There's Never Not News Anymore

I recently bought a Pentax MX 35mm camera from a guy who writes comic books that people have heard of. It came with a 50mm lens, but I'm not so fond of that focal length, so I ordered a 28mm f/2.8 from someone in Tokyo, which somehow showed up at my door five days later. The camera is entirely manual. There's no automatic anything. The only functionality that isn't mechanical is the TTL light meter.

Both of my Canon AE-1 cameras have been out of commission for so long that I'd forgotten what it was like to shoot an old-school SLR with no fancy autofocus or anything so luxurious. This is like a stick shift with rack-and-pinion steering, only with film, which makes it even harder. You really have to know what you're doing, most of which is done in your head, and you're still left hoping for the best when all is said and done. It's cool. The camera was only going for $70 and came with new foam, seals, and shutter bumper¹, but the seller took off $10 because he thought sometimes the shutter might stick, and it has stuck a few times but always goes back down when I advance the film, which is not so bad. It's an old camera made in the 1970s. I can relate. We're in the same cohort, the camera and I.

Aging with your cohort is a strange process too often taken for granted. As we grow older, our friends, family, colleagues, high school crushes, college lovers, musical idols, Hollywood sex symbols, and so on grow older alongside us. At some point, all of your friends have a bad back and paunch to go along with their grey hair—if they're lucky enough to have hair, that is. Nobody can read the menu without cheaters. It's ordinary and obvious that people are doughy and prone to breaking into a sweat going up a single flight of stairs. You tell yourself that's just what people look like, but then a fit 20-year-old cruises by on a bicycle perched atop a racing saddle while wearing yoga pants that leave little to the imagination, and the ruse is up.

Now, consider you're pushing 70 or 80 (squarely in the boomer encampment). All of your college crushes are senior citizens, nearly everyone you know has retired, and anyone who's anybody is taking at least a half-dozen medications so as not to fall over dead. A lot of your crew are still quite sharp, but many, maybe most, are nothing like they once were in their prime. The idols and sex symbols of your youth are mostly dead or doddering at best and certainly not remotely sexy anymore. But that's just what people look like. Only not really. You've seen taut young buttocks in sweaty hot pants blithely wandering city streets in the summer sunshine. There is no denying the clock has both ticked and tocked.²

Today in history, Joe Biden dropped out of the race for President of the United States, not necessarily because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because it was inevitable given the state of his health and the small matter of a cabal of billionaires ganging up against him, many of whom outright own the very same media³ that prattles on about how We the People are in charge of our democracy, but mostly they're lying, and we're not in charge of anything, except maybe the thermostat, and even that's only because they can charge you for it.⁴ The situation only became more blatant after Citizens United. Billionaires own the government, the land it stands on, and all of us.⁵ Nonetheless, it was the right thing for him to do, even if it doesn't work out. It's not normal for world leaders to look like that.