Bygone Best-Days

We’re fucked. Worse … I’m fucked.

I came to this realization while limping out of a Kohl’s last week. I’d gone there to return an Amazon item, which is pretty much the only thing that gets me into a Kohl’s these days, and I was limping because I was recently out of a boot following foot surgery and said foot was angry that I wasn’t sitting on my ass doing nothing.

Having completed my business, I was merrily hobbling toward the exit when I spotted a woman standing near the door. She was looking at a clothes rack with who I assume to be her son. He looked to be about 13, though never trust me on judging ages. He may have been 33 and could have been 3. Whatever the true age, he was standing with who I assume to be his mom … a mom who was wearing a shirt that had two multi-colored lollipops, one strategically placed over each of her substantial boobs.

Underneath was the text: “They aren’t going to lick themselves.”

Now, I’m all for a funny T-shirt. I love funny T-shirts. I own funny T-shirts. I am not a prude, and I like boobs. Still, my thought was, “Really?! This is your choice for a top today?”

Partly, I felt bad for her son. I would have died as a 13-year-old (or a 33- or 3-year-old) if my mother wore a shirt implying the need for her breasts to be licked. No son should ever think about his mother’s breasts, and no son should ever be out in public with a mother who is inviting the licking of said breasts. Yet here we were.

I imagined the scene that morning as the woman got ready for the day, standing in front of her closet looking for an outfit that communicated exactly where she was in life at that moment.

“This!” she exclaimed, perhaps out loud, perhaps only in her head. “This is what I want to wear for a day of errands with my boy.”

What does a shirt like that have to do with a declaration of fuckery like the one I made to kick off this diatribe? Well, I have been gradually falling out of love with America and society in general for some time now. I am disgusted by how we treat each other, how we treat the less fortunate, how we push our individuality as a justification to be inconsiderate assholes, and how we have just generally gotten more coarse.

“But Tony. You started off this missive by dropping the F-bomb.”

Yes. Yes I did. This is a conscious decision, one that I made as I’ve witnessed the world devolve into what it has become. If the world is going to smack me in the face daily with stupid T-shirts, obnoxiously loud mufflerless pickup trucks with confederate flags flying and profane bumpers stickers, and generally shittyness every time I am forced to leave the sanctuary of my rural Uranus retreat, well, fuck that. I’m meeting ugliness with ugliness and will continue to do so until things change.

But they aren’t going to change. Because, like I said, we’re fucked.

There are so, so, so many examples that all add up to our fuckedness. The sheer volume of them leaves me astounded that we all don’t feel this way, that I am something of an outlier in my pessimism for our survival as a nation and a society. As I see it, we’re one gentle shove away from falling into the abyss, and I see that shove as potentially just a few years away, thanks to an asshole president who has already proven he has no interest in the furtherance of a democracy of which he is not the center.

I’m not advocating a return to some conservative, traditional, Ward Cleaver way of living. That was equally fucked up. Yeah, those of a certain age recall that era fondly, but they also were very fine with people with darker skin being forbidden from using the same bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants, entrances, hotels, and on and on and on. So let’s not romanticize the good ol’ days or the so-called Greatest Generation, shall we?

My hope is that what I am feeling is what every generation feels when it becomes the older generation … that their best days are behind them and, not only that, that society’s best days are behind them. I know every generation is obligated to hate the music of the generations that follow, and I can definitely check that box. I know the Greatest Generation thought the Hippies were going to be the end of everything and that the Hippies thought Reaganomics and the Moral Majority were going to choke us all to death.

So far, no one has been right in their apocalyptic prognostications, and so I take that as evidence that I’m wrong in thinking we’re irreparably fucked.

Still, this I know:

Our kids are getting dumber.
The young adult generation has no clue what separates fact from opinion and what a reputable source of news looks like, and no, youngin’, it’s not your social media feed.
Influencers are a thing … vapid, dumb individuals who get paid to open boxes.
Public discourse amounts to screaming at each other about our opinions on everything from politics to sports. See also: Pat McAfee’s recent cash haul.
What passes for customer service these days sucks.
Automation isn’t helping.
The public schools are a shitshow.
We’re more disconnected from meaningful relationships than ever while being algorithmically tricked into believing this isn’t true.
No institution exists that truly brings us together on anything anywhere ever.
Those that used to bring us together (for example, churches) have been co-opted by right wing politics, and even before that, they weren’t real good at caring about anyone who wasn’t in 100% Naziesque lockstep to their ideology of exclusion.

So yes, I think we’re fucked.

But like I said, I also think I, personally, am fucked. Why? Because I honestly think that, like society, my best days are behind me.

I was thinking last night about all the good memories I have. Despite the extremely shitty elements of my youth and the tragedies and sadness that have pocked my adulthood, I have had some wonderful moments with some wonderful people, and last night, my brain decided it would be a good time to catalog some of them.

There was the time I skipped school and went with a friend to Opening Day at Yankee Stadium when I was a senior, my last Opening Day before fleeing New York to safer, non-parentally-influenced environs.

There was the evening parked at the lake with my then-girlfriend the night after I got my driver’s license.

There were times with my best friend, driving to Elmsford to play pool or video games or swing a bat in the batting cage.

There were the times with the Four Musketeers—me, my best friend, my girlfriend, and his girlfriend—driving around in my car or his, singing the music of the day at the top of our lungs, going roller skating or to the movies or doing nothing other than hanging out and just enjoying being alive.

There was the first conversation I had with my future wife, the time after a date to the circus where everything … everything … felt perfect, our wedding day.

I have been blessed, indeed.

But my thought last night as I finished the cataloging was that I don’t see anything approximating any of these memories happening again in the future. And so, in that, I fear that I am as fucked as society because like society, my best days are behind me.

We all lose wonder as we get older. What wowed us then becomes ho-hum because we’re too stupid to appreciate it like we used to. Still, if I could imagine something amazing happening to me in the future — like meeting the person I met and became best friends with eight years ago for a brief six months — well, then maybe I’d have some hope for new best days, better best days, the bestest of best days.

But that person is gone from my life, and the only things that remain are the memories and the scar.

I can’t help but feel that what I’m doing, what we’re all doing, is playing out the string until things fall apart or we die, whichever comes first.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think there will be things that make me smile going forward. There are. Every day. But it does mean that those things of late (and by that, I mean the past near decade) don’t hold a candle to the best days I seem to have left behind me. Largely, I spend every day feeling anywhere from translucent, at best, to invisible, at worst. I would die to have someone care enough to be invested in my life, invested in who I really am, curious about me and what I do and what I think.

It’s hard to find that when you feel invisible.

I’m trying. I really am. I do the things that bring me joy, I put myself in positions in which I can meet people and create new best days, but the results from all that effort haven’t changed the general feeling that we’re fucked and I’m fucked.

Listen … I get it: One woman’s poor wardrobe choice shouldn’t do this to me. Everyone’s got a story, everyone has a past, and she might have a great reason for her choice of top. It’s not that woman. It’s that the woman, her shirt, everything that confronts me every time I’m forced to go out into the world around me … so much of it sucks. So much of it is survival.

That doesn’t add up to “best day” material, does it? And I don’t know how to change things.

Bygone Best-Days

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