doubt, fucked.
This was rammed home in grand style when, decanting from the train and bopping through the station concourse listening to ‘House of Love’ (ahhhh, the 80’s, say what you like about heroin raddled bands, they rocked) I saw a traveller - obviously caught in that no-time/no-place transition between one journey and the next, backpack, puffer jacket and sense of going somewhere interesting - chowing down on the biggest sodding burger I’ve ever seen. Christ alone knows what time zone his body was on, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was evening for him but looking at him I knew, I mean knew, that I’d never be able to eat something like that.
Not, ‘I can’t drink like I used to’, or ‘who really wants to go clubbing all night anyway?’ - this was me thinking ‘ooooh, don’t fancy that’ about a BURGER!
I put it down to my Old Man’s Jeans. Generous of waist and dark of colour - the only time a young woman is going to be interested in them is when she was finishing hemming the fucking things.
I need some sort of coping strategy. I don’t want to embrace middle age but there’s nothing more pathetic than fighting it. Booze, I think, is the obvious solution.
1 Comments:
Stop feeling sorry for yourself. The alternative to becoming middle aged (death?) is much worse. At least you're married. You probably even get laid once in awhile at least out of obligation and if not, well at least you're making enough money to buy yourself a prostitute. Maybe you should just shave your head like Bruce Willis---he's hot. Sean Connery is hot and he's old---way older than you, I suspect, and actually has a tendency to look like a Professor himself. I'm certainly hot for teacher. At least you have all your limbs (well, hopefully you do) and are coherent enough to bitch about the people at the train station every day. At least when a man gets older it is OK for them to be with younger and younger girls...the reverse is not so cool.
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