Sometimes I look around at everything that's going on, and I feel like it's all gone wrong somehow. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Not only the result of my own bad decisions, but the whole path all of time and space has taken to converge on the spot I occupy. I wonder, then, where I do belong.
Lately, my fantasies have found me in some sort of variation of 1963 or so. The tv area in the living room is sunken; a faux-bamboo bar graces the downstairs den, next to the billiards table. I compulsively wear a suit in public, but when it's time to work, I don a short-sleeved dress shirt and a green tea-shade like you imagine an old accountant would wear. I draw a vaguely-liberal syndicated comic strip from my work-space and occasionally paint signs for local businesses; the wife writes trashy but clever pulp stories and catches the occasional shift from the steno pool. Our son has a pop-top collection and several lovingly-detailed "Famous Monsters" kits ordered from the back of a comic book.
Thursdays we invite the neighbors over for fondue and listen to bebop and tropical music. Every other Saturday we hire a babysitter and unwind at the tiki bar, dance almost a little too scandalously. When the routine of working at home gets tedious, we take a break and have a meal at the local diner; silvery, pod-like, almost futuristic looking.
The neighbors rib me for my politics and spotty church attendance, but they know I'm an upstanding, dues-paying Mason and give generously to charity every Christmas...
Wait.
Who is this person who's life I keep fantasizing about? How is it possible for me to be nostalgic about a time a decade and a half before I was even born?
Am I finally hearing that voice, that ghost that turns men my age conservative? That lulls them with fantasies of an imaginary past with supposedly more clearly-defined ethics, and makes them pointlessly stubborn and reactionary when having to confront changes going on globally, more and more frequently, that truly have no real precedent? That makes them relentlessly impatient, demanding impossibly simple solutions for impossibly complex problems?
Is this what it's voice sounds like to me?
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