Even old people need to explore new realms

The Column: 02.08.23

I’m an American, I like to believe that nobody but nobody is beyond the reach of friendship and understanding, not even North Koreans or former felons or the creators of complex security systems that have driven me to the brink of madness, trying to remember the password for my computer and then having to replace the password and confirm my identity by typing in a six-numeral code sent to me on my cellphone whose password I now can’t remember either.

I don’t have top-secret documents stored in the phone or in the laptop. I have a lot of appeals for donations from Democratic politicians and lefty organizations such as Citizens United for Diversity & Inclusivity In American Humor (CUDIAH), none of which needs to be kept from prying eyes. I’m a Democrat. So what? I wish I had a friend in the password biz who could say, “Oh, passwords went out of usage long ago, nobody does that anymore, you just need a simple voice-recognition system that eliminates the need for passwords.” My current friends are all liberal-arts grads who know nothing about this stuff. Do you get my drift?

I need to broaden my social circle. All of my friends are aging liberals, and they’re perfectly nice people but our conversation is the same old same old stuff repeated, reiterated, recycled, re-repeated, et cetera. We talk about the cold, about our grandkids, about bad books we’ve read recently. We’re still talking about the guy who uses bronzer and combs little squiggles in his hair. Which is so over. I mean, really.

I do not have a single friend who was looking forward to hearing Taylor Swift and who was furious at Ticketmaster for messing up her tour and watched carefully the congressional hearings into the whole Swiftian crisis. Nobody.

I wish I knew some Swift fans and I’ve tried to make connections but I am not good at texting because I use just one finger and they text at 60 w.p.m. with both thumbs and even when I’m sitting next to them they still prefer texting to talking, and I fall behind, which marks me as untextworthy, and they go like “C.U.” or “BRB” and they’re gone. I’m trying to like Taylor’s songs but it’s not easy.

You were so awful to me
And I sat there and took it
You had me in your pocket
So you could just reach in
Like grabbing a keychain,
I was a handkerchief to blow your nose on
But now I’m gone.
I’ll never be in love with you again. 

All I can say is if a girlfriend of mine wrote a break-up song as bad as that, she never would’ve been my girlfriend to begin with so there never would’ve been anything to break up.

My friends tend to be overeducated, quasi-vegan, animal-rights types, though they whack flies and poison cockroaches and set vicious traps for rodents as if Mickey and Minnie have no right to exist — but hey, inconsistency is the spice of life — and just once I’d like to have a personal friend who’d invite me to sit in his den unmasked and look at his Mannlicher-Schönauer bolt-action 30-06 and admire the heads of water buffalo and jaguar and giraffe mounted on the walls and show me videos from his latest safari to Uganda, which by accident segues into scenes from Nancy Pelosi’s office on January 6, 2021.

America is awash in firearms and I don’t have a single close friend who owns even a .22. I don’t personally know a single Proud Boy or Minuteman or Viking Avenger.

I’m not saying I approve of these people — au contraire, mon cher — I’d simply like to know somebody over on the dark side who is up on all the latest conspiracies, rather than the folks in my book club or the people I meet at coffee hour after church or at meetings of my ACLU chapter.

I feel a little smothered by good intentions and I’d like to see more of the world before I start the long grim slide. I’m not looking for an illicit romance or anything dangerous, I’m considering becoming a Republican realtor in Wabash, Indiana, and say bad things about Biden, just to see what it feels like, maybe go to a target range, do some bowling. My wife loves New York but I talked her into marrying me and how much harder could Wabash be than that? Six months is all I ask, darling. Just for the experience.