Daily Linz 1 - The Wise and the Wet
by Lindsay Perigo
A note from the Editor: Today's article is the first installment of a new feature here at SOLO. Each weekday, we will have a new "Daily Linz" to fire your soul, charge your spirit, and (I'm sure) rattle your cages. Enjoy.
Youth, said Oscar Wilde, is wasted on the young. (If it wasn’t he who said it, it should have been.) All beauty, no brains. No body-fat, except between the ears.
Age, equally, is wasted on the old. They don’t want it, so why bestow it on them? Is there a more persuasive argument against the existence of God ... or for the proposition that if He exists, He’s a bastard? Ageing is an impertinence. It’s unesthetic and dichotomous. Hair disappears from places you want it and sprouts luxuriantly from places you don’t. Your libido remains rampant but your delivery mechanism falters. You have wisdom in spades, but can’t remember what it is. You dream up countless new projects to tackle ... and then fall asleep. Drinking a glass of water can add 5 kg to your girth instantly. You repair to wine that improves with age only to find yourself doing the opposite ... not to mention that you get cramp from pouring it.
I was prompted to these cheerful observations by an article I read while staying with an ex recently. It was in one of those trendy gay magazines replete with pics of athletic young men with six-pack abs. It was by a fifty-something. He was bemoaning the fact that he could no longer turn heads. He felt invisible. He couldn’t complain about this with impunity, he allowed, because he didn’t lust after fifty-somethings either -- when he did try to make out with anyone his own age, one look at the latter’s “sagging tits” had him sagging.
Let’s face it, most of us are enamoured of youthful good looks. Of course, shared values are extremely important, but if you can find them in a youthful, good-looking package ... bliss! My last major relationship was with someone twenty-four years younger than I. He was also an Objectivist and a Mario Lanza fan. Made in Heaven you would think. Yes. That God-bastard’s Heaven. It couldn’t last, of course, because of the age chasm.
Still, the aforementioned fifty-something magazine writer put out a valid appeal -- don’t write the elderly off. (In the contemporary gay world, that’s anyone over twenty-one.) Flip musings above notwithstanding, the geriatric have much to proffer from which youth can profit, even if they’re not top of any nubile list for bedroom delights. Often they are at the height of their vigour and value. Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan ascended to leadership of their respective nations after nearly seven decades on earth, and went on to become two of the twentieth century’s towering tyranny-topplers. Chris Sciabarra began his groundbreaking Trilogy at the dialectically correct age of sixty-six and completed it at ninety-nine. When Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar he was so old he was dead. And sometimes, indeed, age and wisdom can be aphrodisiacal, as in the famous case of the fair youth who tried to seduce ugly old Socrates (the boring old fart turned him down).
The point?
First, it was recently stated here by my impudent, whippersnapper-flibbertigibbet thirteen-something editor that I, Linz, am so old that even carbon dating can’t establish how old. That might be true, but it’s also true that I’m about to spearhead a leap to SOLO’s next plateau. I’m not so old that I can’t do that! I’m about to beef up my own activism, on a fulltime basis -- Daily Linz is an instance of this -- and I’ll be looking to you to do the same on your part-time bases. SOLO expects every good SOLOist to do his duty, from the youngest, Joe Rowlands (yeah, I know, but he’s my Exec Dir so I had to say that), to the oldest, Michael Stuart Kelly (he has to be … he keeps telling us that he spent a millennium in Brazil, and had a mid-life crisis while there).
Second, and seriously, the cliché is true -- youth is primarily and enduringly a state of mind. Above infirmities and deformities notwithstanding, I constantly assume, with no conscious effort to do so, that I have an entire lifetime ahead of me still, and am astonished, not to mention a little annoyed, when I am reminded that fifty-three years have already elapsed. How can this be, when I’m just getting started? In any event, this is a promise (warning?) that y’ain’t seen nuttin’ yet. For elaboration, please see the text of my SOLOC 2/TOC-Vancouver presentation, The Elixir of Youth, here. Therein you will find what I always intended to be the spirit of SOLO, writ large.
Total passion for the total height!
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