When I was done, I was mostly sad for Elvis. Not just because he ended up overweight, addicted to prescription drugs, exploited by his management and hangers on, and plagued by extraordinary narcissism and insecurity, but mostly because he wasted the final years of his life, day after boring day, holed up on the second floor of Graceland, trying to discern some kind of meaning to his life.
I also felt bad for Guralnick, who’d spent years of his life chasing down the details of Elvis’s final years, looking for some kind of point to it all, but just chronicling the slow decline of a man who could not get back to who he once was - a creative and original entertainer bursting with energy and a sense of destiny. The last two hundred pages of the biography just kind of peter out after Elvis gets bored at his early-Seventies Vegas residency and he starts losing control of his addictions.
I came away from the book with a simple resolve: live your life as if there is a biographer waiting to write about it. There should never be a day where the biographer writes, “He woke up, watched some television, ate some food, and went to bed.”
I am not always successful. Today was pretty close to one of the nothing days I abhor - I woke up, solved some puzzles, read the paper, hung a picture, watched the second day of Wrestlemania, and made a pretty good dinner of homemade raviolis in brown butter and fried sage leaves with Italian sausage and green beans. That’s about it.
I may have been a little depressed because I got word this morning that a good friend of mine has been diagnosed with dementia. No one deserves dementia, but this person particularly doesn’t deserve this fate. He was a person who embraced life and friendships with love and humor. Closer to home, he looked out for me at a time when I was professionally vulnerable, something I will always be grateful for.
He is also the third person in my generational cohort who has been diagnosed with dementia, which is beginning to sound some alarm bells. It reminds me of the last time I went to a high school reunion and looked around the room at all of these middle-aged, balding men and realized that my highly idealized self-image was delusional - it could not be denied that I too was middle-aged and losing (or graying) my hair. And so I cannot deny that old age is coming for me, faster than I realize.
Which is why I have to hold myself accountable, as do you, my faithful reader, to do something meaningful every day.
(By the way, I see the page views for this blog every time I log in to write another entry. There is one person who reads me nearly every day - I think I know who it is - and I am profoundly grateful for your attention to my reminiscences and observations and efforts at self-improvement. I write these blog entries because it is good for me, hopefully fending off dementia and other horrors for a while, but also because I enjoy being read. Thank you, my friend.)
Tomorrow will be a meaningful day! My biographer will write, “Scott awoke early, ready to do his part in saving American democracy as an election clerk. He savored his bowl of cereal, his banana, and his ubiquitous Diet Coke, then dressed and reported for duty. He could not have possibly imagined what would happen later that day, but most historians agree that it was a pivotal and transformative moment in his life, propelling him in an entirely unexpected direction. A statue now commemorates the site, a single word in Latin etched on the marble base: ‘Majestas.’ He rose to his moment.”
I can’t wait to find out what happens next!
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By the way, the website is once again not letting me insert pictures into this blog. I think I am going to have to migrate to a real website sooner than later. Fortunately, I have a nephew with skills, so expect a call, sir!
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