fading

[degringolade]

 

Playing hooky from work today, the plan is to use up one sick day per pay period over the next couple of years.  Today is part of that plan.

Sticking with the plan.  779 days left.  I just hope that there will be something other than a pile of rubble to retire to.  Hyperbole is fun, but I think that my current retirement plans will be effective because of a couple of reasons.

The first is really pretty simple; I don't buy into the pre-packaged nonsense created by Madison Avenue that the retirement are the golden years.  Look, getting old is real and a great deal of the time it comes with physical limitations, aches, pains, and other such unpleasantness.  There are idiots out there (usually educated older white women who used to be babes but now are looking pretty long in the tooth) who claim that if you eat right, exercise obsessively, and pretend, you can be the person you were in your twenties.  Well buckaroos, if you are over fifty and you think that you are as good as when you were twenty, you must not have been worth a shit when you were twenty.

Second comes the reality currently being played out in the air travel industry.  I helped fuck up the environment back in the day before I came to my senses.  Too many trips across the oceans and too many bad seats at 30,000 feet breathing recirculated air broke me of the supposed romance of "travel".  I am content where I am thank you.  But there are folks out there who think that them being someplace else is important.  Well, it isn't.  I think that our lives are going to be seriously "re-localized" in the near future and I am very cool with that.  

Next comes the living arrangements.  Less is more and small is beautiful.  I have been living in a 525 sq. ft. apartment for the last four years and I am as content as a bug in a rug.  If anything, I am trying to figure out how to reduce even further.  This limits the cost and limits the ability and desire to buy more shit.  

fourth is a simple fact, I am planning on being poor.  Now, don't get me wrong, I won't miss a meal, and ninety percent of the world's population will look on my lifestyle with envy.  But by the standards in most "right-thinking"people in the land-o-the-free, I will be poor.  But since my activities will be constrained to activities defined by the prior three paragraphs.

Now, here is the simple point that will allow me to be happy under these not-very-onerous conditions.  The right-thinking people who are bought into the current illusion of infinite growth and infinite wealth on a finite planet will consider me a failure.