Retirement |

It’s December and this Coot is cold – and bored.

Posted by Ralph at 11:01 Plain 'ol Cantankerous

Feb 232015

: Image via Wikipedia

Where is Global Warming when you need it?

This Coot is frustrated today. It may be just the weather. It is only December and we’ve got frost. What ever happened to that global warming thing? Wherever it went, bring it back because I need it. Still, I’d probably be frustrated even if if weren’t freezing because my life is boring. Something is wrong here. It’s not the way it happens on TV. I did the right stuff. I went to college as long as I could get away with it. I got a job- it was even an ‘interesting’ job. Then I retired. I followed the plan. I put up with serious shit and smiled even when I hated it. Then put my nose down, did the energizer bunny thing and got another job and then another. Then I won! I got to retire. Now I want my reward.

And what’s up with retirement?

So, I’m sitting around in my retirement bliss wondering where is all the fun. I put up with big time inconvenience for all my adult life so that one day I would get to retire and do what I wanted. Isn’t that what fun is all about? Thinking back, nobody was ever very clear about what that fun would be. The TV ads always show golf courses but since I never had time to play golf I would first have to learn. Going back to school again doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Then apparently when you retire you are supposed to go live with other old fogies. Apparently retirement fun is living in some place with a golf course along with a swarm of happy, semi-conscious old people sipping wine and watching the sunsets. Can you spell B O R I N G?

Did I get snookered big time? Is the Pope catholic?

Maybe I should have learned golf.

Maybe I should stop struggling. Maybe I should learn to play the golf and live in one of those senior communities. Let’s say that I’ve managed to put away enough money to move to one of those golf course ghettos. Would my life be better? I don’t think so. First, I’d be broke from buying into the place and couldn’t afford to travel. I’d be stuck there forever. Then I’d be surrounded by mindless twits who play golf all day. What would I talk about? And who could I talk to? When you live in a place like that, how often do you see people from the real world? How often would my family actually visit me and provide intelligent conversation? My retirement may be boring now but if I lived in a golf ghetto, I would be pleading for Alzheimer’s to take me into oblivion. That is no life for a self-respecting coot.

It is a serious existential question.

Dust off the Kierkegaard. Dig out the Sartre. What even made me buy into this retirement trap of happy senility? If there is a solution to my retirement problem, then I guess it is up to me to find it. Society has certainly let me down. If I had waked up sooner, I might have paddled up a different creek and become a rock star because they seem to go on forever. Never mind it won’t do me much good to cry about it now. I’ve got to take my boring life to a new plateau. I need to find something fulfilling to do and keep warm while doing it. Something that doesn’t require so much discipline. Forget golf. I’ll take up pyromania.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Up with Getting Started

Posted by Ralph at 04:47 Uncategorized, Up With

Sep 212013

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished.

That will be the beginning.”

–Louis L’Amour

So what is so hard about getting started?

Are you stalled?

When I was a young sprout, there were ideas everywhere, or so it seemed to me. Everything was new. I couldn’t tell a fresh idea from one that was worn out. They all seemed exciting to me. Moving on through life, I gained knowledge and judgment. I began to form opinions. I got picky about ideas. I got sophisticated. College taught me that all the stuff I learned as a kid was crap, my parents were dumb, unsophisticated hicks and I shouldn’t trust my instincts unless they were first verified by The New Republic. But college doesn’t last forever. Sometime you have to start paying the piper. I had to get a job.

In the workplace it was different. So much for new ideas. Nobody even wanted me to think. It turned out that those smart college profs didn’t have any better answers than my parents. All the social profiling and posturing that seem so smart in college just didn’t seem to work in the office. I bought into all the new ideas, got creative, encouraged people to become raving fans and quickly discovered that my boss didn’t want my ideas. He wanted me to do what he wanted, when he wanted it, stop complaining and suck up. So life continued. I hunkered back and just coped, muddling through my parenting years, reeling between one crisis and another, cautiously taking baby steps without making any big commitments.

Now here in my Golden years, I find that I’m pretty set in my ways. I don’t expect to be a world beater anymore. I just want to get along. It’s what worked for me all these. Whatever success I got in life, I can attribute to taking no initiative, grabbing no limelight and following the person who can do me the most good. And then I retired.

I thought I was all finished with life. I thought all my battles were fought and lost. I thought there wasn’t a challenge left to face. I thought it was all over. Then I discovered I was wrong. Retirement makes you start all over – unless you are ready to die and get it over with.

So now, in retirement, nothing much matters. It’s just you. There is no job, no status, no followers. Whatever you had before is gone. Who are you? Who cares? Why do you get up? It’s all over if you let your job define you. If you don’t have a role in your family or your community, you might as well have died on our last day at work.

So the good news today about finishing is that it always signals a beginning. That is the problem that retired people face and the answer they choose makes all the difference. You know what ended with retirement and if you stop there all that is left is to ride that end down to the grave. On the other hand, if you choose to begin something, all the excitement and opportunities of life fill you with excitement and optimism. How can you begin something at the end of your life? The question begs the answer. You can’t. If you begin something new, you can’t be at the end. And if you don’t begin something new it is all over, whether you know it or not.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Working in Retirement

Posted by Hansi at 05:57 Plain 'ol Cantankerous, principles

Sep 192013

** EDITORS NOTE: Today we finally have a guest post from our long time contributor Hansi. Go check out his blog at Hansi’s Hallucinations. He has some funny stories and some interesting drawings, all done by him. Be sure to welcome him as our newest guest Coot. He has now finally earned his degree from Coots University, this post was his dissertation. He will defend it in the comments. Thanks for the post Hansi, we look forward to more!**

I went to a memorial service for this old Probation Officer I worked with the other day. [ The service was the other day, not me working with him. That was a long time ago]. And speaking about a long time ago, I got to see a lot of former co-workers; all of whom are retired. Now that was a trip.

If the pay is right, i all works out.

The talk consisted of mostly “What are you doing” or “Are you still doing…?” And a lot of typical retiree subject matter: one’s health, which Medicare supplemental ya have, and all that small-talk that confirms , Yes, you are a geezer. But when they asked me what I was doing , I almost felt guilty or ashamed ” I’m still there, I’m working part-time for probation.” Well that dropped some jaws. Some folks couldn’t believe it, others just shook their heads. The thought of going back was repugnant to many of them. But I thought, ‘To hell with em”. Most of them were the same persons that made the place so horrible to begin with.

Most beings I follow in the Blog-o-sphere are either retired or desperately wanting to be retired. That even includes my thirty year old Son. I had to counsel him. by the way, that he had at least twenty five more years of eating shit before he could retire; something that didn’t sound too appetizing to him. So I thought I’d do a halfway serious piece on retirement, and from a guy who is actually retired and not one of them fictional characters you see stories about in Yahoo Finance written by some thirty year old salesman in the Mutual Fund Industry.

I had a thirty year career as a probation officer and retired in 2004 at age fifty seven. I really didn’t consider being a probation officer as a ‘career’ so much, but more of a job I had for a hell of a long time. If you would have told back in college that I’d end up in corrections (the side that had the keys), I would a said, “What have you be smoking, and give me some?”. The only thing I really did liked about probation, was the shock value of telling people what I did for a living.. “You must like working with people”, being a standard response. Right, if you’re a PO, you don’t like working with people, you like screwin’ with them. And by the way I did met some real up-standing folks as a PO, real gems, role-model material.

Why did I retire? Cause I couldn’t stand it anymore! And I could do it. And I decided to get the hell out. Funny thing was, within nine months, after a brief sojourn doing volunteer work [that mythical source of promised meaningfulness for retirees] at Food Share, I was back! But not as a PO, but as a CSO: Corrections Services Officer. See, I used to work overtime at our old Juvenile Hall, but only cause I could make time and a half doing so (getting closer to what work is all about). And our Agency just completed work on a brand new, state of the art “Facility” [jail for kids] and needed experienced people to staff it. I could work part-time, when I wanted, and was paid at top step DPO which was now more that what I made when working.

Sometimes you hardly notice.

See the secret to working in retirement is: you gotta have a good reason. Why else would ya want to go back and work for the same god-damned idiotic fools that made your life so miserable in the first place?. And that good reason was Money, for me. I got to admit though that I did kinda liked working in The Juvenile Facility. It was like those “Locked Up” shows on MSNBC; searching cells, doing extractions and all that stuff. Now that was a real contact high, working with younger male co-workers in what was a super charged testosterone laden environment with Jizz levels off the charts. Made me feel young again, breaking up fights and using pepper spray.

Most importantly, working in retirement allowed my wife and I to travel the world: Peru, New Zealand, Europe, the Yucatan and numerous side trips in the States. I was a little travel-whore: will work for airfare. But really, it was a financial opportunity that I couldn’t pass-up. Well I worked until mid 2009, when the financial collapse caused the “County” to cut back, and us part-timers were the first to go. But I’m back again, now working on massive drunk driver caseloads, sitting in front of a computer cranking out bullshit for four hours a day, three times a week [not to unlike blogging]. Probation had money again; were desperate again; and here I was…again.

The reason? This was yet another financial opportunity I just couldn’t pass up. The money is outstanding, the hours what I choose, and I’m pretty much left alone to crank out BS. And in this economy, getting good paying part-time job ain’t easy. Getting any job ain’t easy.

So what’s my point? Working in retirement can be a good thing, even if it’s for the same incompetents you worked for before [if they were competent, they probably wouldn’t have needed me back again]. If you have skills that are still marketable, use ’em (or more correctly, rent them out). My retired teacher buddy is doing something similar. Being in an elementary school classroom again would kill him, but supervising home school families once a week is sweet. Maybe everybody can’t do this, but if you can, I’d encourage to put aside all old feelings and try going back. Hey they still may be sons of bitches, but if they pay well….oh well.

Well that’s this old Coot’s story. Not a very compelling argument for working after you’ve retired. But if one sees an opportunity, for anything really, you gotta jump on it, even in retirement.

Hansi

Hansi is a self-confessed geezer who just cant stop working so long as they let him work on his terms. Hansi was born and raised in Southern California and staying medicated allows him to remain serene and happy in that crazy place.

Down with Weekends!

Posted by Ralph at 17:55 Down with

May 042013

Retirement changes your perspective-like, for example, how you value your time. My priorities shifted but it is a slow process after 60 years of routine. Like Pavlov’s dog, I’d been conditioned but instead of food, I salivated for the weekends. I’d learned that weekends were when I was in charge. On weekend days I could sleep late, go where I wanted to go, spend time with the kids or just goof off. Monday through Friday were defined by work- the activity that supported my lifestyle and provided my limited free time. On a normal weekday, I would rise at 4:30 and get home about 12 hours later leaving me about four hours before bedtime. My work wasn’t onerous- some of it I liked doing- but I wouldn’t have followed that schedule if I didn’t need the money.

It’s no wonder that weekends became so important. I remember counting down the weekdays to Friday and dreading Sunday night, knowing that tomorrow morning at 4:30 my slavery would begin again. Weekends were a treasure.

Well in retirement, life isn’t like that at all. You can do pretty much anything you want any time you want. You can sleep all day and carouse all night if that makes you happy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. What was wild and crazy at 25 no longer is appealing- or even possible- at 65. By retirement, it seems you get drowsy at 8- or else you can’t sleep at all and find yourself listening to talk radio all night trying to stay sane. You still aren’t in control.

Aging isn’t the only problem however. Put aside the monkey wrenches that aging throws into the equation. You can attempt to ignore them and pretend that they aren’t obvious to everyone else but whatever you do it won’t make you young. The issue I’m talking about here is controlling your time. It’s a problem whether you are young or old but old people have so much more of it. While you were working, out of each week with 168 hours, 52 (31%) were under your control with a lot of pressure on that time. After you retire you have the entire 168 (100%). Imagine what that would have felt like 20 years ago. What would you have done with that time? If you are like me, the list would have been a mile long and you would have been as excited as a teenager getting a driver’s license. So what happened when you retired? Where is that list and why isn’t there any excitement?

What is sad about retirement is that life goes on pretty much like always and instead of treasuring those hours and filling them with living, they just dribble away, unloved and unappreciated. Nobody takes retirement seriously. It gets no respect. It requires no commitment. At a time in your life where the possibilities are limitless, why hide your head in the sand and let life flow around you? Have you forgotten how to live?

Still life does go on and inevitably, without thinking you make adjustments. You shift your shopping patterns. You eat when you feel like it. You take a nap. Without actually thinking about it, your schedule adjusts and one of the big surprises is how you feel about weekends. You discover to your amazement that weekends suck. Instead of looking forward to Friday, you now long for Monday because Monday gives you freedom. Monday is when the wage slaves are back at their desks and out of the stores, shopping malls, freeways and parks. Monday through Friday, the world is your oyster and you can search for your pearl without the madding crowds. What a surprise!

Maybe it’s a small thing after all. Maybe it can’t compare to the daily challenges and satisfactions of a job or raising a family. And maybe that small satisfaction stands in the way of making a real lifestyle change- like becoming a beach bum in Fiji or joining the Peace Corps but it is important none the less because you turned your working lifestyle on its ear. Mondays are when you savor that cup of coffee on the front porch watching your neighbors begin their commute to work, remembering the ‘good old days’ when you were with them. You have a wonderful day ahead.

So I say up with Retirement Lifestyle and up with Mondays when the Retirement Lifestyle Week begins.