You feel lost. This just isn’t my place, now. Whatever the injustice of this woke tyranny, you cannot fight it.

Cities are places where the past is only ever something of which to be ashamed. Where presentism is baked in.

GONE

I am in town to see Al Jardine and The Pet Sounds Band at the Sydney Opera House.

Al Jardine, an original Beach Boy, is about 83 years young. Most of the singers you watch (well, I watch) on Spotify are either gone or ancient.

Sydney is full off rushing twenty-somethings, earphones on, phones engaged, on their way to jobs that you don’t remotely understand. It’s a strange and foreign country.

You put on the cricket. They are all multi-millionaires who preach politics. They wear coloured clothes.

What they are doing is many things. Entertainment for the masses is one. Contributing to the massive profits of corporates is another. But it isn’t cricket.

They know that you know that it isn’t cricket. They’d say, “it is what it is”. That covers off on most things these days.

When you grow older, you notice death. Google an old star. You suddenly see how old they are now.

You remember them in your prime, and theirs. Death is all around.

You get an email from an old friend. His wife has passed on.

Why didn’t you keep up with them these past years?

What happened? An email not answered. Then another. Then you lose touch. Then a loved friend passes. You weren’t there.

It isn’t that you don’t care. It is just that you are getting old. Former connections aren’t there, all of a sudden.

No one is to blame. Blame, at seventy-odd? What does that even mean?

GUILT

Luckily, when you get old, the guilt fades over lost connections and long-done sins. Everything just fades. Guilt is so the day before yesterday.

You only get so many trips around the sun, as Alan Jackson says. The trips are lessening.

As he says, in So Late So Soon:

We drank all the wine
And we burned all the candles to the ground
We danced to every dance they played ’til silence seemed to be the only sound
And I could’ve sworn not long ago
The sun was only starting to go down

But when did all the stars
Fade just like the moon?
And how’d it get so late so soon?

Twilight was just leaving
When the first kiss of the evening got us high
And time stood at a standstill when the whole world just stopped for you and I
And that last kiss you gave me, baby, just lit up the sky

When did that early bird
Start singing his first tune?
How’d it get so late so soon?

Life goes on…

You buy another book. Will you read it? You sign up to another podcast. Doubts creep in. Why am I doing this?

Yet, you still invest in the future. A future a little less certain than the future in which you invested last week. Buying that new book reminds you that you still have work to do.

You are increasingly angry. Even though you know that anger is a law of diminishing returns. And that it just feeds more anger.