Where I Am, How I See It

I wrote the tidy passage below in late August 2015 -- almost 17 months ago -- as the conclusion to the report to my college graduating class that the school invites us to submit every five years. It was printed and published with my classmates’ reports and contact information in a paperbound book by the reunion committee for our 35th reunion last June. I did not attend.

So its official publication date might be said to be 2016. A few things have changed since: my wife was struck down and injured rather dramatically (and not just because it made the local news) by a cyclist less than two months later, then diagnosed with breast cancer a year after that. On a more trivial level, I can no longer claim not to own a smartphone; my carrier forced me to get one last May, but I’ve never surfed the Web, read a book, or watched a video on it. I have sent text messages, though; probably fewer than a hundred in eight months. Mostly I call my wife.

I can’t say the three paragraphs below are necessarily the best thing I published last year, but they’re probably the most significant: the most pointed and honest. I think about them more often than anything else I’ve written in many a year. Not a few times in conversations, I’ve tried to reproduce the gist from memory to someone because it sums up where I’m at in my life and in the world. I usually forget one essential detail or another.

So, only slightly edited, I offer the following as my statement of position for this year and, undoubtedly, a number of years to come . . . 

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. . . At this age, life is fairly pleasant and interesting, and I think most people who know me would say I’m a warm and optimistic person. But I’ve always had a “sweet coating over the bitter pill” outlook. I believe humans are steadily and inexorably destroying life on the planet as we know it, which is the primary reason I gave up car ownership 12 years ago, and land-based meats about 9 years ago. I don’t own a smartphone; I’ve never sent a text message.

I feel sorry for children and teens today, because of the ubiquity of electronic distractions, corporate control, and the outrageous cost of education (I had my small student loan paid off only a couple years after we got out) -- not to mention the state of the world we are leaving them. Ecopolitics were not the reason I never had children, but I’m content with that choice as well, for similar reasons.

On the plus side, Carole and I live simply (for an urban lifestyle), we have no debts, my physical health is good (better than when I held a day job and had to drive to work), and we’ve managed 22 years of marriage. But I have very little savings, no investments to speak of, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to retire … not that I would particularly wish to. If the health care and retirement system in this country doesn’t radically reform in the near future, I imagine suicide will be a perfectly logical choice someday, if I can manage it.