Forty in ’98
A Few of the Things You Really Shouldn’t Know at your Age
by Kerry Joyce
Illustration by Greg Moutafis
“I wanna publish ‘zines and rage against machines.” -Harvey Danger
Forty years old. Hmm. I remember sitting in my 4th grade class back in ’68, calculating what I would be in the year 2000. Equipped with nothing more to guide me than a standard issue #2 pencil and a piece of manila paper, I came up with nothing less than 42. Forty-two! The precocious little mind boggled. It seemed impossible. Not so now.
It’s time to take stock:
Let’s see. What I don’t have is money in the bank. Or a house, or children, or a big, friendly, drooling dog. What I do have is a steady job that occasionally allows me to do some work that I find meaningful. This is something I’d wanted for a very long time, but which nonetheless eluded me. I have a relationship with a woman who does not meet my previous expectations, but instead somehow manages to exceed them. I have some friends. Friends who have stood by me through some painful, difficult, embarrassing moments, and whom I’ll probably have to count on in the same role again. Some are among the most amazing people I have ever known. Some aren’t.
There are people I’ve tried to cultivate friendships with, but it didn’t work out. And perhaps there are those who tried to cultivate a friendship with me, and it was I who did the shying away.
There are people you meet who are arguably better than your friends – funnier, nicer, more talented, whatever – but somehow you know they weren’t meant to be your friends. What you struggle with, they find effortless, what they struggle with, you don’t think is worth bothering about.
Frequently though, you make these judgments too quickly, so I also consider among my assets my affiliation with Lollipop Magazine, which among other things, has allowed me to acquaint myself over an extended period with dozens of people in a working and social situation, and as a result, enabled me to include them among my closest friends today.
I am a creature of my time, so like many of my era, I have an abiding interest in the subject of “consciousness,” or better yet “expanded consciousness.” When I was 14, I started experimenting in this vein. I tried kicking open the doors of perception mostly through reading a lot, smoking marijuana a lot, and occasionally by getting involved with things like Transcendental Meditation, LSD, and some of the other shit The Beatles were doing. To what extent I succeeded, I can’t say.
I do know the details of my past, my little victories, my secrets, and my unholy drives best, but ultimately, I now suspect that the people around me see through most of my petty deceits and self deceits, and seeing me from the outside, ultimately know me better than I know myself.
This belief, a once frightening prospect, is now more frequently a comfort. Not only for me, but for many others. I suspect, as we get older, there is a shift of desire away from social autonomy and toward social integration. Social autonomy is pretty much a contradiction, but that doesn’t stop people from wanting it.
In this spirit, my enlightened self-interest no longer seeks an affiliation with the most dazzling and cultivated people, so much as with commonplace, everyday devotees of the Eros of giving. People who in response to expressions of your generous nature will perceive a part of you that you don’t know yourself, and will act in kind with something you needed all along, without even knowing it. I’m still on the road, just on the one more traveled by to a greater degree.
It means a lighter load, not necessarily a better one. It is within the purview and perhaps a duty of the young and the strong to make the world over in their own individual image, or at least to give it a gallant try. By society at large, this is sometimes called “infantilism.” For many, though, the urge to leave some mark of one’s own unique idea of beauty and truth on the world is something akin to a biological imperative. It represents not a desire to rearrange the world to get what you want, but a rearrangement of some parts of the world to express something new. It’s a gift the giver bestows mostly on himself, but occasionally the world benefits, too. Sometimes in an Earth-shaking, indispensable way.
Doing your own thing on your own terms (is that Seventies enough for you?) is something everyone would, in theory, like. But most people commit themselves to a more or less institutionalized lifestyle early on, forming themselves into dependable sub-units at school, job, church, and other institutions, and enjoying a feeling of safety and security thereby, with perhaps some reasonable hope of working their way up into positions where eventually they can exercise more control and creativity over their activities.
Other, very capable, people, resist this path. Strong-natured individuals, sensualists living in the moment, or those whose first experience with an institution, the family, was a poor one, have a difficult time “playing the game” and “putting up with the bullshit.” Some of the more luckless among these individuals wind up institutionalized on the receiving end: in jail, in a mental hospital, or in a cemetery, it being very difficult to not be part of institutional life in some sense.
Institutions invariably make unreasonable demands. It seems they expect you to undergo a kind of prolonged hazing before you take on any real responsibility. Now I suspect this apprenticeship serves an important, if unintended, function. Why should you be depended upon to assume leadership against a larger evil from without when you haven’t even demonstrated the ability to withstand a smaller one from within?
The function of institutions is to provide a comfortable context for perfect strangers from different walks of life to work together for a common purpose. And a lot of the seemingly pointless rituals and gratuitous conformity found therein help reinforce and reassure one and all that they are in a place where individual passions and agendas are subordinated to a larger purpose. Naturally, those whose individual passions and agendas are paramount have a difficult time.
Looking at the world, you’ll observe that in places where there is a lack of these institutions, there is poverty and chaos. But also that in some of the oldest and greatest makers and repositories of culture – China, Germany, and Japan – they have been perhaps too successful at socializing the young in submitting to authority and quelling those individual passions, and, as a result, have been responsible for some of the most frightening of tyrannies.
At this moment in our happy land, we enjoy both sound institutions and a high tolerance for individuals and institutions in exile – subcultures of dissent. Those who disagree with the above serve as an early warning system of real and potential problems, and keep the culture at large on its toes.
We have bands and ‘zines, and an occasional film, that speak to the common frustrations of the disparate individualists, that provide a little common coin for the alienated, a little warmth in the wayside of the dispossessed. Lollipop served that purpose for me and, I think, others, but it stopped working for me about a year ago. I was engaged to be married. I needed a job. A REAL job. I simply couldn’t play the game I was playing with the cards I was holding any longer. I experienced my own personal darkness at noon. It was time to retool my thinking a lot.
So now I’ve adjusted myself to the idea that I have to live my life – indefinitely, but perhaps not forever, to a greater extent than I thought I would have to – within the framework of other people’s reality. I have to put greater faith in my fellow sorry human beings. When things get bad, I still close ranks and man the barricades. Sometimes it’s still me and me against the world, maybe sometimes this is the wisest course. Maybe there’s a limit, and I’m still working out where the limit is. But the laws of nature haven’t crushed my spirit, and neither will the laws, written and unwritten, of man.
Like the “Three Kings Of Orient Are,” these days my movements are guided by a bright star of a not so distant constellation. Mine is an image of an as yet unrealizable photograph: It is a sitting portrait of my fiancé holding our child.
