Perusing my friend Nicole’s weblog Prose and Converse, I couldn’t help but identify with the incipient homicidal rage that navigating the Michaels parking lot in Palm Desert can inspire. Up until this very afternoon, my girlfriend Sam was under the employ of the accursed arts and crafts emporium, so I am intimately familiar with contending with people who by all rights shouldn’t be allowed to drive, let alone walk through the parking lot. It’s an enormously frustrating endeavor, one that could shatter the steely resolve of even the most stalwart of heroes.
The geriatric population simply loves Michaels, especially older women. Perhaps after their uteruses go out of business, their cervixes crumble to dust and their eggs become hard boiled, they must direct their hard-wired genetic prerogative to create somewhere or lose what they see as all purpose for existence. Michaels caters to their emptiness with wood-carved letters, miles of yarn and ersatz flora, including cacti, sod, vines and flowers. Thus, as soon as they throw their doors open at 9 a.m. until well into the afternoon, there is an ever-flowing river of doddering elders puttering and shuffling across the asphalt with no regard to anyone who cannot fondly recall the Truman years.
Before Sam’s final day, I was at my wit’s end with these feeble specimens of humanity. I frequently played games of chicken with aged pedestrians, reasoning that if I actually hit one there I shouldn’t feel especially guilty; they were presumably minutes away from death anyway. This callousness stemmed in great part from frustration; they move at their own agonizingly languid pace, which often translates to an Oldsmobile going 7 m.p.h. in cramped quarters. Underlying that, I’ve come to realize another factor is at play: fear.
I’m not afraid of death. I’ve had my share of friends and family come to their end, and I’ve made peace with the unchangeable nature of mortality. No, some part of me even looks forward to living a long and full life marked by an inevitable decline. But I’m afraid of becoming old. I don’t want my voice to change into that of an old man’s, wavering and tired. I don’t want my hair to go white and brittle. I don’t want my hands to curl like claws under the strain of arthritis. I don’t want to stoop like some Victor Hugo monstrosity. I like having working bladder and bowls, the ability to achieve erection, ears that can still make out sound and eyes that for now don’t need bifocals.
It is this fear that colors my interactions with the old and decrepit. Contempt for their ways is contempt for something I hope against hope of ever becoming. I cannot predict if my road will lead me to a Michaels of the future, spending my retirement money on fake foliage, or whether I will transform into the snow-bearded sage I so hope to become.
Oh, I also hate those old fucks because by and large they’re idiots with an unforgivable penchant for sandals and the unforgettable geezer musk.
