jameswharris

Retirement From Sex

A better title for this essay would be Retirement From Life, but the word sex attracts more readers – don’t worry, I’ll get down to the juicy parts soon enough, just consider this intro foreplay. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about retirement from work, but I realize the word retirement can encompass far more than just that one part of life. Retiring from work is a major transformation in one’s personality, but as we get older we go through so many transformations that can also be called retirement.

For instance, I’ve long ago retired from going out to bars to hear live bands. That used to be part of my personality, listening to live music, but I’ve gotten old and can’t handle noise. Even loud restaurants feel like psychological torture. My wife hasn’t retired from live music, so she still feels youthful in that regard and I feel old. I know lots of guys who have retired from going to the movies. I haven’t yet, but only because it’s a major way to socialize with my lady friends.

Another area that I will be retiring from is heavy lifting. Guys like lifting heavy stuff because it proves they are still young and strong. A woman mentions she needs a 25″ TV carried up three flights of stairs and you volunteer, to make a point about your maleness. Women don’t need men for much, but lifting is something they seem to appreciate. So to retire from heavy lifting means checking out of the strong male club and it means you are admitting you’re weak, like a woman. And this is a big change. It’s humiliating to have to say, “Sorry, I can’t pick up something that heavy.”

Men retire from the heavy lifting club slowly. As you get older and something needs to be picked up and younger guys are around, you start letting them show off. But if you’re the only guy you keep trying to prove yourself as long as possible. George Carlin recently joked about this in his new comedy routine about turning seventy. He tells his audience, once you turn seventy you never have to lift anything again. Oh, you might pretend to try, but a younger person will rush over and do the job for you. I’m only 56, so I still have to lift things, but there are times when my wife talks about helping friends move, and I’ll remind her of my back problems. Of course, if a lovely young woman at work is in need of heavy lifting help, I don’t worry about my back so much.

Retirement from work means a huge change. Work means you are useful to other people. It’s more than just earning a living, work is social and it defines an essential part of our personality. The first thing people want to know when meeting you is what you do. Saying you’re retired is like saying you’ve stop being somebody. Of course, you solve this problem by becoming somebody new, but that’s hard to explain, especially if your hobbies are rather piddling.

Now, back to sex. Sex is a big topic, but few people express the personal details of their sex life, and neither will I. Let’s just say I’ve reach an age where I can see an end to my sex life. I feel sort of cheated by that because I remember back in the 1960s seeing documentaries about how people in their nineties could have active sex lives. I think there are some people who are still balling when their age hits three digits but they are few and far between.

Sex is not something I want to retire from, but I’m starting to see the dirty writing on the bathroom wall. I am appreciative for all the sex my wife gives me, and I do know on her part she’s doing a lot more giving than receiving, because she’s been closer to retiring from sex since menopause. (At least with me, I don’t know about her and her boyfriends.) She feels guilty about retiring from sex, which is lucky for me, but it’s not an emotion I want to play on for long. I’ve joked with her that if she doesn’t want to change the cat box then maybe I can find someone else for the job. She told me to go for it, but I think she’s confident that few women want the chore of being kindly to an overweight old bald guy. I guess she knows, it would still be changing the cat box to them too.

I don’t think I’m the only guy in this situation. I’ve gotten hints and jokes telling me the well is running dry in other marriages. Some of my friends even allude to losing interest themselves, and a couple joke like Al Bundy when he complains about having to service Peg. Although, I have heard rare reports of lucky older guys who have wives with matching libidos, but those guys might be lying, just like how some guys lied about the frequency of their sexual successes when they were younger. But statistically, I know the world is filled by all kinds, and anything is possible. Of my male friends who dine alone, they just make jokes about how happy they are they don’t have to move furniture all the time.

What surprises me about retiring from sex is how men are so much different from women. I know a lot of divorced and widowed women my age, and older, and the common consensus is they are overjoyed to be out of the sex provider business. I find this a little hurtful because it makes me wonder if they ever really liked making us guys happy. I always ask my single lady friends if they wouldn’t like to get married again, and they universally groan.

There is one common joke I hear, “Oh, I wouldn’t mind marrying a rich guy with a bad cough.” This strikes me as severely mercenary, and makes me further wonder about the motives of the women I knew when I was younger. I know books, movies and television shows are all about romance and sex, but I’m starting to wonder if pop culture hasn’t been perpetuating a long standing urban myth. I just assumed women were different before and after menopause, but now I wonder.

Retirement from sex means learning who you really are. When I was at Clarion West Writers Workshop I wrote a science fiction story about a guy who volunteered for an experimental treatment to temporarily turn off his sex drive to see what life would be like without his little slave driver. The story got a violent reaction in the critique group. The night before my older classmates, both men and women, told me how much they liked the story, so I went into the critique the next morning thinking I’d have a hit, but I was blasted by the young people. Some of the younger women called the story misogynistic, which was scary.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that. On one hand, it could have been true, on the other hand, why was the story admired by some and hated by others, and the dividing line seemed to be age? If a man turns off his sex drive does that mean he devalues women, or even hates them? Since the younger women were writing romantic stories, I could see my anti-sex story as anti-romance. What’s funny is women become anti-romantic after menopause. Well, that’s not quite true, they become anti-sex romantic.

Jane Austen is the queen philosopher of post-menopausal women. All my older women friends want a Mr. Darcy for dinner and dancing, handsome, rich, dashing – and a man who never expects the heroine to leave her Empire silhouette gown. Retiring from sex for men, means fulfilling a new role for women, one more fitting for a Jane Austen tale.

Don’t get me wrong, young women also love Jane Austen, but they either want or expect to unsnap their jeans for Mr. Darcy. Retirement from sex means changes in personality for both men and women. I think many woman are happy to go off to their little houses to live alone after their children grow up and their husbands leave them through death or indiscretion. And I think with older married couples, the concept of romance changes with them too, with women preferring their husbands to retire peacefully to their workshops or computer rooms.

In the life-long battle of the sexes I’m never sure if either sex understands the other. Women smugly claim to understand us males, thinking we live by one single motivating force, and claiming we don’t have a clue about their fairer sex. I think men have multiple drives, with sex just being the obvious one. It’s like asking little kids about going to the bathroom, inquiring if they need to go do #1 or #2. Well, there’s a lot of males hopping on one foot needing to go to #3, and that’s all women see. Sometimes it’s, “Oh, how cute,” and other times, it’s “Can’t you wait.”

I know when I go out with my women friends and the dinner check comes, they whip out their purses insisting to pay their half. I’m amused by this because I wonder if they are thinking, “I don’t want him believing I’m going to put out for $18.35 plus tip.” Like I said before, many of my lady friends have joked they would marry an old rich man with a cough. I’ve got to wonder if there is an incentive that would bring them out of retirement that falls between the price of dinner and a large inheritance.

Retirement from work means withdrawing from the complex social life of the office. Retirement from sex means withdrawing from a life of close physical contact. I don’t think men and women experience this retirement in the same way. I think the constant intense biological pull that women feel to be mothers and wives disappears after menopause, so they actually feel free and relieved to be independent. Whereas men who have always been free and independent feel psychologically cut off from people when they retire from sex. Men often die after retiring from work, and they often die when they have to live alone, and sometimes I wonder if they die when the final realization comes that the little guy is not going to have any more fun. Old women seem to thrive on independence and their retirement from sex.

What’s weird about thinking about having to retire from sex is how it changes my personal opinion about myself, and what it reveals about my personality. Gays and lesbians teach me a lot about sexual identity, in a rather round-about way. We define ourselves by who we want to get naked with, but what happens when we never take off our clothes with other people? Do we lose that identity? Do we suppress or bury it, or does it just slip away like time. Already I feel my sexual life has regressed to what it was like when I was a teenager, when I considered getting to first base a major goal. I’m back to wondering why women are so stingy with their riches.

Does retirement from sex mean a total regression, a devolution back to virginity? The phrase “old men and their toys” takes on a whole new meaning. Or will retirement from sex be the undiscovered country of my future? Or should my work retirement goal be to become an old man with money and a bad cough looking for a younger women willing to trade a few years of cat box changing duties for a long term retirement plan of her own? Or should I admit that I am not Mr. Darcy in anyone’s eyes and I should just develop a new identity, but one without sex?

Time Goes By, is my guide to getting old, and even Ronni, my elder guru, discusses the waning life of sex in, Been There, Done That. What’s Next?, although she is quick to defend that elders are having sex in, CNN: Elder Sex is a Dirty Joke, which reports 73 percent of people 57 to 64 are still having regular sex, and 53 percent of people age 64 to 75, and 26 percent for people 75 to 85, are still getting it on too. So retirement from sex, is like retirement from work, not everyone retires at the same age.

My point of this long-winded essay, is retirement is all about change, and fundamental changes, changes deep in our personality. This makes me not want to retire in any way, and keep on going the way I have been. On the other hand, I’m ready to rush into this new undiscovered country and start exploring. Escaping death is not an option, but I’d like to think everything else is, but that may not be true either. A lot of men would prefer to die at their desk, and I can understand that. And a lot of guys joke about coming and dying at the same time, and I can understand that too. The harder thing to imagine, even scary to think about, is living twenty or thirty years without work or sex or the ability to lift heavy objects.

Jim

Free Science Fiction

It’s a great time to be poor, tight or miserly because there’s lots of free science fiction offerings on the Internet. Heinlein was wrong about that free lunch deal. Just subscribing to two web sites, SF Site and SFF Audio via RSS feeds will keep you informed of more good free SF&F reading and listening than you can handle, even if you’re out-of-work or out-of-school. All you’ve got to do is read the regular posts and these sites will spot the goodies for you.

Hell, a couple months ago Tor let people sign up to get 12 free ebooks novels from them, in PDF, HTML and unprotected Mobi formats, which is good for the new Amazon Kindle. I socked them away for a rainy day when I want to try out some new authors, but I especially appreciated getting a copy of Old Man’s War by John Scalzi because I already bought and listened to it on audio. Audio books are the best way to fully experience a book, in my humble opinion, but audio books are not so good for reference and study. eBooks are great for snagging a quote. I wished all paper editions came with ebook editions for reviewing purposes – but I digress from my main topic.

I don’t know why there is so much free reading and listening on the Internet. I do know there’s a theory that a certain amount of free promotion helps with sales, but currently there’s enough free promotion to exist completely without buying.

Some writers like Cory Doctorow even offer their latest novels for free, such as his new book Little Brother. Read the intro in the HTML edition to see just how far his generosity extends. I’m waiting for the audio edition to show up on Audible.com to buy. I’ve read Cory’s stories in anthologies I’ve bought, but his name has stuck with me because of his free work on the Internet. Finding his brilliant “Anda’s Game” made me remember his name as a standout writer. The same thing happened with Charlie Stross, because of free stories on the net, or stories in anthologies, I’ve gone on to buy his books.

A good way to dip your toe in the free story waters is to read BestScienceFictionStories.com where Rusty reviews standout SF short stories, many of which are on the net to read for free and Rusty provides the links. He even offers a guide to finding free stories, “Nine Secrets For Finding Your Favorite Science Fiction Short Stories Online,” as well as “The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Short Stories.” When I was a kid I had to haunt musty used bookshops all over Miami to find classic SF stories to read. Now story hunting is as easy as a mouse-click away.

And these stories aren’t submissions from would-be writers, or trunk stories from published writers, but award winning stories, stories that have appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies, and stories that have appeared on lists like The Top 100 Sci-Fi Short Stories.

For the last decade I’ve been doing far more listening to fiction than reading. At first audio science fiction was rare, but in the last year there has been a boom in SF&F for your ears, including free productions. At first free audio featured amateur readers no better than the best student you’d hear when we had to take turns reading aloud in class. The best professional readers today act out audio books in performances I often find better than those I see in Oscar winning movies. Free audio productions have a long way to go to compete with professional productions, but surprisingly, they are evolving fast!

The granddaddy of SF audio is probably Escape Pod, currently broadcasting it’s 159th episode. You no longer have to mess with podcast software to listen to the shows, so go sample its stories with the on-page sound controls. The production quality is now equal or better to many of the commercial stories I buy at Audible.com. Escape Pod offers a lot of quality for free. Again, these aren’t just third-tier stories, but stories that have appeared in professional story magazines like F&SF, Asimov’s, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Jim Baen’s Universe, and other magazines that SF writers love to sell to.

Also, the above linked magazine sites often offer free stories to read from their for-sale magazines, especially during award times when they want to promote their nominated authors. Just following the links on this page will keep you up-to-date with what’s going in with the genre of science fiction. You’ll learn who the famous authors are as well as the new and upcoming writers.

Free audio book novels are showing up but most of them are read by amateur readers, something not to my taste, but if you like free and are patient and forgiving, you might find a lot in these offerings. I expect this category to grow in the future as amateur actors discover audio books are a way to audition their talents and get their names known. Digital recording equipment is relatively cheap, but producing a ten-twenty hour novel is quite a commitment, but they are appearing. Keep an eye on SFF Audio.

And if you want to know about classic science fiction, visit Feedbooks, where you can get ebook novels for free. Their Science Fiction page offer books from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to George Orwell’s 1984 to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, the new book mentioned above. And all the books are nicely formatted for a wide range of electronic reading devices. Teachers and professors could offer a class on science fiction and their students could get all their textbooks for free on this site.

I don’t understand how all this generosity works. It’s a hippie dream – a commie’s philosophy come true. Feedbooks doesn’t even have ads on their page. It’s a mystery, like WordPress, how do they make their money? There are even radio magazine shows like StarShipSofa.com, that appear to be the work of energetic individuals unmotivated by capitalism. It’s like the old days of fanzines, creating a new generation of online fandom, fashioning an audio genzine.

Like I said, it doesn’t take much to join this community, just add the RSS feeds from SF Signal and SFF Audio. Having online access allows web surfers to join a never ending science fiction convention, again for free, without having to buy a membership or pay for hotels, cabs and airline tickets. If you follow SFF Audio, links to panels and con speeches often show up too. And again, it’s all for free.

This makes me wonder about the financial health of the little audio book publishers and small press publishers. Is all this free competition hurting them? SF Signal and SFF Audio also link to these commercial sites, so if you want to see them succeed, patronize their online stores too. The commercial SF&F magazines have been losing paid readership for years – is the Internet partially at fault – either through free offerings, or just a diversion from old fashion pastimes? It’s all too hard to know, but we do know there were a lot more short story magazines on sale at newsstands before the advent of television, again a system that offered content for free, usually paid for by ads.

The science fiction short story may go the way of poetry – moving out of the realm of commercial sales to exist and be supported by love of the art form and its fans. I hate to see that, but I sure do love the fact that the art form of the science fiction short story seems to be growing on the Internet.

Learning to adapt to this free medium takes a bit of training and equipment. Listening to audio via on-page controls is the easiest way to join in. Just play a story and kick back. They are nice company for doing the dishes, or pursuing hobbies like modeling or knitting. Next up is learning to subscribe to podcasts in iTunes and take the stories with you when you run or walk. If you like to read on your phone, PDA, notebook computer or ebook reader, find you favorite reading software and learn where the best places that offer that format for free. I’ve barely touched on the free sites available.

Like I said, I mostly listening to books because I’ve found so many ways to integrate audio books into my routine. It’s quite wonderful to be walking down the street while classic novels are whispered into my ear.

Jim

Young @ Heart – Don’t Wait for the DVD

There are some films that you need to see in theaters, and Young @ Heart is one of them. I’m not the kind of guy who cries, but if I wore mascara my face would have been a mess during this great feel good movie. I’m curious if this show has any impact on those are are currently young of body, but I think any middle-aged person will find this story of the oldest rock-and-roll cover band to be uplifting and inspire great reflection about dealing with getting old themselves.

This is a little story about a chorus of old people who don’t give up no matter what, even when two of their own die in one week, and their little revue gets an emotional jet assisted take-off by being seen on the big screen in the dark theater. I never admired wrinkly-old-people more, because this tribe of oldsters rocked out and kicked my ass when it comes to living and gumption. At Rotten Tomatoes its rated 87%, and I’ve got to figure that other 13% of reviewers are Dead @ Heart.

Sure these old farts would get the boot from Simon and the American Idol tribunal, but songs like Coldplay’s “Fix You” was totally owned by a really fat old guy with an oxygen breather in tow. On the big screen, the lyrics of these songs were totally showcased in a way that made them sound far more meaningful than when sung as anthems to the young. “Road to Nowhere” by the The Talking Heads and “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones took on whole new meanings.

I’m listening to Coldplay sing “Fix You” right now and it just doesn’t have the impact it did in the movie. But I now admire the lyrics all the more. I’m reminded of another movie about music I saw a few weeks ago, Once, and how the songs just don’t translate with the same impact off the screen without being able to see the tortured faces who were singing words that matched their expressions.

I can imagine some viewers thinking that all of this is camp, or stupid oldster tricks, but I found the ancient ones hard core for getting up and doing things I’ve been too scared to do all my life. Janis and I sat up close and I think seeing these little people on the big screen magnified the issues of standing every day with Mr. Death in the room.

I think Young @ Heart had major impact with me because I’ve been around a lot of dying people in recent years, and I can read much more into the scenes than the film maker really worked to show. The more you know about pain, suffering, deteriorating bodies and death, the more real this movie becomes. Unless you have some inkling of what it takes to make such an effort late in life, then you’ll not truly get this film. It might be fun and a lot of laughs but you’ll miss the Sigmund Freud lessons.

It’s one thing to rock in your teens, that’s fucking easy man, it’s a whole other thing to rock out when you’re in your eighties and nineties. I think I’ll go play Mr. Young’s “Hey, Hey, My My (Into the Black).” I’ve got to keep remembering those lessons.

[Here are a handful of YouTube clips to give you an idea, but they don’t work like being at the theater.]

Jim

Rethinking the Kindle

Tonight I was reading on my Kindle and I decided I’m not completely happy with it. I love reading on the Kindle, that is, seeing the large print, reading screen by screen with a press of a button, and having a narrow line width to scan with my eyes. What I don’t like about the Kindle is the Home directory. I also discovered I no longer like reading Time magazine on the Kindle, although this might not be completely the fault of the Kindle.

For my personal use and taste, I’ve decided I like the Kindle best for reading a single book at a time. The Kindle is great for reading on a book you’re hooked on and you’re ready to sit and do some serious reading. I can read screen after screen with little eyestrain. The Kindle is a comfortable magnifying glass. Whenever I used to try to reading normal books and hold a magnifier it was never comfortable. For me the Kindle has become a tool to make reading easier on the eyes.

I don’t like managing books on the Kindle. The computer makes for a much better librarian. I wished the Home page only had unread books on it, and I could hide all my read books in another directory. Really all I want is to turn on my Kindle and start reading where I left off, so I’m not even sure I wouldn’t be happy leaving my library of books on my computer or on Amazon.

The whole thing about carrying 2,000 books around in one little device isn’t as interesting in practice as it was in theory. In other words, I like the Kindle as a book replacement, but not as a library replacement. The Kindle’s software and hardware interfaces are clunky when it involves more than reading. PREV PAGE and NEXT PAGE are perfect concepts for reading – all those other buttons, not so much.

I could handle a much simpler Kindle, but I don’t know if my tastes would make other Kindle users happy. Amazon should sell two kinds of Kindles – a streamline reader with few buttons, no broadband connection, and have it managed from a computer, for about $100, and then the more expensive Kindle with all the bells and whistles for $399. I would be happy with three buttons: an On/Off switch, and a Next and Previous page buttons, along with a USB port. Yeah, and it would need some kind of home button with a trackpad or other cursor selector device – but ultimately I’d prefer a touch screen. I wondering if something like the iPod player control would work with ebook navigation.

I’d like this simple Kindle to be super hardened so I wouldn’t be afraid of taking it places, include the bathtub or beach.

My 4gb iPod Nano can hold many unabridged audio books but if I put more than a few on it then it becomes a pain to find things. My iPod and Kindle just need room for 1-3 books – at least that’s how I feel. I’m trying to simplify my life. My iPod Nano is the perfect tool for listening to audio books. The Kindle is still too swiss-army knifey to make me happy.

I love that the Kindle is Green and I can go paperless, but I’ve decided that general magazines aren’t suited for it. My fiction magazines are okay, but modern magazines have too much content, with lots of little sidebars and snippets of facts mixed in with the articles. That busy layout doesn’t translate well to a pure reading layout of the Kindle.

Jim

Ethan Frome

For my May monthly selection for the 1 Percent Well-Read Challenge I decided to read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. This is my first reading experience with Wharton, and I was very impressed. Ethan Frome was first published in 1911, but is set earlier, in a time before cars, when people lived very differently from how they do now. I listened to an unabridged edition of this book from Recorded Books read by George Guidall, and as soon as I started listening I knew I was hearing very fine writing.

The reason I joined the 1 Percent Well-Read Challenge was to seek out books I’d normally never read, and to discover views of life that would be surprising and novel, and I think Wharton succeeded well with those goals. Ethan Frome is a very short novel that is often assigned to school kids to read, and I can understand why. The writing is vivid, sharp and full of details that should stimulate a lot of discussion with young modern minds. At one point Ethan talks about stars and constellations and regrets he wasn’t able to escape from small town life to become educated and pursue scientific ambitions. We seldom hear 19th century characters talk about science.

Ambition versus reality is a common thread throughout the story, and I can’t help but think any reader of this novel not comparing their own life with Ethan and Mattie. We all want more than we’re given, and Wharton creates a rather horrific analogy of being trapped by circumstances beyond our control. The heavy ironic ending would fit naturally into a Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show.

Classic novels of the past are a vehicle of time travel for me, especially ones like Ethan Frome that are written with a significant accumulation of details. I started listening to Ethan Frome just after listening to The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert A. Heinlein, a science fiction novel. I was surprised by the stark contrast of details and lack of details. Heinlein provided damn few details about his vision of the future, instead telling his story mostly in dialog. Wharton told her story in a chronicle of observations, descriptions of moods and voice, and sparse dialog. It would be fantastic if science fiction writers could make-up such realistic details about the future for their stories.

The Heinlein book was overtly about sexual relationships, but it was unrealistic. The Wharton book dealt with sexual undercurrents at a time when writers couldn’t write directly about sex. It was far more realistic.

Jim

* I was disturb by the number of out of print editions of Ethan Frome on the web that seemed to be no more than traps to get people to look at ads. In the old Internet days there were a few sites for free books that would nicely format the texts for reading online. These ad honeypots did not do that. A lot of these sites were geared to school kids, knowing they had to research the book. Some of these sites offered study guides, which is admirable, although the content on many were thin. I’m hoping over time some of these study guide sites will emerge as true centers of study, and not just for school kids. I think all of these book sites should try to format the text to make online reading easy, and offer links to common ebook formats for people who want to read on ebooks, PDAs, phones and laptops. It would also be nice if they could integrate their ads into a layout that is more appealing to the eyes. Fewer ads should get more attention, and if placed properly they shouldn’t detract from the content. Most of the time the layout was so bad I immediately closed my browser tab.