12/10/2012:
A very mellow day,
A day that makes one’s golden years actually golden.
Happy in retirement?
There’s a joke:
You slave like Spartacus in the Libyan salt mines for 30 or 40 or even 50
years, and now you’re supposed to re-calibrate the machine, re-gauge
one’s anatomy and metabolism for a habitat so far and away grindstone
gone.
The muckrakers Studs Terkel and Barbara Ehrenreich remind us:
Work is the only thing we can do for 8 hours, other than sleep.
Perchance even to dream out that Roman **** or Bacchanal.
No, alas, 4 hours is the legal limit for an ******* lasting that long,
During all our joy-juiced carnal desires,
Be they under the elms or elsewhere.
Cialis! ******!
Names already living it up in infamy.

A simple truth about Retirement:

Stop working and die.
A most intense public service announcement,
A vast digital image out of Yeats,
A very special Spiritus Mundi P-S-A.
Targeting Baby Boomers, especially:
“You better find yourself something,
Or someone to occupy your mind.”
Brought to you by the good people at
OCCUPY BRAIN STREET,
First a national, then a veritable global movement,
However so short-lived;
Like all the others.
Oh, Boomers, your attention span is down to 8 minutes.
Your mnemonic links are frayed and tattered,
Your hard drive noodle fragmented,

Yet still whirring white noise jazz.
A New Orleans Dixieland funeral,
And Al-Zheim trumpet blast to go out on.

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,
But I am relatively well adjusted in retirement.
And today—previously mentioned as a mellow day--
Today is one reason why.
As is medical marijuana and the sultry voice of Chrissie Hynde,
With or without her band of Pretenders.
And let’s throw in a lovely bottle of Temecula red wine--
Doffo, if you’re going to get fussy on me,
Another blithe distraction cultivated and custom-made for old age.
Indeed, a very mellow day.