Great Moments In Online Game
There it was, sitting in a secluded directory of my soon-to-be-decommissioned server like a remarkably shiny time capsule or a sealed letter to myself postmarked December of 2012: just over two GB of encrypted backup files from the laptop that I decommissioned more than three years ago. It took just an hour to download but I had to sleep on it before I could remember the password and then my quad Core i7 current lappie still required thirty-three hours to decrypt the whole thing.
Most of it was stuff I still had, and most of the rest was no longer useful --- blurry out-take shots from my CX-5 review, anyone? But there were a few instances of glitter among the dross. Photos from an SCCA National Solo event that brother Bark and I did a while back. Four irreproducible snaps of a raven-haired woman standing with her back to me next to my Town Car, holding a thin black dress down against the evening wind coming off Lake Erie. A video of my three-and-a-half-year-old son jumping up and down at the local trampoline-bounce place.
Last but not least, the above image, suitably redacted and presented here for your amusement.
"Angela" is a former customer of mine with whom I became briefly entangled many years ago. She works in healthcare management and at the time of this Facebook post, which has to be maybe 2010 or early 2011, she was at a kind of combination rehab place/old folks' home. So, you know, my man falls down the stairs outside his apartment, because he's a 45-year-old man living in a $550/mo apartment, and he has to go to rehab, and he sees my old rider kicking it there, and I still to admit that even into her late thirties she had a kind of insane glow about her, I know what he was thinking, he figured it was time to bone. But because he's profoundly uncomfortable with the modern world of social media, he decides to swing and miss right there on a wall post.
With that said, he's very far from alone. From time to time, the woman formerly known as Vodka McBigbra will send me particularly hilarious morsels of pickup game she gets. It's almost enough to make a feminist out of me, because almost without exception every man over 50 in this country appears to have the same basic approach:
Hi, blah blah you're very pretty blah blah... (hugely passive-aggressive discussion of everything his ex-wife did to him)
It's just proof positive that the 85/15 situation that one encounters in one's college and young adult years, where 15% of the guys are sleeping with 85% of the girls, just never ends. The world is full of lonely old men. They send photos of themselves that look like nightmares an eight-year-girl might have about her creepy uncle; taken from below, triple chins in evidence, crazed look in the eyes, backlit. They talk about their feelings a lot. Whatever characteristics once distinguished them from the bland mashed-potato mass of humanity have long since disappeared or been rendered vestigial. They are jealous, petty, needy. Many of them have hydraulic-pressure issues that only resolve briefly, in the occasional sunny morning. One wonders why they continue living.
One is also reminded that human society evolved to its 1950s (or whatever) apex for particular and specific reasons. You're supposed to be happily married when you're old. Or, failing that, just married. There's not much dignity in old-person dating. Not much joy, either. Even the sorrows are diminished --- and that's a shame, because sorrow in a relationship is the engine that has powered many a creative effort since time immemorial. Still, one question remains, put to you by a man who is staring down the rifled barrel of forty-five himself. What is better: to fade away into harmless grey sexless irrelevance, or to be tormented until death by a mind, an attitude, a spirit that is essentially and defiantly teenaged? Do you want to come home to old age with your shield, or on it?