I'M NOT GETTING OLDER, I'M GETTING HAIRIER

Yup, it is happening. I'm having a birthday this weekend. Again. It seems to happen every year. It is getting monotonous. The family is coming up so if you enjoy peace tranquility sanity and a sense of rightness with the universe I would avoid the Greater Toronto Area this weekend.

So, a few reflections on this whole getting older thing. Firstly, as I move further into my fifth decade, I don't know if I can consider myself middle aged anymore. For me, middle aged always implied a half way point. I may be beyond that now. Don't get me wrong, I feel fine and I ain't going anywhere but another fifty years? I was bad to myself when I was younger. I smoked so much pot that to this day I pee resin (Tapping the blog .. is this thing on?)

Seriously, looking ahead fifty years is a kind of weird exercise. Because you are not just looking ahead to the status of your life (career, relationship etc) but the quality of your life, your health. My health, my body is not the same now as it was at 25. I'm a bit heavier, a bit slower, and even hairier ... ok, I knew that as I aged I would grow hair in new places but why does it come in grey? And the new gadgets I looked forward to purchasing did not include a wider variety of hair clippers/trimmers. But, I am happy to report that my health, my body, has not really changed in a true dramatic fashion from twenty five years to fifty .. but fifty to seventy five? Seventy five to one hundred? Yikes is the word that comes to mind.


If I live to be one hundred I have this vision of myself: A long grey pony tail and big mouth attached to a walker. Um, scary thought, sorry.


Besides the physical changes I am not sure what my personality is going to be like in fifty years. I like to think that I've gotten wiser over the years; I have certainly gotten crankier. Frankly, I don't think I'm old enough now to be this cranky. Collette's father is crankier than me but he is 84 ... far as I'm concerned, you have a divine right to be cranky at that age. I think I have an early developing case of "codger's disease" or something.


Maybe I will have some kind of sea change in fifty years. At one hundred and one, Vic will be this gracious, generous, munificent entity who spreads waves of love and understanding across the universe; like the Dali Lhama of North York ...... but let's face it, the reality is I am more likely to become the Troll of Toronto; a long haired grey bearded beast with a bum ankle who lives under the Bloor Street Viaduct, scaring children, berating members of the Progressive Conservative party but easily placated by an ice cold bottle of lager. Mmmm lager ... sorry, wiping drewl from beard and continuing on.


I wonder what I will know if I live to be one hundred. I will have accumulated knowledge, that is certain, but will I remember any of it? I am already having memory issues. I keep forgetting what it is that I don't remember. So I have this vision of 98 year old Vic waking up one morning, energized by an epiphany that would create world peace, feed the planet and prevent people from wearing socks with sandals. Only, on the way to the bathroom for my fiftieth pee in 6 hours, I would not only forget the epiphany, I would forget why I had gone into the bathroom in the first place. And wonder what the hell the yellow liquid on my feet was. Wow, another ugly image in one post, thanks for tuning in.

Fifty years just seems way too far away. I have no idea what the world will be like in fifty years let alone my own life. Maybe I will dedicate the next twenty years to doing nothing but sustaining my existence, you know, eating well, exercising, drinking seaweed-and-tofu-and-pigeon-beak smoothies and forgo red meat, beer, and cream filled donuts (you know, the stuff that pretty much sustains me now) only to find that the corporeal world has been replaced by virtual reality anyway; a bunch of meat tubes plugged into a communal Hi Def computer system.

So what is the point of all this musing? Wait, you still didn't think there would be any point to this blog did you? Silly reader. The only point to this post: I will be around next year, musing about the future yet not doing much about it, drinking an ice cold lager and sucking the cream out of a donut.

And, just because the thought occurred to me, the title of this post is I'm Not Getting Older, I'm Getting Hairier but that is what Vic would right. If I was a military general celebrating his 5oth year of blowing shit up the title could be I'm Not Getting Older, I'm Getting A Harrier.

I kill me.

DEFINITIONS

What is the hairy edge?



It is a place that exists inside my mind. Its as real as the memories in my head and as fantastical as all the fiction I have written. As concrete as the faces of the people of love and as ephemeral as the piece of music I've been writing for twenty years and don't have the ability to record.

"The dreams made of smoke and the reality hewn in Stone" Gunter Grass



It is an almalgam of all that crap that has filtered through my brain in 50 year. It reads like Samuel Delaney and James Dickey and Phillip Dick and Margaret Atwood and T Jefferson Parker and Harlan Ellison and bill bissett. It sounds like BB King and Leonard Cohen and Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rankin and the Rolling Stones. It looks like frames created by Sam Peckinpah and John Ford and the Cohen Brothers and Ridley Scott.



The Hairy Edge falls between the things I've done, the stuff I'll never do, the work I will most certainly do, and the dreams of "someday I'll get to it"



The Hairy Edge is the moments when I am physically alone yet still connected to the people all around me. Like walking through a snowstorm for two hours, the flakes on my eyelashes, the city all quiet and frozen and not moving and I don't see anyone but I'm thinking of what I'm going to buy my wife for Christmas. When I'm driving from Toronto to Kingston at 2 am, the highway empty, the wheels humming, John Lee Hooker rumbling in my ears and my mind is thinking of my brother and how the next day I am just going to get him drunk. Solitary. Not alone.



The Hairy Edge is a space I create when I am writing, not the words on the screen or my fingers on the key but just that moment, that place, between the words forming in my mind and the letters appearing. That place is quick and temporal and the most salient of all.



The Hairy Edge is out there. Well, not really out there. I was out there once when I was young and I came back with less teeth, more hair and underpants that smelled like Jose Cuervo tequilla. I am old now. I don't want to be out there. I want to be in here. In here with my wife and my dog and my John Wayne westerns. I live in here and its a nice place to live. But sometimes I have to be away from here so I got someplace that is not here and not out there but perhaps some place just south of both of them, where my sould remains the same but my mind kind of bleeds off a little.



The Hairy Edge, for purposes of this site, is my musings. The ones I usually keep in my head. The thoughts that compell my wife to ask "Hon what you thinking about" and when I don't answer she knows where I am



Now the Hairy Edge has a space.



Lets see if I can fill it