Excuse my political insensitivity, but every time I think of LGBTQ2S I want to add JKLMNOP. No disrespect intended, but it wouldn’t be the first time my irreverence got me in trouble. It popped up again the other day while thinking about the ennui of Red Sky Morning and I briefly - very briefly - considered the possibility of changing the title of the painting to OGLMT - ‘Old Guys Lives Matter Too’. But I doubted anyone would get it and besides, what if it became something? A social identity initiative, like a club to which I didn’t want to belong! I pictured myself wearing a peaked military hat and uniform in front of a cluster of microphones and a teaming mass of slogan-chanting supporters! Excuse me again. Sometimes I get carried away.
The thing is that I’ve been running away from groups and clubs all my life. I recall experiencing deep sighs of relief after every departure, distancing myself from the uppity-ness of it, the divisiveness of belonging to a group that defines itself by some activity or moral high ground, declaring ‘I’m this and you’re not!’ Unfortunately, inclusion within any group of people, well-intentioned or malignant, necessarily requires the exclusion of others. Differences of opinion and lifestyle should be more nuanced if we’re ever going to get along and move forward. The last thing our troubled culture needs right now is more binary solutions - you’re either in or out.
Broadcasting and fist-pounding separates rather than unifies. Some even consider it counterproductive. Although he’s regarded as a bit of a toff today, the writer W. Somerset Maugham was a world traveller and revolutionary for his time around the beginning of the 20th century. His fiction projected the idea of being unmoral (as opposed to moral or amoral): accepting everything, being non-judgemental, uniting rather than polarizing. Critics at the time suggested that such an unstructured approach - the absence of a ‘moral’ code - would result in an inability to distinguish between right and wrong. But Maugham believed in beauty, truth and goodness - if you were truthful with yourself and others, it wasn’t an issue. Nevertheless, he struggled with the difficult distinction between a bad person who does good things and a good person who does bad things.
Do we make too much of the difference between one person and another? Perhaps the best of us are sinners and the worst of us are saints.
OGLMT. My father never liked working for a living. He worked all his life and fulfilled the expectations of being a good family man, and yet …
His parents were staunch members of the Salvation Army. Before leaving England for good his father played in a brass band on the street while his mother collected coins from carousing sailors in her tambourine.
Throughout his adult life my father espoused the gospel according to good book-keeping - as in ledgers. When he wasn’t running his business he read instruction manuals and an array of self-help books like Psycho-Cybernetics, Arthritis and Folk Medicine, and the Teachings of Swedenborg, a clairvoyant who spoke to the dead. He learned a new system of mathematics for some reason, and would occasionally have massive tension headaches that would put him out of commission for hours. He was disillusioned by the United Church, but often on Sunday mornings there were strangers in our living room - Jehovah’s Witnesses talking to him about the bible.
For many summers I worked in his warehouse. One Friday I saw him coming and going in his white shirt and tie and brown business suit throughout the day, business as usual. After everyone had left for the day he was alone in his office, quietly whimpering and cradling his face in cupped hands. That morning the nursing home had called to say his mother had passed away in the night. It was the first time I ever saw him cry. My dad had always been a pillar of strength and propriety. We drove home in silence to an empty house. He disappeared to the basement and after a while, with nobody around and nothing else to do, I left to play baseball. My sister later said we shouldn’t have left him alone.
My father was successful enough in business to sell his company and retire early. He never looked back, but for a while I could tell he didn’t really know what to do. He was accustomed to the trumped up bluster of being important and very busy. Then slowly he began to smile more often and learned to read, not for instruction or self-improvement but for pleasure. He discovered the joy of swinging hammocks in the shade and he took naps. His headaches ended. He occasionally allowed himself more than one beer, and he began power-walking daily and bowling weekly. He spent hours and days at the family cottage tinkering with the plumbing that he never got quite right.
Once, in pursuit of an elusive leak in the roof after a rainfall the previous day, I caught him doing a Huck Finn; basking in the sunshine up on the roof in baggy old clothes and rubber boots, his legs crossed and hands behind his head. After he retired, he and I would talk and share a laugh like we never had before.
My grandparents were humbled by their faith. As a family man my father lived up to his social and material expectations but for most of his adult life he was searching for something he couldn’t find. He did his job. He made a living so his family could live lives of their own, ultimately leaving him at a loose end - humbled and without purpose. Humility gave him the confidence to let go and carry on.
OGLMT. Old Guys Lives Matter Too. My dad was lucky. So many men can’t make the transition. In nature, dominant males endlessly defend and control their family of breeding females and offspring until he is eliminated or ousted by a challenging male, and the cycle continues. Non-breeding females remain with the pack to protect and serve, as surrogate mothers, while defeated males are cast out, rudderless and alone.
Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.
Although No Joke can seem to meander sometimes (!), bear in mind that I’m not trying to explain or lecture so much as provide a context from which the painting(s) emerged.
To contact me directly (not through Substack, so it won’t appear comments or anywhere else), my email address is: ewbjones6@ gmail.com.
Someone you know might like this No Joke! Why not share?
Back Pages
Definition of the Day
I’d Say Just About Every Friday Afternoon
Ennui (on-wee) - boredom, restlessness, weariness induced by inactivity.
—
A Few Old Man Facts
Suicide. A study at Colorado State University revealed that older white (European) men have higher suicide rates because they are less psychologically equipped to deal with the normal challenges of aging, likely because of their privilege up until late adulthood.
Loneliness. A study done by the Swedish Research Council found that in an 80+ age group, men who live alone reported a higher frequency of loneliness than women in the same category, having much to do with how they perceived their situation: men more often have had their wives as their only confidant, whereas women have a wider social network and may even see their new solitary life as a relief.
Sleep. A study at the University of Surrey investigating interrupted sleep patterns at night (awake for extended periods of time, trips to the bathroom, etc.), recommends that older people should not feel guilty about napping during the day if it allows them to keep active and busy when they are feeling less tired.
Sex. Testosterone is a key male sex hormone involved in maintaining sex drive, sperm production and bone health. Doctors have always known that low testosterone levels can signal health problems. New research now indicates that the same is true for high testosterone levels. Men with neither low nor high testosterone levels tend to live longer.
Happiness. Mens perception of unhappiness, dealing with ‘hassles’, tends to get worse around 65-70 years old, shows a new study at Oregon State University. It is possibly caused by health issues, cognitive decline or the loss of a spouse or friends. Aging is neither exclusively rosy nor depressing, researchers said, and how you react to hassles and uplifts as a 55 to 60 year-old may change as you enter what researchers call "the fourth age," from 75 to 100, based on your perceptions and/or life experiences.
—
Smoking Cigars At The Climate Change Summit
Too Important For Such Petty Concerns
During the period leading up to and during the Glasgow summit on Climate change (COP26) there were 182 non-commercial flights into Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Prestwick, about double the total for the previous six days. Many were cargo flights, carrying vehicles for VIPs. Seventy-six of the flights were private jets arriving in and around Glasgow. Aircraft jet engines are much worse than any other form of transport for CO2 emissions - greenhouse gases.
Due to their lower occupancy levels, usually with a maximum of 8 or 10 passengers, private jets produce considerably more emissions per passenger than commercial flights. A popular private jet, the Cessna Citation XLS burns 867 litres of aviation fuel per hour. Many of the G20 leaders flew directly from Rome to Glasgow, taking about 2 hours and 45 minutes, meaning that each flight used 2,356 litres of jet fuel that produced 5.9 tonnes of CO2.
The COP25 summit in 2015 was attended primarily by environment ministers, scientists and activists. The COP26 summit in 2021 was primarily attended by business leaders, financiers and monetary officials. For environmentalists the summit this year was a fiasco. Not only were they out-numbered, but China and India, the two largest coal-burning countries, refusing to sign on to phasing out burning the stuff.
The financial industry did much better with the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, fronted by (our Canadian golden boy) Mark Carney, uniting 450 financial institutions with about $130 trillion at their disposal, more than the world generates in a year. The alliance’s plan involves “driving upward convergence around corporate and financial institution net-zero transition plans, using financial levers to impose carbon neutral rules on economic factors.” In other worlds, they’re keeping their mitts on the cash. The alliance won’t disburse funds on climate projects (to scientists and activists) but rather, direct how the funds will be invested, favouring the financial industry.
—
Beware Of Old Men With Sticks
Barbara and Dan, both 81 years old, were expecting the arrival of an electrician because of some work being done on their street in Niles, Illinois that could cause short-term power outages. After examining their fuse box the electrician asked the elderly couple to join him in the basement so they would ‘know what to do’, if they were alone and the power went out. They suspected something was up when they heard the floorboards creaking upstairs. They dashed upstairs to find two accomplices carrying stuffed pillow cases from the bedroom. Dan quickly grabbed his grandfather’s shillelagh, an Irish walking stick with a large knob of wood at the top, and started swinging. He hit one of the men in the back of the head and another in the crotch. Dan chased them barefoot across the lawn and caught up with them in their vehicle where he cracked the front and rear windshields. In the meantime Barbara had been on the phone with the police and the three were apprehended.
Joke At No Joke
That’s it!
Did you like/ not like this issue? If you didn’t, lighten up. It’s just a newsletter.
If you did, let me know! You can do it here ⬇︎
…………………………… or you could do this ⬇︎
and have every issue delivered to your email box and help me access more subscribers, which would be nice!