Diary of a Dissolute State: Preface

You never thought you'd make it to this age. Not because you expected to die by now, though some part of you did, but because no human mind can conceive of itself being 43. You had just gotten used to not being a kid anymore when life ambushes you with your forties, but you still think yourself twenty-five when at twenty-five you barely got over the thought you weren't eight anymore. Not that you take getting there for granted, but how much more unreal will sixty-five be?

Old certainties melt away, the certainties within you grew up, the certainties of there being time, the certainties of there being world enough. You're already too old to recognize the world. Changing the world is a job for young people, and when the world is only left to us at fifty, how are we expected to have enough time and energy to change a world we have not years enough and energy to change?

What is there now? It's our world, not our parents', and fuck does it not feel like their idealism was the most selfish thing ever; breaking the world just in time leave us with the job of fixing things that cannot be fixed. Not your parents, they were cynical puritans, and you've inherited their constant anti-boomer fulminations. But the evidence piles up that you exist in a world grown impossibly decadent. Ever since you were an adult, the world felt unmoored, but every day for ten years you've woken up with that dread of a world tilting off its axis. Now you're at just about your mid-forties, and what felt like tilt feels like hanging by a thread. By fifty-three, the world could be upside down and we could fly toward the nuclear energy of the sun.

This is your world now, but it's not YOUR world. You never wanted this world, you disagreed with just about everything anybody's ever done with it: the decisions of your parents, the decisions of your peers, even whatever decisions were your own. Maybe your nephews' generation will get it right, even though they won't either; but with any luck you'll be around to snarl at their generation too, even as the terror creeps up on you there won't be much generation left to snarl at.

So long as there is a new generation, there is hope. They can still get it right where we got it wrong. They won't, yet somehow the world burbles onward. For all we ever got wrong, there has always a new generation even as dissolution threatens the future itself. That faith has to sustain you: the belief that in spite of every bad decision, even if some of us don't make it to old age, no decision is risible enough to break us all. Humanity is great not because we triumph, but because we survive our defeats. Whatever comes, it is still likely that a vast majority of us will survive it, even as we dwell in terror from the thought that we won't. However many of us are left, we will regroup, we will find a way, existence moves onward toward the next triumphs and the next follies, forever repeating the story of our victories becoming our defeats, and our fulfillments arising from precisely those defeats.

We will win, we will muddle through, not all of us, but many of us, and whomever is left will tell our stories and posthumously give us the reason we endured whatever we endured.

We will still be here.

Amen.