Honest Until It Gets Funny
No, I’m not old. I’m just falling apart a bit. As I probably should in my mid forties. But I’m not as cool as I want to. I want to be cooler, as I get older. And not just cooler about falling apart. Cooler about everything. Now, I don’t really know if that is a thing I can pull off, old and cool. I was never that cool to begin with. I could try to be like George Clooney, Sean Connery or Jeff Goldblum. But chances are slim that I’m one of those guys. There must be some middle ground between them and that nylon pants guy with the pumpkin crotch belly.
Luckily, I have found out that trying to be attractive, forbid sexy, usually fires back. Being attractive is not something we can do or should try. Worse, the more we try it the less we are. Not everybody learns that lesson. There are enough old fools that try to prove their coolness with fast jokes, their supposed fame, or their luxury camera collection. Clearly, if you get old, the worst move you can pull is trying to be openly kinky or something like that. Trying to be sexy looks silly enough when you are young. It gets more embarrassing the more you fall apart. Don’t wear skinny jeans, uncle Frank. Watch it with the booze, the smokes, and, please, try to say “No, thank you” when you’re offered e at the Disco, old man.
I guess that most people will agree that we have better cards with elegance than with sexiness as we crossed half the bridge and slowly approach the other side. I noticed that the deader I look in the mirror the more elegantly I need to dress. New Cashmere pullovers are an older guy’s blur filter. One day, I noticed that holes in my clothes just look ragged, and the more these holes show the sader I look. So what can we do apart from buying new cashmere pullovers, put on trench coats, trim the mustache and roll our umbrellas?
As our brain wax dries out, hardens, and learning new words and things feels like heavy lifting, memory can and should be trained. As running on the beach feels less like flying and more like Sumo, appropriate exercise may help but an hour of gymnastics in the bleak sun can cause days of headaches. As healthy food becomes a must and sleep heals invisible wounds, meditation can do wonders, they say. But fuck all that, sometimes middle aged men like me just want to live! Is there anything that gets better, easier, nicer? Driving a Porsche, maybe?
At 46, I’m far from a specialist on middle aged men’s tricks to look cool. I’m just about to get an idea that I have to deal with slowly falling apart. At a bit over half life I found a helpful trick. I can train myself to recognize when I am about to say something I don’t know or don’t feel. I was always able to do that. I just didn’t know what to do with it.
You know how a lot of wrinkled people say things like “Now I just say what I think”, “I wish I was as relaxed as I am now when I was younger” or “The only thing that is better now is that I don’t care about what others think anymore” etc. When you hear this as a younger person it sounds a bit mysterious at first, and the more you hear it, the more it becomes just another old people cliché. Then suddenly you hear yourself saying it. It’s a half truth.
The most embarrassing things we say or do happen when we try to impress others. The trick to avoid those embarrassments: Before you say something, anything pay attention whether there is that feeling that creeps up before we say or do something we don’t mean. The delicately suffocating hey-this-is-not-what-I-mean-but-I-ll-get-away-with-it feeling. Reacting to this feeling strictly and to not say or do what you are about to say or do has a beautiful effect. It let’s you breathe. And sometimes there is a pleasant flowery breeze when you dodged the bullet and did not pretend. So it’s not so much saying what you think, as not saying everything that goes through your mind. It’s a great compass for writing, too.
I need to pretend a bit less thanks to that trick. It lets me know when to not speak. I wasted too much time pretending. I pretended to be an artist. A comedian. A philosopher. A novelist. A designer. I had no idea how obvious all this pretending was. I still pretend, but I try to avoid it as much as I avoid smoking, now. The difference between potential and reality becomes painfully clear as the funnel of our potential narrows and reality widens. Being aware of reality helps you to shut up before you say something you don’t know or even believe.
Shutting up helps me understand and explain difficult thoughts and things as it simply gives me time to listen and to think. Everything gets a lot easier when you only say what you know or really believe. This sounds so serious, but it’s not a grimm outloook. I believe that there is something like an art of being honest until it gets funny. Saying only what you know or really believe might sometimes start off as somewhat awkward or bizarre, but as you go along with saying just what you believe, and just what you believe, things can get funny. And sometimes that sets you free for a moment.
Admitting ignorance and inviting people into it makes us free to clear things up together. Discussions where everybody pretends to know better and understand better while neither understanding the other nor believing one selves are suffocating.
To express emotions in words in a way they can be re-felt as closely as possible requires exercise. It’s strangely difficult to not ruin the original emotion while trying to give it an clear shape. To not add too much spices or oversalt the dish. Preserving the feeling while you translate it into words is a balance act. To describe the emotion triggering you to speak and keep it alive while you describe it is difficult, but not crazy hard. Sometimes maybe as hard as calculating 23 x 54, sometimes as hard as 795 x 254. But not much worse. And making difficult things seem simple is cool. Cooler than the 5 x 5 clichés. Delicacy can be learned. It has to be exercised. It has to. Otherwise you just get old and die as a miserable oaf in beige nylon trousers.
The worst embarrassments I remember are those moments where I didn’t realize what an unbearable idiot I was but everybody else did. When I was not myself and didn’t even know it but everybody else knew. When I was trying so hard to be someone else that I lost the ground below my feet. I could tell you 99 embarrassing stories to illustrate what I mean but I’ll spare myself and the people involved reliving the spinning shame.
If you think the awkwardness you constantly feel wherever you go is your true self… maybe it is. Maybe you trying too hard to be yourself. I know. There is hardly a thing you hear more often. It’s the 2 x 2 of self-help clichés. I’m still an awkward person. But I care a bit less because I know that this, along with shutting up, is the only thing that helps me esacping towards honest until it gets funny.
Being young has its benefits. Coolness is not one of those. You may look cool when you are young but you are not cool. At least, not as cool as you could be. Trying to be yourself is as uncool as trying to be sexy, or as paradoxically impossible as trying to be cool. As you look worse, you need to be cooler about being “cool”. Maybe the word “cool” can be one of those ladders that helps us climbing up to a bigger, higher ground. Is there something cooler than cool? Something we could agree on as a common goal for old people so we can die relaxed in our beige nylon pants?
I don’t mean cooler than cool as in Christian Rock cool or just be yourself cool or resolving the Cuba crisis kind of cool. More as in your mind on the abyss of a dark LSD trip, and survives without getting schizophrenic. Surviving a drunk motor bike crash with nothing but a couple of broken bones kind of cool.
I know what I am looking for but I don’t want to name it. It’s not just funny. It’s not a treasure. It’s not a talent. It’s not advice. It’s not a gift or a possession. It’s not art or a form of luck. It can appear in a cold rush of a cold metropolitan shower where you miserably miss out on one of the greatest adventure of your life because you are an idiot. Or in the light of a someone else’s dream, when you walked though a field full of purple flowers that turned into a sea butterflies. And when it happens, it’s not about you or what pants you wear.
