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One Thing or Another: All Boxed Up
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Who doesn’t want to gaze at a baseball cap or coffee cup forty years after buying it and remember that special vacation?
How many boxes does it take to hold a life? It’s a question many of us ask when we find ourselves moving from one home to another. A home is in many ways who we are: that place where we’ve spent most of our time, where we’ve created identities linked to the rooms in which we sleep, eat and bathe, and where we contemplate our daily existence. Then a new phase beckons, a new adventure, and we see it all in front of us, boxed and packed to be taken by car, truck or hand cart to the next phase, the next identity with a few revisions.
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One Thing or Another: The Kids Are Not All Right
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns …
Not long ago I was among those crusty older people who bemoaned and occasionally belittled younger generations for effectively forgetting I’d existed. As a sixty-year-old man (I tend to round up), I was embittered to know so many people even a decade younger did not share my memories of the devastation of AIDS, of my government’s indifference to that plague, of Madonna’s performance in a wedding dress at the Grammys, or of the celebration in the streets of West Hollywood following Bill Clinton’s election. It was, I insisted, a matter of preserving history, without admitting it was as much my personal history I wanted preserved as that of my country or tribe.
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One Thing or Another: The Kids Are Not All Right
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns …
Not long ago I was among those crusty older people who bemoaned and occasionally belittled younger generations for effectively forgetting I’d existed. As a sixty-year-old man (I tend to round up), I was embittered to know so many people even a decade younger did not share my memories of the devastation of AIDS, of my government’s indifference to that plague, of Madonna’s performance in a wedding dress at the Grammys, or of the celebration in the streets of West Hollywood following Bill Clinton’s election. It was, I insisted, a matter of preserving history, without admitting it was as much my personal history I wanted preserved as that of my country or tribe.
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One Thing or Another: Name Your Poison
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all. By Mark McNease
Anger is a quick and easy fix, a rush injected straight into the vein, but it’s poison, and I named it. I asked for it. I ordered a lifetime supply.
Observing the current cultural and political climate, I’m reminded of a scene from the westerns once so popular with American moviegoers. A bartender in a grimy, dusty saloon, says to a weary customer, “Name your poison.” The customer asks for whisky—they all drank whisky in the movies, with names like Rot Gut and Dead Eye—and the bartender serves him from a bottle on the shelf. The customer throws back a mouthful from a greasy shot glass, grimaces as it burns its way down his throat, then smiles, slaps the glass on the counter and orders another one. That sure felt good.
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One Thing or Another: Still Life with Benefits
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all. By Mark McNease
I read once that the most revolutionary thing we can do is slow down … And now, in the woods, with darkness and animals just on the other side of the wall, I am doing that: slowing down. It is revolutionary. It changes and transforms.
It’s that time of year when custom encourages us to take a look back over the past twelve months and contemplate what we’ve been through. It’s always a lot. Have you ever reached the end of a year when there weren’t events of great significance? January begins with hope and December ends with surrender—that’s the annual passage we take again and again until the journey ends. Some of us lose loved ones, some of us change jobs, some of us find joy above and beyond simply waking up each morning slightly amazed we’re still here. I don’t know about you, but that’s really how I feel most days when I find myself conscious once more: what in the world is this? How did I come to be, and how am I able to ask that question? It’s as miraculous as anything will ever be.
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One Thing or Another: Straws and Camels
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
There are shadows overhead for all of us, and we sometimes live our lives as if those shadows will suddenly grow larger and darker as something dreadful finally swoops down to take us away. But we can choose another way.
I can’t name a specific date and time, but at some point the past few months I stopped paying attention to the news beyond what I need to stay informed. Is there a significant natural disaster nearby I need to know about? Has a foreign invader breached our northern shores? Have scientists discovered that drinking eight cups of coffee a day leads to a long life or that it causes permanent memory loss? There’s the local political stuff I want to know about, like who the next governor of New Jersey might be, even though I haven’t registered yet to vote here, and which dismal choice I’ll have to make next year for health insurance. But the overall big picture, the cloud of dread and anxiety that is our current 24/7 news cycle? I just can’t indulge in it anymore. Very little of it uplifts me and much of it depresses me. It’s as if, given the possibility we are not living in the end times, we’ve collectively decided to make it appear as if we are, like that Buck Owens and Roy Clark song I remember from Hee Haw, “Gloom, despair, and agony on me …”
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One Thing or Another: Calamari Wishes and Cashier Dreams
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Life is about downsizing now, reducing the number of things someone will have to have hauled off when I’m dead.
Readers of a certain age will recognize the title reference from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Robin Leach’s hit show about the rich and infamous that ran from 1984 – 1995. It was the granddaddy of celebrity voyeurism, the original orgy of window shopping into lives we would never experience, caviar we would never eat and champagne we would never drink.
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One Thing or Another: Hope, Renewal and a Miracle Cat
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.A funny thing happened on the way to despair: our oldest cat Jessica defied expectations and lived to meow another day. If you’ve ever had a pet diagnosed with a grave illness, you know the odds. You also know the futility of hope—they might get better with a daily pill, they’ll need some insanely expensive surgery you can’t afford, you’ll spend a few weeks or months believing they’ll recover, then you’ll cradle them in your arms in room #3 at the vet’s office waiting for a syringe of Permanent Sleepytime.
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One Thing or Another: Auld Lang Anxiety (So Long 2016)
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease/EditorI’ve witnessed the end of a few years in my time, but seldom have I welcomed their passing as much as I welcome the final days of 2016. It has been both a year to remember and a year to forget, the way one allows painful memories to fade. While I wouldn’t trade the year for, say, a wrinkle in time that caused me to jump from 2015 to 2017, I can say without hesitation it’s been a year of cataclysm, change, overwhelming emotion, and degrees of stress I hope to never experience again.
I could write about job loss for the year, the death of one pet and health scare for another. I could write about getting shingles that still itch. I could write about an entire year consumed by political news that went from the entertaining to the grotesque, to the utterly heartbreaking. And that would be just the beginning.
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One Thing or Another: Shingle Bells
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNeaseI don’t know what’s more excruciating, living through shingles or attempting to write a humor column about them. But since I consider laughter a true medicine, and a sense of humor vital to surviving this life, I’ll do my best to smile through the pain.
It seems appropriate to end my Year of Living Stressfully with a case of something we’re led to believe only strikes people over the age of 60. I celebrated my 58th birthday in October, so while I’m not that far from the mile marker beyond which shingles waits for one in every three of us, I still thought I was safe for a few more years. I obviously have not had the vaccine I see commercials for every hour or so (do our television sets know what products to market to us yet, the way websites do?). I also couldn’t tell you until now that I’d had chickenpox as a child. I don’t remember my childhood diseases, only its discomforts, which were many.
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One Thing or Another: Heaven’s Diner
[clickToTweet tweet=”One Thing or Another editor’s column: Heaven’s Diner. ” quote=”I wonder how different the world would be if we met in diners instead of on Facebook or through apps designed for brief encounters.”]It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
Mark McNeaseI recently read an article about New York City’s disappearing diner culture. The writer lamented the loss of a sense of community diners gave the city over many decades, falling victim now to ever-rising rents and changing tastes. (The concept of community that takes place outside a smartphone is apparently strange and foreign to many people today.)
This, one day after ending a visit to relatives by having breakfast in a Richmond, Virginia, diner. When we walked into the place I immediately looked around at the colors inside. The exterior, in black and red, had told me I could expect something exceptionally diner-ish. The booths were red and black, the tables yellow. The two waitresses were distinctly post-punk, with tattoos and neon hair. The crowd, as is usually the case in diners, consisted of people who knew each other from years of eating there. Only first names were necessary, if names were needed at all. And each of them – men, women and children – looked as if they’d enjoyed lives filled with grits and hash browns, without a single kale salad from cradle to grave. My kind of people.
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One Thing or Another: Country Mice
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
It’s the morning of the time change, that twice-yearly, incomprehensible turning of the clocks by an hour. We’re told, as if it’s an extra treat for puppies, that we’ll have “another hour to sleep.” This is ridiculous, since most of us inhabit bodies, not clocks, and rather than sleep another hour (something I would relish) we just wake up sooner. So here I am an hour earlier than I would have been yesterday, sitting at my living room desk in the true darkness of the countryside, listening to the few sounds a small, old house in the woods has to offer this time of morning. It’s a house I’ll soon be moving to with my husband and two cats. A house I’ve loved for ten years but only experienced as a weekend getaway. That’s all about to change.
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One Thing or Another: The Joys of Being an Almost Halloween Baby
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
It’s that time of year again when all the world celebrates a birth like no other … mine! What’s that saying? ‘60 is the new 55.’
October has always been my favorite month. It’s the month when autumn really makes itself felt, especially if you live where the seasons are discernible. (It recently went from air conditioner weather at the tail end of a relentlessly hot summer, to a sudden and unexpected freeze with a 30-degree drop). It’s flu season, which is always good for a sick day or two spent lying on the couch taking over-the-counter cold remedies that do nothing to stop you from feeling like death is near. Honey, is the healthcare directive in place? You’re sure you’ve still got your copy? And, How about the will? Can I change it by tomorrow? My sister forgot my birthday, I’m not sure she deserves the belt buckles.