deirdre

totally worthless human being who needs to get a grip, stop wishing and wanting and just accept that this is what old age looks like.... at my age, it is just a sad saga:
I guess I just come here to vent my spleen, so to say, though hopefully there is more soul than spleen. It's bad enough to be this old, fat, worthless, chronically unemployed and lonely, but I don't want to turn into a bitter whiner.
Some people been talking on my introduction post got me to thinking...

Just how odd are we that we are so alone? I mean, I don't see myself as all that outrageously leper-like, yanno? Ok, so I'm a fat old lady, I'm not 300 pounds fat, but I'm still hefty enough for it to have started giving me serious complications with my health.

I do volunteer some, there is one cultural arts center that lets me set up and tear down for their programs and in return I get to hear some pretty amazing jazz ensembles (my new passion, always loved music, all kinds, but never realized how truely outrageously amazing jazz is, I'm soaking myself in it now, trying to cram the entire repetoire of Monk, Parker, Armstrong, Elllington into my feeble little brain as we speak, lol), or film festivals, book signings, art shows..good stuff like that..... When I have a spare two bucks and can put it in my gas tank, I get over there and it is so nice to be with people again.... it's mostly a geriatric crowd and they are nice old folks but I don't get to socialize, I have work to do and am not allowed to schmooze...still, it's a good gig. I have passing knowledge of a couple of people there, they proclaim when I make some deprecating comment about my weight, "Oh you aren't fat." hmmmm, when you are over 200 pounds, you are fat, no way around it.....but what I am trying to convey here is that often, at least with this Geratone-swilling crowd, I have a personality, smile and conversational ability that overcomes and almost obliterates my bodily distortion.

So I do consider myself a fairly erudite, charming neophyte oldster who has a certain elan and panache....and yet still...... just not clicking enough on all the cylinders to connect with one freaking human being on this planet. HUH???? LOL....

Ok, so the severe lack of moolah sort of puts a crimp on getting out there and milling with the hoi-polloi.....but that isn't the only reason I have become a virtual cloistered eremite.

60 is an odd age, you aren't really old old, there is no one remotely near my age down at the town senior center, or even the surrounding towns.... honestly, you just don't find people in their 60's, most are way older, which is fine. Hello? I don't discriminate by age at all - but most older folks don't find we have much in common. Once though, I did have a couple of friends who were in their 80's... (I used to volunteer at a home for the aged) problem is they do tend to pass away. I had a great friendship with Ernie for the last two years. We'd go out to lunch at least once a month. Ernie was 89 and just a peach of a person. I'd love listening to his stories and same old jokes and I think he liked to get out and treat me to a pizza. He had such a good heart, he could see my aching loneliness and he was just a nice enough person to make room in his social calendar for me. Everyone loved Ernie...... but last Christmas, on December 19th, he was admitted to the hospital for severe gastric pain, turned out he was passing a kidney stone, but as is so often the case with old ones, one thing segued into another thing, it's just a domino effect...and for over two weeks, I sat by his bedside every single day, watching him slowly die. That was devastating. He was the only person who had cared for me, thought of me, made room for me in his life.

Still and all, I wonder, just why is it so gosh darn hard to find people like that? I really do think that at my age, it is almost impossible to find a circle of support. Most people have people in their life...like Ernie, he had friends, a huge family and commitments, he had a social life...yet he still took the time to connect with me once a month and I was so grateful for his friendship..... the older you get, you are perhaps set in your ways and you do accumulate your circle of relationships that have been ongoing for most of your life. Today, no one at all seems willing to let anyone new into their already comfortable life.

I don't have that because I left the state I was living in for all of my adult life....and starting over here has been just about impossible. I can't do the work I did in my old state, I don't have the needed credentials, at my age, why garner the outrageous expense, float the loans to go back to school and get the certification? And it wasn't like I had a whoop-de-doo social life up there either... The last ten years in Connecticut were spent fighting a rare cancer and doing my own divorce pro-se because, hello? if I only had a limited amount of time left, I was bound and determined to not waste anymore of it with this violent, bitter recovering alcoholic/drug addict. I was a dutiful wife, brought up extremely Catholic (Irish father/Polish mother is just about as extreme a Catholic you can get unless you are a full-blooded Italian, need I say more?) there had been no divorces in my family, I was an only child and was threatened with banishment if I did divorce... but hey, the cancer was my wake up call. It had been a nightmare toughing out this ridiculous charade for my parents. Though he was finally DRY after 25 years, he wasn't sober. He went from constantly drunk to dry-drunk, an angry, resentful, closed up man who refused to get therapy or use AA to cope with his attitude (real men don't need help you know). Living under that stress I firmly believe caused the cancer, I truly do.... so I filed for divorce and had to fight the cancer by myself for the next 10 years. Still, I had a job, I had contact with people, passing friendships, nothing best buddy, but a variety of people did flow in and out of my life.

Returning here to the metro NYC area was a total mistake, but who knew? It was immediately after 9/ll, long story, but my father's death was directly caused by that.... and the past 8 years have been a nightmare.

I dunno. Do we see ourselves with blinders on? Heavily veiled. Through a haze of lies we tell ourselves to cushion our already sagging egos? I mean, I have my faults, that's for sure, but why am I such the Frankenstein monster, the leper, a freak? Not that people are running screaming from me...but it sure feels like they do.

What is it about us chronically loners who can't seem to find anyone to invite us into their lives? I did the Craigslist Platonic section for 5 years. Got all of two replies, if you weed out the weirdos who send you pictures of their penises and assorted others who populate the area bars, crying in their beer. When it came down to actually meeting, both women just disappeared. AFter months of emailing and great phone conversations. Met one other person who turned out to be angrier and more bitter than my husband, I spent five hours in a diner listening to her vicious rant on why everyone has disappointed and abandoned her and the 5,000 reasons they were twits of the third order.

Five years .... even tried starting meetups.... and going to meetups.... no one EVER came to my walking group meetup and the majority of other meetups wanted $10-20 a session and being unemployed for so long has put a kibosh on anything charging admission. The library book clubs weren't all that interesting, my taste in literature does not lean to historical romances, which an awful lot of these book clubs seem to read.

I try to cultivate an attitude of gratefulness for what I do have...I'm still able to pay the outrageous taxes on this house I own.... cashing in all my IRA's saved for when I retire at 66. Who knew I'd be ostensibly retired against my will at age 59? Though the For-Sale sign IS on the front lawn as I must move out of this outrageously expensive area. I am not prone to kvetching and whining and sitting on my pity pot...still and all.....

Is it just fate, how the cards were dealt that has me in this morass of solitude? Circumstances beyond my control? If I do get lucky enough to sell something on craigslist and I get a dollar or two for the gas tank, I do get out every once in a while, to the library, a choral group, the odd poetry reading here or there...but with no money at all most of time, if you can't get out of your driveway there you are, staring at the four walls...... or this computer screen. Jeesh, thank god for this computer and the $4.95 internet connection

welllllll whatever....I have droned on here endlessly and if you got to the end of this mini-polemic, the question stands. What the heck is it about us chronically alone people that precludes others from including us in their jam-packed-people-populated-hectic-preset-on automatic-pilot lives????? I mean, if it doesn't involve sex, it seems like no one really is interested in anyone else as a human being in their own right.

First we are young, then we are middleaged, then we are marvelous - Alice Roosevelt

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them. Alain de Botton

"Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!" Max

Art is a weapon and as deadly as steel cannons or exploding bombs.
-Woody Guthrie

“Most people are on the world, not in it - having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” John Muir