A Retiring Fellow

Some years back I got a friend request on Facebook that surprised me. It was from a well known movie producer. Now, this had nothing whatsoever to do with my movie deal with Warner Brothers at that time (for my novel, THE FLOCK). At least I don't think it did. It was never mentioned.

I enjoyed corresponding with him from time to time, and I always got a kick out of his posts about has fascinating career and how he ended up producing movies. And he had great stories about famous writers, directors, and actors who had created the movies he produced. He was the kind of interesting and famous friend you never think you are going to make on Facebook.

After a couple of years, though, he began to complain that he had too many Facebook friends and that he was going to start paring down the list. I seem to recall he had a couple of thousand at the time which actually isn't all that many in the scheme of things. What he said he wanted was a few hundred people that he felt made his experience on Facebook fun, and with whom he could actually exchange ideas and stories.

He was one of the very few people on the platform that I worried about not seeing anymore. But he would text me from time to time to assure me that I'd made the cut. This went on for about a year as he shed friends.

One day he started up a conversation about work. Retirement came up. I was still several years away from retirement. Close enough that I could taste it and wanted the day to come so that I wouldn't have to punch a clock and stress myself out by keeping myself from punching managers or supervisors. I mentioned to him that I thought everyone should be given the opportunity and pension to retire by age 50. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time to toil away for the capitalist system and then kick back and enjoy twenty to thirty-something years of fun.

This idea upset him. I mean...he actually got angry. I never would have figured it, coming as he did from the counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s. But it did piss him off.

A few days later I noticed that I was no longer on his friends list. I suppose at that point he must have been actively looking for reasons to shed anyone and everyone to get down to his magic number of Facebook friends of 400 or so. In the end, I didn't make the cut, as he had put it. I must admit that I missed his stories. He was pretty cool.

I finally did retire. Being retired is glorious. Fuck working. If you don't have to work you shouldn't do it if it's making you miserable and you have the means to give up your job. I worked from my teens until I was 62 years old. That was freaking long enough. I know lazy bastards who do things like leech off of their parents and make their wives support them. I've always worked. For the past ten years that I did work all I could think of was making sure that I could retire at 62. I was freaking finished.

And I think of my old Facebook friend and I wonder what it was about the idea of people being able to retire on a government pension at 50 that pissed him off so much. Maybe he was just a right wing curmudgeon with the aura of the counterculture about him that was totally false. I'll never know. Not only did he cease to be friendly with me via Facebook, he subsequently died.

No, don't ask who he was. It doesn't matter, now, and I'm not going to mention it. If his name wouldn't be familiar to you, the films that he produced almost certainly would have.

As for me, I freaking love being retired. I have time to have fun. I don't stress out over getting up before light unless Carole and I are going on a trip, or I'm going to drive to a park to go hiking or camping or kayaking. I can stay up half the night working on a new novel. I can plan out an ad campaign for my novels. For years I talked about planting a garden and never did. Now I have and we harvest vegetables from it almost every day.

Fuck it. That famous producer was wrong. I was right. Retirement is amazing. You don't have to sit on your ass and wither away or become stupid in front of the television.

In fact, I wish I'd been able to do this at 50 instead of 62. Or earlier.

Fuck working. I hiked ten miles, saw three waterfalls, a mountaintop, deer, a wild turkey hen with eight chicks, and rhododendron in full bloom everywhere along the waterways. I didn't punch a clock. It was a weekday. There was no schedule. I did whatever the heck I wanted to do at the pace I wanted to take.

My favorite view of Stone Mountain while being on Stone Mountain.

Seven of the eight wild turkey chicks I saw.

The mother hen.

One of thousands of rhododendron blossoms today.

A small cascade above a larger waterfall.

Facebook and Lazy Bastards.

I generally enjoy Facebook. But I can't really speak my mind there. Initially things weren't that bad. You could say what you pretty much wanted to say without much in the way of repercussion. But in more recent years a certain subset of members (along with corporate policy) have made it increasingly difficult to engage in conversation or commentary on the platform.

Last year I spent about half (maybe more) of the time banned from Facebook. This cut me off from communicating with my various Facebook friends and even with my family members (via FB). After the fourth time of being banned (for saying something negative about the government of Saudi Arabia) I figured I'd just stay away. But, since I do have so many actual friends there, I returned.

Well, it didn't last. Once again I found myself banned for making a single negative comment about police brutality. I didn't even use profanity. Still, the brief sentence was flagged and I found myself once more banned from Herr Zuckerberg's domain.

This time I did follow through and deleted the program from my desktop and various electronic devices. When my prison sentence is ended I don't think I'll go back this time. I think it's for the best. I've found that I produce more work when I'm not on Facebook than when I am there. The professional writing networking I once enjoyed there had collapsed anyway, so it wasn't any good for that.

Oh, well.

It reminds me of the situation I had with a trio of former friends. These three guys were all about my same age, all fairly creative in one way or another, and all three of them had found a way to lead an existence without working. Instead of holding down an honest job, they stayed at home all day long doing a little cleaning, but mainly lounging about performing very little to nothing in the way of honest labor.

How did they do this? How did they get the money to pay for that roof over their heads, the clothes on their worthless backs, and the food they stuffed into their selfish gobs?

They had--all three of them--married women who were willing to demean themselves by working while their worthless husbands sat in the domicile. Sure, a couple of those guys learned to vacuum, and fold the clothes, and wash the kids. But by and large they spent their leech days just puttering around, driving to see locals pals, smoking their tobacco, and living safe knowing that their wives were bringing home the bacon so that they could be lazy, worthless bastards.

I don't see any of those guys anymore. One of them was just far too stupid for me to talk to. One turned out to be psychotic. And the last of them became a neo-Nazi.

I deleted them all. Not the same way that I deleted Facebook, but just as effectively.

My biggest question remains: Where did they find women who had so little self-respect that they kept those scumbags around??!!

On the Field of Play

Almost every day you are going to encounter a personality type referred to as “the alpha male”. You can’t avoid them if you go out in the world.

I encountered my first alpha-type when I was about six years old. Frankly, I’m not sure if it was just before, or just after I entered the first grade. What I recall is that he pulled that alpha male shit on me and what ensued was the first fight that I ever got into. What is most memorable to me is that a passing adult saw what was going on and pulled me off of the little shit. I had his throat against a board nailed between two trees and he could not breathe.

This was a neighborhood kid and I do not recall that I ever saw him again. Mission accomplished.

Alpha males are just part of life. You see them everywhere as you move through your routine of breathing and eating and walking the fuck around. They cause the most disruption in two locations—school, and the workplace environment. Because of my own particular personality type, I found myself beating the shit out of a lot of alpha male types in grammar and high school. Most of these victims of my rage largely ceased to suffer from their social missteps after encountering the violence I handed out to them.

All of this led me to understand that most alpha males are in need of a solid beating. I learned this early.

You will also certainly bump into that human type when you enter a workplace environment. Yes, they live there, too, because not all of them found themselves being danced upon by my feet when they were younger. By the time I began to encounter them in the jobs I’ve held I had learned that beating the shit out of someone was a move that ended up with me in the slammer in the city jail. Yes, yes, yes. It took me a few times of cooling my heels in the confines of a holding cell to realize that I couldn’t just beat the shit out of every alpha male who was bullying me, or my milder co-workers.

Over the years I have found that the best way to deal with these loud-mouths and bullies is to ignore them. This makes them think that either they have you on the run; or it makes them realize that they are dealing with someone they have not previously encountered, and this frightens them. A good, solid stare of rage can also freeze their hearts and make their balls shrink. I have employed this tactic, also.

One place that the more devious-minded alpha males end up is in the world of business. I have encountered such men in my life. You see them online a lot, which is a place that never existed until a relatively recent few years past. One such slug I would see constantly in my days moving around the social media giant we know of as “Facebook”. This website is as good a gathering place for that type of person as it is for everyone else, I reckon. Oh, well, they can’t do much in the way of harm on Facebook other than brag and strut.

But, what I soon found was the sad sight of people who need this guy’s business (or think that they do). I would watch these people—many of them, sadly, friends of mine—suck up to this jackass. They would kiss his anus and lick his imaginary balls. It’s a sad sight in general, but worse when the guys doing the kissing and licking are friends of mine. I couldn’t take it, and so I found that if I blocked the alpha, I then no longer had to watch my pals kissing his ass online.

You have options on the field of play. In this new world, I am always looking for paths that do not involve me ending up in a holding cell in the downtown jail intake center.

Don't handle it like this unless all other options are unavailable and you don't mind sitting in the jailhouse until someone can come bail your ass out. (Yes, I have been there several times, and for just that reason.)

Dead Facebook Friends

I have Facebook friends who have died. Actually, in reality died. Dead Facebook friends whose icons still stare at me from the screen from time to time when the system mysteriously dredges them up to float there, reminding me. I suppose a lot of people here have dead Facebook friends. If you defriend them, they'd haunt you in other ways if there were such things as ghosts.

Marley, a famous ghost from fiction (psst! The only kind).

My dad, who is also dead, had this to say about ghosts--we were sitting in the forest in the mountains of north Georgia just looking at the trees. And he suddenly said:

"You know how I know that there's no such things as ghosts?"

Since I was twelve at that point and had not believed in gods or the supernatural since I was eight years old, I already didn't believe in ghosts. But my dad was sharp and almost always had something interesting to say, so I bit.

"Nope. Why?" I asked.

Then he swept his arm to indicate the forest all around us growing on the steep Appalachian hillsides that had once been part of a vast Indian Nation but which (at least this 120 acres on which we sat) now belonged to him.

"Because this was once all Indian land, before we slaughtered them all. If there were such a thing as ghosts, they'd rise up from here and kill every fucking white man around."