Writing at 60: a guest blog by Jon Obermeyer

Never tease an old dog; he might have one bite left.

Robert Heinlein

Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre.

Phillip Roth

1.

Older than Dirt

Methuselah.

Move it, Gramps.

Have you saved enough for retirement?

I've fallen and I can't get up.

We've been dreading our elderliness our entire lives and now it's here, dagnabit. Let the Geriatric Games begin.

Infirmities abound. I'm awake three times each night doing the enlarged-prostrate-shuffle and the first five steps out of bed are zombie-like, my knees creak, the floorboards creaks and even the creaks creak.

II.

The AARP solicitations start coming in the mail when you're 50 and it pisses you off, slightly. Rock stars from your adolescence keel over, seemingly in batches.

Your metabolism not only slows, it goes negative on you so you gain weight when you eat nothing all day.

Welcome to Ice Station Six Zero, your Seventh Decade on the planet.

You can actually see Social Security in the distance, a mirage from Lawrence of Arabia. If you're lucky, there's a well and a bucket waiting for you, but probably not a palm tree or shade.

I'm lucky for a writer. I'm single, an empty nester and I've already figured out how to live on not very much income, in anticipation of not much income.

I'm not freaking out that I've saved nothing for my retirement. My retirement funding was wiped out in triplicate: 2002, 2008 and 2015.

This late-in-life austerity means freedom. I write for clients about half the day (or half the week), and the other half I work on my own writing projects.

And with three distinct fallow periods of creativity, (the late 1980s, the mid 1990s and early aughts), I have quite a bit unwritten.

III.

Unfortunately, the list of books I want to write grows longer, the more books I finish.

I blog on Medium. I blog on LinkedIn. I post new poems on Facebook.

I turn old poems into flash fiction and extract poems from old short stories. I have this massive unsightly junkyard out back which has innumerable Ford and Honda chassis to strip for parts.

I have a sense of urgency that most do not.

I had an ischemic stroke in 2015 at age 57, and almost died. I've participated in hospital stroke survivor support groups, and I have seen first hand how debilitating that cholesterol-caused event could have been. Luckily my stroke was 100% motor skill damage; I was cracking jokes in the ER as they took me off for a CT scan and an MRI.

I made puns from my neurologist's last name even as she took scissors to my new polo shirt from Target on the ER table.

"This is a Nguyen-Nguyen situation for me, isn't it Doc?

She didn't laugh. She's not supposed to.

The only thing bad about motor skill damage is that I had to learn to walk again, speak clearly and type again with my left hand. I stll can't bar chord on my guitar the way I used to. But all my cognitive functioning is there, and the old black bullwhip (wit) can still snap at the speed it used to.

My one danger is a tendency for manic behavior, and what my therapist diagnosed as a personality disorder, that sounds like Single A Fresno form of Tourette's, an inability to read and process social cues and keep my weird thoughts and musings to myself.

I'm not officially in the workforce and I haven't insulted anyone lately.

IV.

I hope I have a novel in me. I started a novel in early 2017 and hope to finish it this year.

I have some ancestral memoirs/creative nonfiction I would like to work on: my grandmother's childhood on the Alberta prairie, my Irish ancestors leaving Ireland to come to Canada. And my great-great grandfather Welty, the Civil War cavalry captain (PA 18th) who rode with Averill's Raiders in the Shenandoah, met Kit Carson and spent the last half of his life as a newspaper publisher in Vidalia, Indiana.

There's also a Steinbeck book I want to adapt into a documentary or biopic screenplay.

I have a series, a spoof of Sacramento called Mentos that I want to develope for Netflix. Think Portlandia but with mullets and a Led Zeppelin soundtrack.

Lately, I've become enamored with writing flash fiction, little 1,000 word vignettes.

And more poems, many more poems.

V.

I had a college friend my age die suddenly this past yeat. Paul was on the highway driving home from work, suffered a heart attack, and slowly drifted to the highway shoulder, harming no one.

My father died at age 73 in a Phoenix, Arizona neuro hospital, with my sister Joy by his side. I was lucky enough to visit with him after his initial stroke (hemorrhagic) and I watched in the ICU as he came out of a three-day coma.

I know the longer I stick around, the more of my friends will start dying over the next decade. I don't need an acturarial table to know that.

The world ends not with a bang or a whimper. It will be a nurse following a DNR request and pulling a tube out of someone's throat, or it will be a final steak dinner with a twice-baked potato, pureed in a blender, and served with a straw.

Roth was right: it will be a massacre. Hopefully, I'll be around to write about it.

Jon Obermeyer is a Writer who Lives in Durham, NC. His latest book Briarcliff, A Memoir of 1985-1993 was published this year. He writes for a living, preferring life to the alternative.