TIME TICKS AWAY

I don't even feel like writing that I don't feel like writing. Writing weighs on me. It is a constant burden. Yesterday I didn't rise from bed until two in the afternoon because I didn't want to face the laptop sitting on my table. Anger emanates from the screen because I won't appease its insatiable hunger.

I'm reading more than at any time in my life. I'm hoping that Philip Roth or Pablo Neruda and the other authors whose books occupy half of my bed will inspire a creative spark. Now that the Beard Posse have been found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail, I feel that I've sufficiently covered the local beat. The city elections aren't until May so I can meander like the Rio Grande with the exception that I have no destination in sight.

At this point in my life existence has become a game. That perspective doesn't include my three sons. They still need me, particularly the youngest since he's only 16. His needs are almost as insatiable as the laptop. The older two are ascending the ladder, but they still can use the old man's counsel.

The game part is divided into three categories. Firstly, there is the numbers of years I will survive after retirement. I have almost completed my fourth year. There are colleagues who didn't get one or two years under their belts before they were underground. And there are the others who dote on their grandchildren because they are good for little else.

I am fortunate that I can easily entertain myself as I am doing at the present moment. Besides the writing and the reading, there is learning Portuguese, French and Italian, there is improving my Spanish, there is adding vocabulary to my erudite English, there is strumming the guitar and stroking the tennis ball, there is remaining true to my Yankee Yoga and long walks and there is any number of other diversions that delight the senses, expand the brain and enhance health.

Secondly, there is the goal of attaining 80 and still have game and my mojo. Even under the best of circumstances, particularly for a male, this is not an easy objective, but when you're 70, you have to hope for the best. 

A person who reaches 80 after a full life has few complaints when it's time to exit. There is much that one can accomplish in this last decades. Every endeavor that I am presently pursuing offers the opportunity to grow. For starters, I haven't penned my best paragraph yet.

And lastly, there is the competition among friends. Will I outlive Estanislao Contreras, the poet of Chicano Fuck Songs, Dr. Polyphemous Pangloss, Brownsville's most loved physician, Father Jesus P. Cadissimo, the defrocked priest ministering to the poor of Cameron Park, Maclovio O'Malley, la Voz de los Vatos, and Jack O'Connell, the great unpublished novelist, among others.

I suppose it's the athlete in me that spurs me forward in these competitions against the clock. My biggest regret is that I waste so much time when I have no time to lose.