Pretty in Gray

Hello and happy June! According to my new bestie, ChatGPT, the month of June attributes its name to Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth, among other things.  

Okay, first of all, let's state the obvious: June should not be named after some nebulous pagan deity—it should be named after freaking June Cleaver. She's the goddess of basically everything, and will forever beckon my heart until we meet again for a hearty back hug and glass of whole milk in heaven's kitchen.

And secondly, marriage and childbirth are two completely disparate arenas for Juno to preside over. Weddings don't involve excruciating lumbar pain, ice chips and spectacular torrents of profanity directed at the groom for inflicting such suffering. That happens on the honeymoon (ba-doom-bah).

Anyway, thought I'd grease the skids a little by rattling off a few more fake headlines that were left strewn across The Needling's cutting room floor over the past month or so:

• Kraken drops Root Sports and pisses off all 4 subscribers.
• Trump confused about why Supreme Court won't grant immunity to his debilitating syphilis.
• West Seattle man jogs into crosswalk with 3 seconds to go and still makes it to other side in plenty of time.
• All light rail stations slated to include Level 1 trauma centers by 2035.
• West Seattle man confirms that it's the end of the world and the ants are taking over.
• Justice Alito says every day is Flag Day, bitch.
• "I love that shit, man." Biden perplexed as to why Israel wants to eliminate hummus.
• Group of pissed off kids and a few adults with PTSD chase away Seafair Pirates for fucking good.
• For 143rd straight year, lawn darts and Jågermeister top Father's Day wishlists.
• Record low tide at Alki reveals body of Jimmy Hoffa.
• Trump-Biden debate to include dunk tank.

There we go. Helps the digestion to purge myself of that mental flotsam. I feel randy and spry once again. 

In other non-developments, it's hard to believe I've been pretired* now for over four months.

*"Pretired" is a term I made up. It's defined as the 5-7 year period prior to full-on retiring, when jobless oldsters are most vulnerable to ageist asshole hiring managers and their bullshit attitudes about older people. The word is a shirt-tail relative of "funemployment." 

I had heard that getting a job was more challenging for those of us a little longer in the ear hair, but experiencing it in real time was a little shocking. One interview seemed to have gone particularly well. It was a solid 45 minutes long and it seemed like the role was a perfect fit for my skill set. In addition, I felt like I'd really hit it off with the Chief Creative Officer (a title I now find sort of obnoxious). I was ready to enter the weekend feeling more confident than Rudy Guiliani with a new catheter. But at the very end, just before signing off, he thanked me for my time and told me that "we're looking for someone who can inject some energy into our department." 

Right. Energy. I understand your code, hipster. One of the most frustrating things I've encountered during my job search is the assumption that five or six good years at a place just isn't enough for an employer to take the "risk". Here's a little secret for the chief creative poobah: My generation is one of the most loyal workforces out there. I can't speak for X, Y or the Millennials, but in my experience, if you can get five years out of anyone these days, that's pretty damn good. 

But bitterness is not a good look, right? Two recent documentaries—Brats, with Andrew McCarthy and Thank You, Goodnight, with Jon Bon Jovi—illustrate just that. Both men are staring down 60 and both appear quite unsettled about their legacies. They go to extremes to get answers, and (spoiler alert), I'm not sure the answers were the ones they were chasing. Men my age tend to define themselves by their careers, and that's my challenge. Paradigms grow calcified over time, and I can choose to wallow in the unfairness of it all, or I can move forward and find joy in the everyday. 

It's what my favorite people already do.