The End of the World

Maybe not exactly on December 21, as the Mayans warned, but here in the new year on the eve of a birthday, the world I know has definitely ended. If I tell someone to "open windows", they have no idea I am trying to say: let in fresh air. Being gay doesn't necessarily mean being happy. And people talking about apple are not in the fruit business.

Mention "spin cycle" and I think: washing machine, not Washington machine. I am so yesterday, I thought "professional" means doing a job expertly no matter what. But I have been chastised for being "unprofessional" because I pointed out to a client where he was wrong (a polite way of not saying he was a jackass). So I was wrong because nobody is allowed to be wrong any more.  "Professional" means not telling a jerk he is one.  Maybe this is why we have so many nowadays.

In the world I knew, human beings talked to each other with their mouths. Now it's with their thumbs. Actually to be fair, before, human beings actually talked to each other. All the time was "face time." And btw, they used full words.

There were also people in that world who talked to themselves. I'd see them walk down the street babbling away and sidle over because I could hear my mother say when we passed the insane asylum: "Always remember, there are more crazy people on the outside looking in than there are on the inside looking out." Nowadays I get to remember that and sidle to the curb every day because sidewalks are mobbed with people walking alone babbling. I tense up and walk faster, afraid my mother was right: the world around me really is a looney bin. I cannot begin to tell you what an enormous it is to see on some of those babblers the ear piece of a cell phone. Lol.

In the latter days of the known world, people of means had freezers as a means of preserving meat and cakes in an ageless state for later use. But freon has gone the way of the dodo and dino. The new world preserves the ageless state by freezing human faces with botox, avoiding the reckoning of later.

Then there's communication. Once upon a time, I paid money to buy a TV, paid in loss of time to watch ads that paid for its programs and for contributing this, I got to watch stuff for free. In the unhappily ever after, I pay to buy a TV, lose time watching ads, and then must pay an additional monthly fortune just to see those damned ads or anything at all show up on the screen. How did this happen?

And when did tea party which was a refined gathering of the upper class where dainty bites were served with a strong, hot brew in delicate China come to an end? Because now the words "tea party" get you a gathering of bilious no class men hot to bite China, women, poor children, the elderly, the sick and anything highly thoughtful people deign to brew up.

Of course on the eve of this birthday, I mourn that lost world youth, a land of promise and pitfalls. Quite different from the new world where promises turn into pitfalls or pratfalls. But life happens and worlds change. Three of my friends are trapped in marriages to insufferable men they had found so attractive as boys. Maybe that's why they've sent me birthday cards extolling the virtues of girlfriends-- although we are technically women now.

Having long passed the world of full bloom, I have reached what I call Fall: my hair is falling out, my boobs are falling down, my income has fallen drastically, I fall asleep a lot and have a helluva time rising from the bed. I have fallen so far behind that when I got my new iPhone, I had to drive immediately to the Apple store--not a fruit stand-- and march up to the Genius Bar--not a club for Mensa and Nobel Prize winners-- to learn what is in every new world baby's DNA: how to flick my thumb and first finger against the screen to make stuff move. Funny, that used to be the rude gesture for flicking away mosquitoes, flies and human pests.

Crossing a world border, I got a new vantage point. I now wish I looked as good as I did in that old photo I always thought made me look like hell. Of course in the world back then, people used to assure that looks aren't everything.  But who would say that today? Let's ask a dermatologist: a doctor who used to help sick people with skin eruptions and grafts, but now only helps healthy people with liposuction, implants, nose jobs, tummy tucks, facelifts and eyelid remodeling. When I crossed the border I didn't know I should've waved goodbye to healing.

Actually this new world seems one big diss to the old creation of Mother Nature and Father Time. My dentist of yore used to just care about cleaning and filling my teeth. Although I'm grateful and a tad proud to still have all of them, the young dentist today can't stop pushing me to pay her to whiten and crown them into picture perfection.

Tomorrow will be the anniversary of the day I decided to appear in public. Actually it was night, dinner time, in the midst of a blizzard. So the family had to stop eating, bundle up and skid to the hospital to find out whether I was a boy or girl and in good condition. Surprise was a big thing back then before we made machines that play  peekaboo. But surprise has gone the way of the dodo and dino too.

Did you know that now babies come by order and take-out? I learned from a friend's daughter's experience that with enough money in your bank, you can get implanted with the eggs for a child of the sex and characteristics you can choose from a menu, and then you make a convenient appointment months hence for take out. What a new world: babies delivered just like Chinese food.

Given how much could go amiss by surprise and how much neurosis had been discovered by Freud and his friends, everybody in the old world felt grateful to be normal. Normal meant survivor. But just the other day I saw a huge ad headline: It's not enough to be normal; you have to be amazing! So the new normal is amazing. You read everyday about all the doping, hyping, photoshopping, outright lying, skullduggery,  jerks and manipulation this requires.

You know, Icarus wanted to be amazing, but I think upon getting close up to the light of reality, he got over it.

Maybe the Mayans were wrong about December 21, but the Buddha was a very accurate whether man. He predicted normal would keep changing. Impermanence, impermanence, he said, characterizes everything. He also said we all live in our own worlds, the ones we make up and think are really out there and therefore act in or on as though that's all there is. That's the wonder of wonders, he proclaimed, meaning of course that normal was amazing.

My unabridged and not remodeled body shows signs of age. My mind cannot assimilate the swirl of change and demand of instantly.  Admitting this makes me something of a dodo or dino, I know. In this world without surprise, I think of myself as a holdover, a museum exhibit, something that makes normal amazing because it reminds newbies how life used to be: people talked to each other face to face and solved problems over a cup of tea, and with the fat and frailty of age came the compensation of wisdom flavored with what the hell generosity. Experience was the contact lens that made people see worlds end whether they want it, freeze it, tuck/tweak it or not.

I am not sorry about what I have become. How could I be? Nobody is in this new world, are they?




~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy Garson All rights Reserved