It’s the end of 2023. People are writing reflection posts, and prediction posts. Productivity apps publish goal templates to help you write goal posts, I presume.
I have not reflected much. “Been too busy” with vacation and family – living. But wasn’t there a guy who said the unexamined life is not worth living? Socrates 1, Jake 0.
I will however, put some thoughts down on what I learned this year in a future letter. This morning I can think of only one memory.
In 2019 I was at Cafe Himalaya on 1st ave with four friends, right around New Years. Two of them I hadn’t seen in years because they’re in finance jobs and for a long time I didn’t (couldn’t) be around that, when we all worked out the mid 20s kinks. Anyways, we’re dying laughing. Our sides ached, my jaw locked, we’re in literal pain from laughter. It was the best time. Adam, on of the finance guys, tells a story about his boss. He runs a large PE firm and is married to one of the Olsen twins, and his brother is the President of France, or something. Apparently he sends an @all email to the company on New Years Eve that says “Team, I just relalized the most incredible thing. At midnight, if you subtrack your age from the current year, it’ll be year you were born. This happens only at midnight tonight… which means… we are all exactly the same age.”
He was, I assume, high as a kite. I heard later this CEO pretended like it didn’t happen, which made me like him even more. It’s hilarious and we still laugh about it in 2023. I guess you had to be there.
This New Years I’ll be out in Palm Springs, hanging with the dog-park friends and my God Parents. Everyone is over 65, gay, and very funny. Greg went around at the party asking “you know the expression 'The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup?’ then opens his mug cabinet and, glued to the back, is a magazine page ripped from a gay-porn magazine of a guy… everyone laughed. Some of them went back for seconds.
It warms me to see old people having this much fun (I’ll kick myself for saying 65 is old one day). They took their dogs to the same park at the same time for years, formed a community, have seen partners come and go, comforted one when his partner died, and seem like a peachy bunch of pals in the desert.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four…
May your 2024 rip your sides to shreds with dirty jokes and bad corporate email stories.
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Dude, you gotta change your definition of "old" people. Geeze! or should I say. . GEEZER