I'm a Dinosaur

I'm a Dinosaur and Proud of it! I have noticed that I and my peers have slowly become dinosaurs just like when I grew up people who once wore top hats and bear coats at their college games were dinosaurs when I grew up.

I used to wonder why people over 40 years old tended to be so cranky when I was young. Well, now I know. If you have to watch all your best friends and relatives die and then have to go to funerals and either watch them be buried or dropped as ashes into the ocean over the sides of ships or boats or out of planes over water then you get my point. I think doing this about 100 times might make you a little cranky too! One to five times doing this might even make some people a little nuts, especially if it's a wife, husband, parent, lover or dear friend or (God Forbid!)ones child.(A child is the worst!)

However, I'm also proud to still be alive. All the things except sex I basically stopped doing by ages 22 to 26 that might kill me or drive me insane. (Although working for someone you hate can drive most people nuts or just cause them so suicide.) So that is something I recommend that everyone not do. DON'T WORK FOR SOMEONE YOU HATE BECAUSE THAT IS HOW PEOPLE DIE!(you or them or both).

That is a really good truism. Here is a good list:

1. Don't ever work more than about a week to a month for someone you really hate!
2. Don't do things you can't survive!
3. Don't do anything you can't live with the rest of your life.(like serious emotional or physical harm to yourself or anyone else). Just ask any veteran who has been forced to kill who is now on the streets with a cardboard sign asking for your help.
3. part two. If you have done something you can't live with for God's sake kill yourself and not another 100 people(please!).
4. Most things you can heal from if you are mentally disciplined enough and patient enough. But you must be a very strong and disciplined person to make this work. This means rather than do harm you bite your lip and/or drive your fist through a wall or window (or you break something) instead of harming someone.
5 The worst things to heal from take about 5 to 10 years. But it is usually possible to heal from most things. again Patience is the key.

I was talking to a good friend of more than 10 years recently. He was saying that his father chose to stop taking walks when he was 90 and my friend thought that this was the reason his father died within 3 years of this.

I said, "There is another factor called transfer trauma. Your father probably didn't feel safe outside because of his slowly deteriorating mental state from aging." I said, "I'll be 60 this year, my friend, and even now I go out into public places as little as possible because I don't like all the changes in our culture. I don't like the way the average person sees me or looks at me and I don't like most of their attitudes or ideas about things either. So I'm a stranger in a strange land even though I grew up mostly in this state." Since my friend is about 10 years younger than I and just turned 50, he looked at me with a look that told me he is afraid of the future. Unlike me, he is single and a good friend to my wife. My wife and he are both extremely intelligent and he used to be a member of MENSA which is a club for geniuses.

However, I have always found extreme intelligence to usually be more of a problem than a solution to most problems and I have found the most extremely intelligent people usually can't balance this with common sense and emotional stability. However, there are always exceptions to this observation.

I tend to be fairly earthy in my life sort of the "Carry Water Chop Wood" kind of practical Zen approach to life. I tend to be a person that survives any catastrophe as I am always at my best in a crisis like all my relatives. However, everyday life bores me to tears. So being bored is usually my most difficult problem to overcome.

However, at this point in life I've got a 2500 square foot house with a big back yard and hot tub and with 4 or more computers and 3 or more tv sets (even though we shut off cable about 8 months ago so my daughter could experience life without cable tv.) This has been extremely successful to the point where we might make this permanent. Even she agrees this is better because we are all tired of 20 minutes of every hour being commercials on cable tv. At least on the internet it is only 10 to 30 seconds of commercial per 5 minutes of viewing time at its very worst.

And yes, I'm now formally a dinosaur. With the big six zero coming up I am formally a human dinosaur. What is amazing about this for me is that I feel better now then I did at 30 or 35 plus I have all the experience of life behind me not to make really stupid mistakes of the kind young people make. Do I miss being young? Actually, no. Being young sucked because even though one is young you don't usually have much money to actually enjoy being young that much. Yes, in the late 60s and early 70's there was no AIDS and I had tons of girlfriends and we could have unprotected sex because it wasn't dangerous then. However, we didn't have any money to do more than go to concerts or go surfing back then. I don't miss being young. What I miss is all the enthusiasm and all my friends. That is what I miss. But being young, I don't miss that pain at all.