Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
- C. Jung 'The Stages of Life'

As she strolls down a street of your town, you catch her passage out of the corner of your eye. You’ve seen her a dozen times, but her exquisite packaging always evokes a sharp intake of breath. You don’t know who she is, and it doesn’t matter. She’s a symbol. She is the 20-year-old classic heartbreaker.

Her lower torso is decked in tight, white pedal-pushers -- or whatever they call them these days -- and a discreet perusal of the twin globes of her poetic ass indicates the distinct outline of a thong, of the sort that adorns (you’ve been led to believe) the nether parts of many young females today. Meanwhile, the sleeveless top is tight over criminally firm breasts and the chopped off blonde mane sways with each step of her flip-flop adorned, enamel-nailed, toe-ring accented tiny sweet young feet. It’s almost too much to bear.

She is a female symbol of the sort that has since the beginning of time ensured the continuation of the human race. She exemplifies nubility and newborn sexuality, so there’s nothing unnatural about your subtle (you hope) ogling, or even the fantasies the ogling elicits within you.

Enjoy the vision and the fantasy, for it’s nothing more than that. Take grim solace in the knowledge that the form will not last for more than another decade before age, child-bearing and gravity will take their toll. Nature and the calendar are brutally honest in the changes imposed on such tender manifestations of divinity. Her youthful beauty is but a moment of time. Meanwhile, let her bop down the street, humming a little song, turning heads all the while, and knowing that she is ‘da one’.

Be happy for her, and for you. At her end there is the joy in her youth and her knowledge of the esthetic splendor she offers the onlooker. At your end there is a blessing by way of a freedom in understanding that you don’t need to worry about any of this. You’re merely here, by this time in your life, to enjoy the show. It’s not that you’ve given up on all aspirations, it’s just that you, if you are reasonably well adjusted, are on your way to becoming a realist.

That is because you are 35, 45, 55, or more, so you know she is not for you. She is not for you unless you drive a black or silver something at the top of an exotic vehicular line, have access to at least a 55-foot floatable device, a condo in Hawaii, and are regularly given to taking youthful prot?g?s to winter in Monte Carlo.

That’s the way it works, and unless you have no handle on anything you should have, you accept it. Anyway, you’ve had your own moments. Maybe not enough, in your esteem, but you’ve had them. And, you’ll have more. Just not in this neighborhood.

At one level it does seem unfair. Unfair in that you couldn’t have the likes of her when you were her age, because you were poor, unsophisticated and terrified of females of her pulchritude, and you cannot have her now because you’re not disgustingly rich, and/or powerful. So be it.

But, if you haven’t yet gone through your crisis; if you haven’t taken that sorely-needed reality check, then you must admit to distress. For you know that you sometimes feeling sad, regretful, even resentful that your life hasn’t worked out in any 'really special' way for you.

Now life is passing you by, and with each day the chances of carnal oblivion with somebody soft and tender, yet firm at the same time, fade into the ever-increasing mist of your days. And sexual regrets are only part of the equation. You’ve also had to accept the fact that your chances for wealth, fame and power seem just as far away as they ever have, and will likely never arrive no matter how many lottery tickets you buy.

Maturity didn’t bring the things you thought it would. What it brought was thinning hair, a paunch, chronic heartburn, diminished erectile function, and the need to pee five times a night if you consumed more than a tablespoon of liquid in the three hours prior to bedtime. And, even when it is bedtime, you can’t get to sleep, and you do get to sleep you wake up before the birds!

All the aforementioned and more have created within you a cranky, middle-aged guy who is working his way up to being a full-fledged curmudgeon if he’s not careful. Your days and years seem to consist of a series of disappointments that have contributed to, and continue to contribute to your sense of having been dealt a cruel deck in the bridge tournament of life.

You look at all your virtues; the examples of how you have played the game by the rules, and you wonder why you’ve been left with the cruddy end of that old stick.

Here’s what you’ve done to play the game by the rules:

• you got the education that your parents told you that you would end up in the poorhouse without. You maybe didn’t do brilliantly, but you fulfilled the function. You gave up on your plans to become a stand-up comic, a rock star, a cartoonist, a private eye, a gigolo, or a colorful vagabond, and followed the rules.
• you’ve always worked hard, and never been fired, or even hauled on the carpet. You may have hated some of the jobs you’ve been expected to carry out, but you dug in and felt contempt for those who were unable or unwilling to fulfill the obligations of the job.
• You’ve really, really tried to be a faithful and loving husband. You’ve maybe even succeeded, and the odd bit of lusting in your heart and loins didn’t really count, since you’re only human. God will understand at the end of it all -- won't He?
• You’ve attempted to be a good father; you faked enjoying the Christmas concerts; swooned over the crooked shop course projects; changed diapers and kept the gag-reflex to a minimum; went to ballgames, dance recitals, and a host of other tedious events. It must have worked to some extent. Your kids don’t hate you, as far as you know, and they haven’t become drug addicts or prostitutes.
• you’ve tried to keep your bad habits to a minimum, and the time you, drunk as a newt, and in rare voice (you thought) sang ‘Wild Thing’ in a Waikiki karaoke bar with a honeymooning real estate sales guy from Portland is just one of those things better off forgotten -- if only ‘she’ would let you.
• you’re kind to animals, enjoy a decent sunset, hardly ever try to talk her into having a ‘shared experience’ with a pornographic video.
• you’re not particularly handy around the house, but you have a small enough ego (or sufficient common sense) that you don’t object to the idea of hiring somebody to fix the washer or furnace, and frankly you are delighted to be past the days of lubing your own car, or changing your own oil.
• you have a paranoia over ending up in the poorhouse. You don’t even know if there is still a poorhouse, but you sometimes suspect you might be headed there. Yet, you’re doing OK. You own a good part of your own house. Your debt burden isn’t outrageous. You’ve tried to invest for your old age, but the stock market is disgusting, and you’ve watched your ‘package’ dwindle away, sending that Hawaiian timeshare way off into the hazy distance. Meanwhile, just on the off-chance, you do keep buying those aforementioned lottery tickets. Somebody has to win, after all. But, in your heart you doubt that it will be you.
• you’ve also tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to be more ‘sensitive’ by at least paying lip-service to the protocols that seem to be demanded these days. You usually remember to put the seat down, even though you can’t understand why the females in the household don’t feel similarly obligated to put the seat up when they are finished. You’ve tried to accept, while on the subject of nature calls, that females invariably put the toilet-roll on backwards, and ceased making an issue about it years ago. You’ve even sat through innumerable ‘chick-flicks’ with her, but inwardly were grievously affronted by Clint in ‘Bridges of Madison County’. Surely that was an Alan Alda role. Dirty Harry being cast as a pussy seemed indicative that there was probably something wrong with what society was becoming.

The disenchantment, despair, maybe even despondency you are feeling right now will be in direct ratio to how closely you relate to the foregoing criteria. If that guy looks like you, then you are no doubt thoroughly out of synch with your time of life, and are increasingly unsure what your role in the world should be.

And you should be angry. Maybe you should even be enraged. The world is conspiring against you. It has ‘all’ gone too quickly, and you haven’t gotten anywhere near where you wanted to be -- planned to be -- by your age. It’s not all your fault, either. Just look at the irritants in your life:

• affirmative action: You’ve never been a redneck. You can say that without fear of a whole lot of contradiction. Yes, you’ve laughed at racist and sexist gags, and then felt a little guilty afterwards. Actually, you’re offended by racist gags, but you don’t really have the balls to tell your otherwise great guy buddy that you find some of his attitudes repellent. He is your friend, after all. You truly do feel Indians, Blacks and Asians in the old days got a pretty raw deal. You had no part in it, but it was still inexcusable. On the other hand, you cannot accept that a one-armed female Nepalese of 4-foot-9 who wants to be a fire-fighter (not ‘’fireman’, any more), should get the gig before a 6-foot-four, able bodied white guy who has served as a volunteer firefighter for the last six years.
• newspeak: The term ‘political correctness’ is kind of pass? by this juncture, but the impulses that perpetrated the bullshit are still alive, well, and active all over the place. It makes you seethe. It seems that you can’t use any expression to describe anybody or any thing without your kid (who is a product of those PC bastions, the public schools) being all over you, labeling you a homophobe, sexist, bigot, elitist, and a white supremacist. Maybe all of them at once. You know you are none of those things (for the most part, and believe in live-and-let-live, as long as you don’t need to actually picture what some people do in the fervor of their amours). And, what’s an African American? Once they were all sorts of unacceptable terms, then they became ‘Negroes’, then ‘blacks’, then ‘persons of color’ -- how is that different from ‘colored people’, which is unacceptable? -- and then finally African Americans, even if they aren’t necessarily African (the person may be from Jamaica, and not all Africans are black, like Egyptians or Libyans, for example), or American. What about Indians? Aboriginals, Indigenous People, Natives, First Nations, but surely not Indians, even if that is what they call themselves.
• religion: It’s true, you’re not much of a churchgoer. You do believe in God, but would prefer to do it in your own way. You went to Sunday school when you were a kid. And, you attended a few services later on as a regular old Protestant or Catholic who practiced birth-control and a few other heretical things. Other than that, except for the odd wedding or funeral, you don’t stand much on sacred ground. But, what’s with all these other searches for ‘spirituality’? It seems that traditional Judeo-Christian modes of serenity gleaning are no long acceptable -- indeed, are to be disdained -- but others, no matter how esoteric, are to be embraced.
• You don’t have any problem with letting people worship as they choose, but you should also be entitled to worship (or not worship) as you choose. And, since you are not a Native Indian, Tibetan, or Australian Aboriginal, you don’t see why alternative forms of spirituality are just dandy, but don’t you dare make reference to a conventional image of God of the sort you first met in Sunday School, and don’t you dare be talking about Christmas or Easter. That would be exclusionary. Other philosophy adherents are encouraged to be proud of their culture, but you must be ashamed of yours.
• justice: There ain’t none! Right? The weasels, snakes and shitheads are given a hug, a pat-on-the-cheek, and ultimately a walk for crimes that would make John Dillinger pale. Victims are victimized a second time by the courts, and crime is rampant on the streets. Mealy-mouth, social-worker dominated parole boards send depraved animals back into the public domain to rape your wives and daughters, and invade the homes of your aged parents. Or, so it seems. Crime is no longer to be about punishment and retribution, but about ‘rehabilitating’ the career criminal. ‘As if ...”, as your kids would say. You read the papers and watch the news, and you are left wondering at times just what it is that motivates our courts and our judges. Genuine justice doesn’t seem to be the operative philosophy behind sentencing. It frightens you, and it angers you. It all seems to be a reflection of a society in which there is no accountability, and no blame is ascribed for any malfeasance.
• education: You suspect that the schools are somehow to blame for the level of crime and violence in society. Students appear to have to commit an actual murder in plain view before they’re expelled. Gone is detention hall and the strap, and maybe that is a good thing, but what has taken their place as punishment? Your kids don’t indicate that there is any punishment per se. It’s probably the fault of the teachers, you suspect. Once they stopped dressing like teachers and began decking themselves out like hippies, it all went to hell. Nowadays all they seem to do is whine about being underpaid, and having classes that are too large. You suspect that even if they had 10 students in a classroom, it would still be too large. You’re pretty sure that your average class in school had about 52 kids, and you did OK. At least you came out being able to read and write. And when teachers aren’t whining about their difficult lot in life, they’re busily seducing their own students. You know that’s true. You’ve read the stories and watched the TV documentaries. And sex-mad female teachers -- what’s that all about? Women teachers in your day were virtually like nuns, only they probably got fewer dates. But, by God, could those old bats ever parse a sentence.
• sex: You were raised in a more ‘conventional’ time. Maybe you were of the ‘love’ generation, but you weren’t getting all that much of it. You took up with your now wife when you were 20 and she was 18. She was a ‘good’ girl, and was ‘saving it’ until marriage. Oh yes, lots of window steaming went on, much feeling-up, and so forth, and maybe, just maybe, on an especially torrid night, a hand-job (‘Ooh, ick, that is so gross!”), but nothing more. Even though the pill had been invented, so the fear of pregnancy was less of an issue, penetration was out-of-the-question. A blow-job? Absolutely out-of-the-question. (‘Ooh, ick. That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever heard!”)

There were in those days good girls and bad girls. And maybe there was a bad girl in your past, too. Maybe there was even a hooker. But, there was also VD, and there was the social ethic that suggested you must be committed to that good girl, and never waver once the process of pending nuptials had been set in motion.

So, you did what you were expected to do. You married a ‘good’ girl after the appropriate courtship period. You settled into your little apartment and knew that while there wasn’t much in the way of furnishings, the brick-and-board bookcases would eventually be replaced by a genuine furniture-type bookcase, and the beanbag chair would give way to a comfortable Lay-z-Boy.

You and she, in those halcyon days, started with a pretty decent sex life. Once, twice, sometimes three times a week in the first few months, or even years of the marriage. You thought you would have liked more, but had to confess you were pretty busy at work and were often tired in the evenings.

You have idly speculated over the years about how maybe you had ‘missed out’, and wondered about such things as threesomes, swinging, and a few more Kama Sutra positions. But the book seemed to call for more athleticism than you probably possessed; exactly who were you going to have in the threesome (which, of course, would include two females and you, not, definitely not another male with you and your wife); and, as for swinging, it seemed cheesy, and you had to admit that you were maybe a little more jealous than you would openly acknowledge.

• music: There was a time when music was melodic. There was also a time -- largely your time -- when music was both melodic and cacophonic, in that nice artistic blend best exemplified by Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’, or the Kinks ‘You’ve Really Got Me’. Some pieces were inspiring love sagas like ‘Layla’, and some were weird and on-the-edge scary like ‘The End’, by the Doors. But, the point was that such music of your generation, and that of your parents’ and grandparents’ generations demanded a modicum of talent on the part of the musician, and resulted in ditties ranging from ‘Begin the Beguine’ to ‘Karma Chameleon’ that stick in the consciousness. In your mind, today’s music is -- to use the technical term -- crap. This, you know, has nothing to do with your age. It is crap. It is non-melodic, it is salacious rather than romantic, and violent. Even traditional military marches didn’t suggest the mayhem you hear in songs today. Music is created to soothe the savage breast, not to make the listener want to go out to rape and pillage. Female singers in the past from Peggy Lee to Debbie Harry were moody, sexy and suggestive, but talented. Songstresses of today are semi-naked slut-bunnies, with as much sexual subtlety as an Internet porn-site.
• movies: Are worse than ever. Contemporary actresses seem to all be variations on a theme of pallid waifdom, and raging neuroses, that is if you believe the crap that passes for the ‘arts’ sections of most daily newspapers today. There were always fucked up actresses, of course, like Marilyn Monroe. But at least she had boobs and a caboose to die for. Just ask the Kennedy boys. Meanwhile, males in the showbiz are slovenly-looking louts, unshaven and surly, and at an earlier time their image would have only earned them parts as sharecroppers in ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ If you weren’t feeling out of it before, see how many cinematic ‘icons’ under age 30 you can name, or form a visual image of. You’re out of cinematic touch, mainly because it no longer seems worthwhile to stay in touch with a medium devoted to banal and smutty filth of the sort that could only appeal to that proverbial 14-year-old boy.
• profanity: When my friend and I were about 17 we spent an afternoon working on his relic of a car. I must assume foul-language was rife in his parents’ carport that afternoon. But, nobody was around. It was just my buddy, me, and his four-year-old brother. Taking a break from out task, we went into his house for a coffee part way through the afternoon. His mother was puttering away at some task or other in the kitchen as we sat down at the table. A few moments later the aforementioned little brother strode into the room and offered his greeting to Mom with a hearty: ‘How ya doing you fucking asshole!” She looked at him in stark horror and speculated as to where he could have picked up such filthy language. My friend and I avoided each other’s eyes and innocently shook our heads and shrugged. Later, after we’d finished laughing hysterically, we admonished ourselves and vowed to clean up the talk when his brother was around. But, the point is, we saw it as filthy language, and not to be bandied about loosely. Now you walk down the street, and if you pass a group of kids at the corner, all the talk seems to be filled with four-letter expletives, and the utterers seem unconcerned that ‘adults’ are within earshot. Even worse, you know of adults who no longer couch their terminology when kids are around, so how can you blame the kids? I’m reminded of hearing the story of an elementary school teacher who admonished a first-grader, only to have the brat turn around and offer a ‘Fuck you” tin response. The only time I remember that happening was in my senior year of high school, whereupon the teacher turned on his heel and promptly decked the guy who uttered the phrase. The teachers response was considered acceptable, even by us students who witnessed the assault.

Whatever the reasons for the prevalence of vile chat today, be it movies, music or just as a reflection of the dumbing-down and slumming-down of society, it offends you.

No doubt there are many other aspects of contemporary society that make you angry, and leave you out of synch with life as it is today. Furthermore, you don’t see any consideration being given to you the middle-aged guy, because all of society’s energies seem to be poised in the direction of diverse groups of non or semi-functionals. That is, those who don’t play the game, like you have, get the rewards. And you, you dumb-putz, get to pay for those rewards.

This means that drug addicts get free needles, but diabetics don’t. This means that the man or woman who is a chronic welfare recipient can get his or her teeth fixed gratis, while you have to pay for yours, either via direct cash, or through your company health plan, which you and your employer contribute to handsomely.

Does this make you mad? Do you find the older you get, the madder you get? Then the words in this volume are for you. You are a perfectly healthy middle-aged guy who is having no end of bother dealing with the changes in your life and in your world.

Carl Jung is quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and middle age is when you should familiarize your self with Jung. What he is suggesting in the statement is that if you’re still flailing and hanging on, then you’re going about life in the wrong way, because you’re hanging on to a lie. The old rules don’t apply.

You’re still hanging on to old ideas, old shit, if you will. New shit is piled differently. So, let’s look first at some of your sources of despair, despondency, and just plain irritation. First is the big one.

How did you get so far, so soon?

Nobody warned you, did they?

Never mind, even if they had, you wouldn't have believed them. Age denial is as powerful as any other kind. Just as the alcoholic will not stop drinking until ‘he’ decides himself to do so, you won’t fully accept the passage of time until you surrender to the reality that there is a beginning, and there is an end, and you are stuck on the downward side of the beginning, or the upward side of the ending. Today may be the first day of the rest of your life, but it is also and always the last day of your former life. Chilling, isn’t it?

With age denial, we don't prepare ourselves for our new reality. Of course, your denial matters little to the actuality. Time carries on without regard to the subject denying the impact. But if you strive to get out of denial, it goes a little smoother.

Some people refuse to get it. They carry on with processes that gave them satisfaction in the past. That’s all they know. They party on. They go into debt buying flashy cars and other unnecessary bric-a-brac; they vaingloriously and vainly indulge themselves in cosmetic surgery, hairpieces, silicone tits, and whatever else is intended to fool others, and never succeeds in so doing. They indulge sexual adventures with virtual youngsters believing there is some elixir of youth in that fluid exchange; they dress in laughable fashions; and they desperately try to stay current so that nobody will have an inkling that the other side of the hill is beckoning. But, nobody’s fooled. Even Dorian Gray had to come face-to-face with the picture eventually.

Some people never do get it, and they become the sad souls; the hollow men and women Jung suggests. They’ve never put aside childish things, even long past the point those toys have failed to satisfy or bring happiness.

I’m not in this suggesting that you surrender to ‘old fartdom’, only that you shift your interests and stay dynamic with an alternate approach to life. Don’t stop having fun, for certain, and if you want to climb Everest (Why not? Everybody else is), do it from the perspective that you’re no longer in your 20s, and it just might be a little more challenging -- and ultimately more satisfying. That way you can welcome the 'golden afternoon'. You may even find it to your liking.

So, it’s time to jump off the trail and look for another one. This might mean some scrambling through the underbrush, and you may end up scratched and grazed, but you’ll find the new footpath if you persevere. Just to ease you on your way, you’ll find some markers that might indicate you’re going in the right direction.

Are some of the following changes happening within you? Value them and use them:

• You’ve become less intimidated by people. This almost came as a surprise, but you have recently come to realize that nobody seems particularly scary when they're the same age as you -- or younger, regardless of their status. The only time younger people are unnerving is when you are surrounded by a dozen of them in an underground parking lot late in the evening, or your boy doctor assumes a worried expression when he extracts that rubber gloved finger from your backside.
• You’re less concerned about trivial matters. You don’t care at all who’s hot and who’s not. You’re coming to the conclusion that maybe you’re not, and you hope you aren’t because that might put demands on you that you don’t want. The more in demand you are, the less freedom you have.
• While you might have withdrawn from a lot of the social mainstream (if you were ever there), you find that family members and old friends are becoming increasingly important to you, as a sense of continuity. You just might find yourself getting up the courage to reconnect with somebody who meant something to you at an earlier stage. Don’t just think about it, then --do it. If the person blows you off, so be it. You’ve made the effort, and you should feel good about yourself for so doing.
• you’re less reverent: One of the more tiresome manifestations of youth is their dogged idealism and sense of rectitude that holds that their ideas, beliefs and philosophies are correct to the degree they are set in stone and only an antediluvian fool could disagree with them. That’s because they, of their generation invented the contemporary world.

You, on the other hand, if you’re sane and mature, have learned that most beliefs are as amorphous as mud, and that most philosophies are as flawed and unrealistic as the people who devised them. You have the sneaking suspicion that there are no absolutes and that the meaning of life is in a constant state of flux. The truth no doubt lies somewhere in between. But you, if you’re moving along as you should be, will not be sucked in by false prophesies and uninformed opinions. The simple reason for the dogmatism of the young is that they are, by dint of their lack of life experience, frighteningly uninformed. It’s not that somebody youthful might not have something reasonable to say, and it’s assuredly not that they’re incapable of thought, it’s just that they haven’t seen the broader spectrum of exponentiality, and will instead forge ahead in a linear fashion.

Oh, and I don’t much like the way young people dress, either. Can somebody with a back-to-front ballcap actually state an opinion I’d want to hear? Sorry, that biased snipe was based on my newfound middle-aged irreverence.

• you might someday find a smattering of wisdom: Since the great prophets and philosophers of the ages can easily be counted on the fingers of your hands, don’t assume you will be asked to join their numbers. It’s a very small club to which even the most strident and hubris-oozing Mensa member would be refused admission. I think that’s as it should be. There’s enough dumbing-down in society, without the Legion of Great Thinkers of All Time lowering their standards just to accommodate anybody who wants to join in. Such people should instead join one of those organizations that have as members people who mistakenly assume they’re great thinkers. Those places are called universities.

But, let’s say that just once your son or daughter comes to you to seek advice on a problem, and you offer a non-judgmental suggestion that is based on your life experience, and said son or daughter looks at you, and says: ‘Gee, thanks Dad. I’d never looked at it like that.” Congratulations. You have conveyed wisdom. You have offered a premise that only somebody as worldly-wise as you could give. While no celestial choirs opened up at that moment, the conversation left you feeling pretty good about yourself. Roll the incident around in your mind, and give yourself a hug. You deserve it.

Once you begin to find contentment in such new approaches to life, you will be ready to accept your time, place and age with more equanimity.

Email Ian Lidste