May 29, 2005

As Life Goes on You Get More and More Out of It

As time goes on, you get older. It's kind of obvious, in a way, though people spend a lot of energy trying to evade this logic.

Yet even though time flows as a steady, relentless stream, you don't always notice this occurring as it happens. You have your mind on other things. Then there will be certain abrupt flashes of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, unexpected points in your life where you suddenly realize how much time has been used up since the last time your attention was drawn to the whole time-being-used-up phenomenon. These flashes can be strangely illuminating, and vaguely unpleasant, though for me they usually have more of a whimsical quality. Often, they are brought on by noticing how much younger everyone is in certain situations than than how they looked to you when you used to be one of them.

You've probably heard people talk about this, even if it hasn't happened to you. Someone will visit a university campus and think "wow, they all look like little kids! Is that how I looked when I was a freshman?" Or another will suddenly notice that all the Playboy playmates were born long after she graduated and that when she was their age, they were, like, -2.

Now for everyone who is wondering whether or not I'll get to the point, the answer is "yes," and here it is. I just had one of those moments yesterday.

It went like this: boy, the LaRouchies seem to get younger and younger every year.

It sure seems like it, anyway. A couple of Lyndon LaRouche proselytizers had set up a table by the ATM machine. They looked around twelve. Though I could be wrong about that: for all I know they were graduate students, or maybe even lecturers.

I asked one of them, a guy who looked, dressed, and behaved remarkably like Napoleon Dynamite, how he'd become a LaRouchie.

"Just from reading his stuff," said Napoleon. "I realized that he has been right about everything all along."

He handed me some "literature" (about Dick Cheney being the devil or something) and asked for a donation. I, of course, demurred.

"Do you want the Satan pamphlet back?" I asked.

In answer, Napoleon pointed out that I could quite easily take some money out of the ATM to put in his Lyndon LaRouche coffee can.

Now it seemed to me that if Lyndon L. really was always right about everything, he could have told Napoleon that the chances that I would take money out of the ATM and put it in that coffee can were quite a bit less than zero. I asked if anyone had, in fact, taken money out of the ATM and put it in the Lyndon LaRouche coffee can.

"Not yet," said Napoleon. "But we just got here."

I had my doubts about the coffee can's future. It was kind of hard to imagine a scenario where anyone gave these guys money. Everyone around here already knows Dick Cheney is Satan, after all; they take it as a given. Out here in Oakland, we expect a little more for our spare change.

In the end, Napoleon let me take the Watchtower-like LaRouche-a-zine free of charge. It seemed pretty well-stocked with craziness to me, but then I have a skepticism problem with stuff like that. Maybe one day I'll see the light.

Things sure have changed since I got kicked out of school.

Posted by Dr. Frank at May 29, 2005 05:27 PM | TrackBack
Comments

I know what you mean about the flow of time, etc.

From time to time I am walking around in a crowded place, like the Loop in Chicago at lunchtime on a nice day, and I will "see someone I know." But when I get a better look I realize that the person I am looking at looks like the person I was thinking of maybe 20 years ago. I keep seeing people I knew in college, and it is some kid I don't know at all.

Weirder. Barber shop, glasses off. Mirror across the room, a vague figure, me. I realize it looks like my Dad. Not resembling my Dad, I look like I AM my Dad. As I get older, I look like he looked when he was my age.

These kinds of things seem to happen a couple of times a year, but maybe with increasing frequency.

Posted by: Lexington Green at May 29, 2005 09:01 PM

i've taken to referring to myself as an "aging hipster" because i have had several conversations on "whatever it is that kids are listening to these days".

Posted by: kate at May 29, 2005 11:13 PM

kate, that's my life.

the larouchies and i had a rough relationship up until i moved. a number of them kept calling and following me like an unwanted dog/boyfriend. i had to screen my calls and take different paths around campus to avoid them. turns out a guy i almost dated was one of 'em. yikes.

Posted by: kendra at May 29, 2005 11:58 PM

Since The Man moved my office from the Loop out to the burbs, I've missed the local color of the city. The Larouchies were often out in full effect outside of Union Station, and it always perked me up a bit to hear slogans screamed against a backdrop of crazy-street guys trying to open cab doors for money and a group of musicians from the Andes playing pan flutes against a synthesizer track. The sounds of the suburbs had nothing on that, man.

Posted by: Adam at May 30, 2005 04:30 AM

"As Life Goes on You Get More and More Out of It"

LaRouche would be the exception -- "consistency is everything, as everybody knows."

Posted by: JB at May 30, 2005 11:46 AM

My favorite post to date, Dr. Frank. I laughed out loud several times.

Posted by: lucky409 at May 30, 2005 11:36 PM

kate, as time goes by I'm figuring out the "aging" part, but the "hipster" thing continues to elude me. So it goes...

A friend of mine was president of the campus Objectivists' Club (but was much nicer than that may suggest). He did have a nasty habit of engaging LaRouchies in arguments of first principles, which he would usually win, but usually I didn't have the energy to stick around to find out. If we could build an engine to harness the misguided political idealism of youth in its pure energy form, we might be able to solve our foreign oil dependency issues once and for all.

Posted by: Wes at May 31, 2005 01:52 AM

The LaDoucheies mystify me because I can never figure out why they chose such a marginal idiot to follow. It seems like the bottom of any list of weird political cults to attach yourself to.

Posted by: Emerson at June 1, 2005 12:31 AM

I live in Portland and since some large number of the LaRouche cult are apparently based in or around Seattle we get occasional infestations at the University.

I picked up a zine yesterday entitled "Recreate The Economy" or somesuch. His fixation with Franklin D. Roosevelt is always good for a laugh. Flipping through it, I noted that Lyndon was touted as the leading economist in the United States. I stopped reading after that.

Posted by: nick at June 2, 2005 10:23 PM