I am old.
Too often, this phrase is thrown around by people who are demonstrably young, when faced with circumstances that make them feel older than people who are demonstrably younger than they are. Sometimes, these judgements can come from external sources: I was at a party, had just turned 30, and a 23 year old said “I hope I never get that old!”
I don’t think she knew what she was saying, and I think she’s probably happy that she made it to 35, if she did. Not everybody does.
With that in mind, I will amend my statement about my oldness by saying what I really mean, instead: I am not a product of this era, I am the product of a previous era.
Because things change, it can be difficult to adjust to some aspects of the era in which we find ourselves, which is what caused me to have this thought (that I am old). For instance, I grew up being able to watch tv shows on one device (a television) and I had to either watch the show while it was on or hope that my VCR recorded it when I wasn’t there. Where I am typing this newsletter, from where I am sitting, I can count five devices on which I can watch a tv show, and only one of those is a television.
As a lifelong fan of science fiction, I am excited by the offerings of this era. I don’t just mean the technological ones, but the social ones, too. I believe that we are continually advancing as a culture, too, and correcting some of the things that we wish previous eras hadn’t done. I know I have evolved, personally, and an acknowledgment of this evolution is what prompted my thesis (that I am old).
GENDERS
I have heard people even older than me say things like “there weren’t so many genders when I was a kid.” Sometimes, they are simply making an observation without judgment, and I prefer to think that most of the people who I hear say that are saying it without malice. I’m happy that I don’t know many malicious people, and almost nobody I know has expressed malice toward people who eschew the relative simplicity of the two genders assigned at birth that those of us of previous eras experienced.
People like me, those who are lucky enough to live long enough to experience new eras, sometimes have difficulty with the features of the new eras. That’s what causes them to say things like “I’m too old to understand instagram” or, sometimes, “there weren’t any trans people when I was young.”
One kind of transition is the root word for those who identify as trans. It is factually incorrect to assert that trans people didn’t exist before our current era. This is like a person living in 1770 saying that there was nothing to breathe when they were kids, because oxygen had not been discovered yet. It was always there. They just didn’t have a name for it.
I am very sad that people who were gay, or non-binary, or trans, before our current era, were treated badly for it. I’m also sad for the way they are often treated in our current era. We have not yet arrived at a point in our cultural evolution where these humans are universally treated with the same dignity and respect that all humans deserve. This is true about a depressingly large segment of humans all over the world, but I am heartened by the tendency for our culture to become more accepting over time rather than less. There are bumps in the road, but the destination remains the same. I don’t know if we will ever arrive at perfect parity among all humans with the same dignity and humanity everywhere, but we keep aiming for it. This is a good thing for all humans, but it is a process that particularly suits me. I evolve. But it’s not always easy.
BARNACLES
I’m going to use a boat analogy. I’ve only ever been on a few boats, and generally avoid them, but I think I’ve read enough books and watched enough movies to have an idea about how they work. Wish me luck:
We all move into the future at the same pace, but we don’t control the winds or the waters. I went through a lot of changes in 2019, and not all of them were good. Some of them were neutral. Some of them were terrible. Some of them were fantastically great. Most of these things that happened to me were out of my control, and those are the kinds of things that are my chief concern here.
BARNACLES FOR REAL THIS TIME
Barnacles are little crustaceans that float around the ocean until they find the perfect spot. They secrete a really strong glue and then do some more secreting and surround themselves with a hard shell and a door that opens and closes depending on whether water is moving past it. Barnacles are hermaphrodites, and they reproduce basically by tickling their neighbors. This video is a good guide to how barnacles reproduce, but if the word “penis” makes you giggle, you might want to wait until you’re alone to watch it.
https://youtu.be/znlU8nR5hI8
One thing I learned from that video is that barnacles have the largest penis-to-body ratio in the world, bringing new gravitas to the name Long Dong Silver.
Barnacles need sea water full of plankton to pass through their feet in order to feed, so they like places with lots of moving water. Sure, that means tide pools but it also means things like boat hulls.
Boat hulls are great for barnacles but barnacles aren’t so great for boats. A boat moves through the water like an airplane moves through the air, which is to say that the smoother the surface, the better. The US Navy estimates that barnacles are responsible for 40% more fuel because of the drag they create in the smooth sailing of their ships. England’s use of copper on the hulls of their ships, which prevents barnacles from attaching, is one factor credited with that country’s domination of the sea during that period, but I won’t digress into naval history as much as it pains me to leave it.
Barnacles are also a pretty fun metaphor for the gunk we carry with us through life. They stick to us and make it harder to move cleanly through the water. The water in this analogy is time, or whatever you want it to be. In my version, it’s *life*. Water is life, yes, but water that our boats move through is also life. The water I move through comprises everything external to me, and it’s important to pass through it with as much ease as possible. This takes work.
THERAPY
Therapy is a way of getting rid of those barnacles. Luckily, time has a way of stripping them away, too, but there are usually more right behind them. It’s impossible to be an active participant in your own life and not accumulate emotional barnacles. Simply accepting that fact of life is an important step toward good emotional hygiene. Imagine the boater who refuses to acknowledge barnacles. It won’t be long before his boat can barely move.
This isn’t a blanket endorsement for therapy, because it’s not right for everyone. Sometimes people think therapy is just paying someone to listen to your problems (it isn’t) but even if that were true, what’s wrong with that? It’s better than burdening my friends and family with my barnacles. Therapy is also useful because it forces you to make an honest assessment of your state of mind. We all need to audit our internal lives once in a while and take a look under the surface. There might be barnacles there.
MY NAME
I wanted to keep this section as far from the section about transitions as possible to avoid any appearance of suggesting that using a new name for publishing purposes has any of the weight or importance of, say, a trans person’s name change. That’s not what this is!
I’ve explained before about my name. James Foreman is too common, and too much like other James Foremans who are more famous than me. If I want people to read my writing, and seek out more of it, then I want them to be able to find me quickly. The best way is to use a name that is completely unique.
Hazlett Foreman is the name under which I’m publishing everything new I do, from now on. It’s distinct from me, James Foreman, because he works and does marketing stuff and writes for money, and that guy is me and the stuff Hazlett Foreman publishes might not be the same stuff that James Foreman would publish. It’s something I should have done a long time ago, but I didn’t think of it until recently.
I remember when Google wasn’t as smart as it is now, and searching for me led to, well, me. It doesn’t anymore.
THE HISTORIES
If you subscribe to this newsletter, you already heard about the Hazlett Histories, so I won’t keep bothering you about it.
Except to encourage you to subscribe to it again. Don’t make me bat my eyelashes, because I will!
xxoo