What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Read Online Free PDF

I'm rather busy now. It's time to let the dogs in and the editors out. As for the women, that really isn't necessary. They have their own inexorable methods of working their way into your heart.

ZERO TO SIXTY

     
oon I'll be sixty years old. Impossible, you say? How the hell do you think I feel? I don't know whether to have a birthday party or a suicide watch. I have received a few misguided cards and several inquiries from paleontologists, but basically, all being sixty really means is that you're old enough to sleep alone. In my case, having breezed through my entire adult life in a state of total arrested development, it's especially hard to realize that Annette Funicello is gone. I don't mean to make light of Annette Funicello. She died a tragic, lingering death, I believe, or maybe she's still with us, merely eclipsed by yet another former Mouseketeer, Britney Spears. The older and wiser I get, indeed, the less it is that I seem to know. Soon I may become such a font of wisdom and experience that I will know absolutely nothing at all. There are some, no doubt, who believe this stage of evolution has already occurred.
    But this is where seniority comes to the rescue. For the older you get, the less you care what others may think of you. You may find yourself peeing in Morse Code, but you're still happy to share your wisdom and advice with the world. When hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was a very old man, someone asked him what was the most important thing he'd learned in life. "Always keep the shower curtain inside the tub," he answered. These may not sound like words to live by but, you'll have to admit, it does make for good practical advice. What's more important, of course, is all the water under the bridge that Hilton, for his own reasons, deliberately left out of the tub.
    Possibly, even more importantly, I was cooking chicken gizzards for the dogs yesterday while watching Wuthering Heights. I forgot about the chicken gizzards until I saw smoke billowing out of the kitchen like the fog on the moors. This is what it amounts to, I told myself. To ask in the same breath, "Where are all our Heathcliffs? Where are all our Stellas?" And then, "Now what did I do with that damn coffee cup?" We usually find the coffee cup. But for everything else we've lost it's probably best simply to look back at life with a wistful smile and see it all as reflections in a carnival mirror.
    According to my friend Dylan Ferrero, guys our age are in the seventh-inning stretch. This sports analogy may be lost in the lights by Iranian mullahs, adult stamp collectors, and other non-baseball fans. Or perhaps everybody knows what the seventh-inning stretch implies, but most of the world is too young or too busy to take the time to think about what it means to baseball or to life. A lot of wonderful things can happen after the seventh-inning stretch, of course, but, statistically speaking, it's pretty damn late in the game. None of us are getting younger or smarter. About all we can hope for is wise or lucky. But at least we're old enough to realize and young enough to know that when the Lord closes the door he opens a little window. Old age is definitely not for sissies, but those of us who are chronologically challenged may take comfort in the words of my favorite Irish toast: "May the best of the past be the worst of the future."
    Sometimes I wonder why, God willing, I will likely make it to sixty when almost all the people I've loved are either dead or at the very least wishing they were. My fate, apparently, in the words of Winston Churchill, is to "keep buggering on." It's too late for me now to drive a car into a tree in high school. Yet I remain a late-blooming serious, a veteran soul for whom anything is possible, a man who at times feels like he is eighty, at times forty, and at times, a rather precocious twelve. What I do not feel is sixty. Sixty is ridiculous. Sixty is unthinkable. What God would send you to a Pat Green concert and send