My brain has been coming to grips with some odd things lately. For most of my professional life my mindset has been: what’s the next thing I really should learn in order to improve myself, and when I say improve myself I generally mean “make myself more marketable for the job market.” Y’know, I need to learn another programming language, or get good using some tool or something. Lately I’ve started wondering if maybe I don’t actually need to keep doing that.

I make lots of plans but never get around to executing them. By the time my work day is done I just want to chill and relax. Watch TV, play a video game. Have a beer. Nothing the least bit productive in any of that.

For years I’ve carried around low-grade guilt that I’m not working harder to make more money so that I have more security. I’m not talking “buy a new yacht” money. I’m talking “not being one disaster away from being broke”.

Everywhere you go online you’re bombarded (or at least I am) with offers to teach me how to code better, how to learn AI, how to improve this, that and the other thing. Get smarter, get more marketable, make more money, work more!

Recently, though, I’ve started coming to terms with some truths. I am 65 years old. Almost 66. Every day the news is full of people younger than me who have died recently from one disease or another. I could be gone tomorrow and it’s probably like a 50-50 chance I’ll still be here in 10 years. And I very much doubt I’ll still be working in 10 years, at least not in my current job. Maybe I’ll be one of those old folks stocking the shelves at Walmart or something, but I doubt I’ll be a 75 year old web developer.

This is just reality, not trying to sound like I’m throwing a pity party for myself!

But here’s the good news that comes with that. I’m getting close to being done. I don’t NEED to continue to improve my skills all that much. If I WANT to, I certainly can and will. But I can let go of “I should” completely and not feel guilt around that. If I want to spend my free time gaming, or hell, napping, why not? I don’t have kids that I’m ignoring. Don’t even have a pet. PartPurple is always busy doing her stuff and I’m pretty sure she is far from feeling ignored. We both work from home so we’re both in each others business all day most days.

This wasn’t a lightning bolt of a realization. It’s something I’m still orbiting, getting closer and closer to really accepting that when I’m not working I don’t really have to be doing anything I don’t want to do [setting aside, y’know, personal grooming, keeping the apt clean, paying bills… basic adulting].

Let me tell you, it’s a weird feeling and a very ‘light’ feeling. All this self-imposed stress and guilt is slowly, slowly melting away.

So I guess there is a silver lining to getting old, after all.

I’m curious though — has anyone else felt something like this? Either the pressure to improve or better yet, the relief of accepting that you are enough as you are.

[A note on the AI used in this post: the header image was generated at Night Cafe using Seedream 4.0. It’s a representation of how I’d like to spend my final days. Sitting on a beach like a piece of driftwood, drinking rum and taking it easy.]

I know not everyone holds dogs or pets in as high esteem as we do, and plenty of people probably think it is crazy that we are this upset about losing a dog. But we are. Lola was such an integral part of our life that things seem very hollow and drab without her there to frequently make us smile, or even to just get us out of our chairs and doing things.

PartPurple and I process grief very differently, I think. She hasn’t experienced a lot of death. Her parents are both still alive, as are all her siblings. She’s lost grandparents and that can be hard, but they’re not typically someone you see EVERY day. I, on the other hand, lost both parents, a step-father and a step-brother. My dad when I was about 12, the step-brother when I was 14 and he was 17. Back in those days we didn’t have grief counselors or anything; we just dealt with it. When my dad died I remembered him speaking to one of his friends back when his mother died. “We all have to go some time.” he’d said, very stoically. I tried the same when he died, and had kids at school mocking me for “not caring that my father died.” Which led to some playground fights.

Anyway, along the way I learned my own technique for handling grief and it is pretty insular. I don’t want to talk to people, I try to find something to lose myself in, and just not think about things too much.

Since Lola was nearly always at my side, this isn’t working as well as it has in the past. But here is what is working, sort of. In my head, Lola (for some time now, in a way) has been two things. Lola, this beautiful joyous soul that is nearly always at my side, and Lola, the dog that I have to take care of and who mandates my schedule.

There is no bright side whatsoever when it comes to Lola-the-Soul being gone, but there are some upsides to not having a dog to take care of. I slept in this morning for the first time in almost 15 years. I have a lot more free time now that I’m not going for long walks with her. We’re going to save money on her medical bills, food and such (once we pay off the vet bills which will take years but let’s set that aside for now). Maybe I’ll get into multiplayer gaming, now that I don’t have to pause every 20 minutes to take care of something she needs.

So those are the things I’m focusing on, and it is helping. I still get blind-sided with sadness frequently but I’m trying to focus on the freedom that comes with not having any pets. Lola didn’t travel well at all, so we didn’t travel at all. And I don’t mean flying to Paris.. I mean something as simple as going for a drive out into the country as a day trip. So we can start doing things like that, eventually.

I think this is working because I’ve been ‘practicing’ it for some time. As she got older and older, and I knew she had to go soon, I would think about things like how awful our dog park smells in the heat of summer (trash cans full of stinky poop bags baking in the heat) and how once I didn’t have a dog I wouldn’t ever have to go there again. Things like that: the lack of a dog, with dog being an abstract concept, had some up-sides. So now I’m embracing those.

Though at the same time I worry how this will impact my health. I need to find some other form of casual exercise or I’ll just sit at my PC or on the couch until I can no longer walk. Both my mother and grandmother did this once they stopped working and both went downhill fast once they stopped moving. So I need to be sure I do something. Maybe I’ll start hiking or something. Capture birds on my Merlin app or something.

Anyway, just kind of thinking out loud here. Today’s plan: Lola has a hole out on the woods that she loved to dig in, and since it was in the woods I let her dig in it. At the same time a random maple seed at some point landed in a flower pot out behind our building. The plant in the pot died long ago but the tree is a few feet tall now. I’m going to go plant it in Lola’s hole as a tribute to her

Last night we lost Lola. She would’ve been 15 had she made it to next month. That’s really old for a dog, and I kept telling myself I was prepared. I wasn’t prepared.

She got pretty sick last week and spent about 48 hours at an emergency vet hospital. If you want the whole horrible story, PartPurple set up a GoFundMe page that goes into ALL the details. Maybe I’ll copy what she wrote down at some point to save it but I don’t have it in me right now.

Anyway she came home last Friday, and Friday and Saturday were tough. Sunday she was a bit better, better still on Monday, and Tuesday she had a great day, being her old smiling happy self. She saw a lot of her friends and got attention from so many people in the complex that know her.  I remember thinking “Thanks goodness she is back to normal.”

Wednesday started normally, then she started really hyperventilating. Then she fell and couldn’t get up. We scooped her up and rushed her back to the hospital where they found she had an extremely high fever, to the point where they starting bathing her in cool water to try to bring it down. We took her to veg.com which I have nothing but praise for. They do most of their work out in the open so the whole time they were working on her, PartPurple and I were giving her pets and talking to her and even helping to give her oxygen.

Eventually they put her in in oxygen tank (like a big aquarium where they can oxygenate the air and temperature control things…rather than try to put an oxygen mask on a dog) and an in-depth ultrasound was scheduled for this morning. We left her in the care of the doctors and nurses, and came home; by then it was 5:30 PM or so. At about 10:30 the vet called and told us, basically, that she wasn’t going to make it. So we rushed back over and said our goodbyes. She was pretty out of it and I’m not sure if she knew we were there. Then she went peacefully with a bit of chemical assistance.

And now we have no dog. No morale officer. She was in many ways my best friend, and in some ways I have never loved an entity as much as I loved her. She was my companion pretty much 24/7 since I started working from home 12 years ago. She was the kind of dog that when you moved, she’d come move to just to be near you. She was always with us. In the nearly 15 years of her life I think we boarded her twice to go somewhere. She was almost never alone.

Of course we loved her, but so many people in our rental complex loved her too. We’d go for a walk and folks would holler “Hey, Lola!” and she had this particular bark that meant “Hey, I see you, how are you?” that she would offer to folks she knew. She was a complete character and made folks smile where ever she went.

She was our heart dog. We will miss her forever.

I learned this weekend that an old friend of mine had died and it keeps creeping up and saddening me. It’s strange because this is a high school friend and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him in probably 40 years or so. And it would be highly unlikely that I’d every speak to him again even if we both lived to 100.

But still, knowing he is gone is a bummer.

I guess the worst part is how he died. If he’d had cancer or a heart attack or something it would be tragic but, y’know, just one of those bad things that happen. But the facts are much sadder. Basically he drank himself to death.

He’d been dating the woman he married last time I saw him; heck they may have been married. After that he got a good job, got a nice house, had a couple of daughters who grew up and gave him grandkids… and then he started drinking heavily. After he was arrested a few times for DUI, he lost his good job because he couldn’t get to it. Then he got a local job but lost that one, too. He lost the house, the wife and kids split, and he wound up back in his boyhood home. His parents had died a year apart from each other so he was living alone in the country with no driver’s license.

He’d been in rehab for a month, but when he came out he was right back to drinking. Three days later he got drunk, fell and hit his head and laid there, alone in his childhood house, for a few days before someone found him. He was still alive but his brain was swollen and he later died in the hospital. I got all this background from the friend who took the time to seek me out and tell me S was gone.

I still remember him as this good looking, easy-going young dude. We were really tight through high school. There were 4 of us and we had ‘our’ table in the cafeteria and later on when we could all drive, we’d cruise around at night, drink beer, smoke, chase girls, go beach riding, skateboarding and throw the Frisbee around. Just normal stuff. We weren’t angels but we weren’t bad kids either. Just regular guys. He got me out of a few bad binds over the years, and vice versa. The four of us were always watching out for each other.

We were all into model rockets in a big way too; he had an incredible attention to detail and his rockets were always gorgeous while the rest of us were just slapping ’em together to shoot them off as soon as possible. That has always stuck with me…how much time he’d spend on something that generally had a limited life span, model rocketry being what it is.

Since those days, I’ve done nothing significant in my life and I often feel remorse about that. I’m not the hero of anyone’s story, just a generic background character. And I felt kind of bad about that. But now I see how much worse things can get. I don’t know what happened to S between then and now; I don’t know what kind of demon he had eating away at him. And I wonder if we’d still been in contact if I could have helped.

All too late now. I read his obituary and the picture they had was of an old man (he was 63 or 64 when he passed). I guess that means I’m an old man, too. I just kind of find it hard to believe.

Notes on the AI used in this post.  Image created at DeepImg with the prompt “A well maintained and realistic graveyard. Close up to show just a few graves. Daytime, clouds in the sky. A few trees. No people or wildlife. It should look like a real place. No buildings, just a few graves.”

Sometimes I wonder what is normal. Do other people have a Perfect Moment? In my 60+ years of living I have one moment that I always return to in times of despair, or panic. One moment of perfect peace.

Not that I panic or feel despair all that often. The last time was when I was getting an MRI of my head. Being strapped down and stuck in that machine freaked me out, but I took a deep breath and went to my Perfect Moment and felt better.

I’ll try to describe my moment.

* * * * *

It is late summer. The sun is low in the sky. I’m on my boogie board waiting for the perfect wave. There is no one else around. Just me, the waves and the sand. Maybe a couple of gulls. There’s a stiff wind blowing off shore. The waves are pounding; I’m surprised no one else is surfing today. But they’re loud, the crashing waves.

A good set rolls in. As the first wave passes under me, I sink into the trough behind it. The sun is so low that when I do, I fall into shadow. It gets dark and quiet. The wind whips spray off the lip of the wave, spray that catches the sun’s rays, forming a rainbow that dances overhead. It is so beautiful and peaceful that I forget about riding, and just stay where I am, falling into the trough, watching the rainbow above from the shadow below, then bobbing up as the next wave arrives so once again I’m in the light and hear the crashing of the last wave that passed. Then down again into peace.

I stay there until the sun sets, then ride a wave in and head home.

* * * * *

This happened… jeez, I’m not sure. Sometime in the mid 70s, putting me in my mid-20s at the time.

Just writing it down has me feeling calmer, and of course quite nostalgic. I hope you have a moment like this that you can travel to in your head when the here & now gets a little overwhelming.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

[The header image is one I took at Topsail Beach in North Carolina a few years ago. Sadly I have very few pictures from the old days, and I certainly wasn’t carrying a camera while I was surfing. Not back then, in the days of 35 mm film and when Go Pro wasn’t even someone’s great idea yet.]