RAGE
Itís been quite a time now since Iíve been able to leap from my bed of a morning to scamper across the room & throw open the casement wide. As I cantilevered my way off the bed yesterday morning, joints cracking like fireworks, &, bent double like Quasimodo, made my way down the corridor, I reflected on the joys of aging.
So far I seem to be holding at bay the horrors of nasal & aural hair (can there be nasal & aural down?), & the facial road map could, in a certain light ñ namely, very little ñ be said to lend gravitas. The hair is still black & even though itís thinning on top, I canít see the top & imagination makes a great toupee. And anyway, as Spike Jones says, who wants fat hair?
However, where once there might have been the suspicion of a six-pack, now the cans are long gone & only the evidence of their contents remains. And although I can still touch my toes, I have to find a range of things to do whilst Iím down there before I can summon up the energy to get vertical again. And there is increasingly that sobering experience of catching a sudden view of oneself on the petrol station close circuit TV screen & turning to see who the fat balding guy is whoís got a shirt on just like yours.
So I spent the greater part of the rest of the day trying to locate one, just one, consolation that life provides as you slide precipitously through middle age. Only mere moments before finally losing the will to live I hit upon one & I have been clutching it to my (expanding) bosom ever since. It is the glorious gift of rage. Rage against the local council, the BBC, malign foreign influences, teenagers, the medical profession, bank managers, so-called modern pop music, cars with automatic transmissions, newfangled lids that wonít open ñ the list is intoxicatingly long & the possibilities ecstatically rich. I suddenly realised that I have entered ñ indeed, have probably inhabited for some time ñ that senior territory within which you are actually expected, even required, to be angry.
Consider this. When you see a group of 13-year-old skater dudes wearing baggy T-shirts & jeans around their hips yodelling insults at some apoplectic 50-year-old, donít get the wrong idea & leap to his defence. However florid the guyís face, however dangerously flared the nostrils, however bloodshot the eyes, cardiac arrest is not in prospect. What youíre witnessing is not some primal contest between the young pretenders & the burned out champ but the playing out of a symbiotic ritual. Ripping the piss out of the 30+ population is a generational obligation on the skater dudes. However reluctant they actually are to remind our middle-aged protagonist that heís got a fat arse, bad breath & probably needs viagra in his cocoa, it is their allotted task in the scheme of things. And ñ point of story ñ it is equally the obligation of our balding friend to become very, very angry indeed in response. Thatís how the dance works. Those are the rules. However much of a last chance swinger Michael Douglas considers himself to be, his portrayal of middle-aged rage in Falling Down was masterly. What started as frustration at an intractable world blossomed into self-affirming practical anger. In fact, the film is a defining documentation of entry into that span of life when that worldís expectation ñ even requirement ñ of you is unmitigated spleen, sneering sarcasm, sardonic belittlement, spluttering fury, unleashed rage.
As I got out of bed this morning ñ slowly, noisily ñ I began to compile the mighty catalogue of those tiny but infinitely aggravating life-splinters that over the years work their way beneath the skin to emerge triumphantly as one enters what some hippy-dippy, namby-pamby, long-haired do-gooder euphemist has termed the ëThird Ageí.
So I now have a number (oh, letís not mess about: they are legion ) of personal splinters that I can retain no longer & must consign to the fresh air. These are all, of course, minute, superficial, unimportant-in-the-grand-order-of-things elements of day-to-day life, but their manifestation immediately brings down the red mist & conjures up the unsightly rash. On rare occasions only an act of violence to person or property can effectively bring about catharsis. I present a mere sprinkling of them now in the hope that the odd reader might identify with, & thus share, my generational legacy of rage.
CATEGORY # 1
Middle Aged/Unhip/Staid/Pedantic/StuckinMud Problems with neologisms, reallocated meanings, misapplied emphases & new verbal clusters
# Waitresses who ask, "Do you want to see the menu?" implying that, in spite of my seated presence in the restaurant, it may be the very last thing on my mind.
# The invocation as waiter or waitress retreats from the table to "enjoy your meal", as if there were other possible options.
# Checkout assistants who ask me whether I have a storecard "at all", suggesting that it might be possible to be only in partial possession of one.
# That most aggravating of phonetic tics, the interrogative or querying cadence by which the speakerís utterance tips up at the end, as if seeking constant validation or approval from the listener. Apparently it emanated originally from Australia, presumably via those brain-rottingly crass soaps peopled entirely by terminally unhip middle-aged parents, jailbait teenagers in gingham school uniforms & inarticulate died blonde surfers. It then spread swiftly to the United States, lodging initially on the West Coast before sweeping across the continent with viral speed. Now a firm fixture within the articulation of teenagers (& increasingly adults) across the English-speaking world, it provides the perfect oral setting for sentences containing the words ëWhateverí, ëDuh!í & ëHello-o!í
# Reported dialogue in which the verb indicating speech is replaced by the word ëlikeí. As in: ëAnd he was like, "Yeah, right, whatever", & Iím like, "Whatís that supposed to mean?"í. The unconscious intention seems to be implied wilful inarticulacy, as if a joined-up utterance would forever brand the speaker a degenerate intellectual amongst their dim-eyed, knuckle-scraping but deathlessly hip peers.
# Small middle class white English boys, whose voices have yet to break & whose mothers still brush their downy cheeks with a kiss at bedtime, calling each other ëmaní & ëdudeí whilst waving one hand in the air in poorly observed hip-hop semaphore whilst clutching their tiny balls with the other. Occasionally they can be heard addressing their world-weary & much more convincingly cool female companions as ëhoí & ëbitchí. Only reminding them loudly that they live in a 3-storey town house in Islington just around the corner from Tony Blair & not in a 3-room council apartment in Tottenham demolishes the pose.
# Politicians who, after yet another near-cosmic fuckup on a spectrum from mere financial ruin, multiple job loss & total community dislocation through to ecological disaster & genocidal loss of civilian life, utter the immortal words, "Clearly there are lessons to be learned hereÖ"
Enough, already. Blood thickens, the sinews stiffen. There is work to be doneÖ
2:11:18 AM 
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