press session for Chrissie Hynde: Stockholm
There’s just something about the tenor of my generation’s words that always resonates with me.
I can’t imagine why.
Up Next!
Straight Talk from Boomer and “Pretender” Chrissie Hynde [63]
Post Category → book reviews
Midlife Not for the Faint of Heart
“Out here on the perimeter, there are no stars…” Jim Morrison
Yea, no shit.
The following is an excerpt from my new book, Urban Dystrophy, now available on Amazon.
It’s probably a familiar narrative to many of you:
“I’m sitting at a white plastic table in front of a wine bar. It’s one o’clock on a Tuesday morning and an empty parking lot is the only landscape. The streets are deserted. Most guys my age are asleep. Their time came and went, and they let go in that unconscious way most men do when their stories have been told and the end is a long, drawn-out epitaph.
But, I stayed behind, along with the rest of the itinerants of the night. I have no place to go that I haven’t already been, and nothing to do but wait and hope and sometimes pray for mercy that relevance and that one big love will one day redeem me, but it never does. Not really.
We’re beyond salvation. Most of us. There have been exceptions, but the grace is never a hundred percent and you have to make peace with that the best you can. We’re members of the bitten, the damned, the fighters against the forces of time until we no longer can. Most of us are children of narcissists, narcissists who never died because narcissists never do—they’re just recycled and the kids are left to clean up the mess.
I wonder where all the time went. Time is all I have left to make a final stand. I remember my first midlife crisis at 28. The rest is a blur. Decades came and went. Now I can’t even remember yesterday, much less last week.
Urban Dystrophy
http://www.amazon.com/Urban-Dystrophy-Perverse-Truths-Mid-Life-ebook/dp/B00VH3NKGA
Notice: My Revised Fine Art Photography Site, www.jayrusovich.com, is Now Live.
Recreation, 2005
From my first book, Insideout, available on Amazon.
New Amazon Review of Urban Dystrophy, Unexpurgated
As every writer knows, the reviewing process can be a grueling exercise in humility. Some people like what you have to say, others not so much. A lot of it depends on a person’s mood that day, or projection stemming from conflict, or just plain jealousy that you published a book and they didn’t. I know. it’s pathetic. But it happens all the time.
With this as a backdrop, I thought that i would share a recent review that meant a lot to me. The reader obviously understood the message and offered a thoughtful response, which is always appreciated.
Here it is in its entirety:
“Who wrote this book? Is he kidding? Is he serious? Is he the angriest man in the urban mid-life dating world? Or is he part of a silent majority, the rest of whom lack either the courage or literary skill (or both) to expose the innermost secrets of many middle-aged men in the world of high income big city dating?
Treat it as parody, or treat it as reality, or some of both – either way, it is a great read!
A book for men who want to confirm what they already suspect or know.
A book for women who want to understand what many men are thinking – either the men they want to avoid, the men they want to attract, or the men they are already seeing.
Meet the new, urban, single, wealthy, successful middle-aged man. He’s post-angry. He’s entitled. He’s demanding. And that is only half the story. Meet the new urban single middle-aged woman. She’s unrealistic. Utterly oblivious. Living in a dream world of self-created fantasy.
Meet Urban Dystrophy.
Where men are middle-aged at 56.
But women are middle-aged at 36.
In the world of the big city, middle aged dating is a battlefield filled with dysfunction, borderline personality disorder, hidden agenda, and narcissism. For people who find themselves single in mid life (bad), or who never married (worse), finding a mate who isn’t carrying more baggage than a UPS truck or who is who they say they are or who considers honest self representation a virtue is more unlikely than winning a multi-state lottery.
Middle age may be the new 30, but dating in middle age is the new torture. Built on mass media created thrones of high expectation, the middle aged mans dating experience is all about his desire to have the kinds of girls that he either did have or couldn’t have when he was 25. But now that he is affluent and 50, he deserves – is entitled to – those girls. Why would they want a 25-year-old guy, when he has everything to offer them? After all, we KNOW that women fall in love with their ears, not their eyes, don’t we?
For many women, this will be a primer on the kind of man to avoid. Unfortunately, the book points out that most of the men they believe they want fall right into this category.
For many men in the middle-aged dating scene, this will be a full-on reinforcement and vindication of their dating experiences and choices.
Anthropological intrigue.
In the land of Urban Dystrophy, young women in their late 20’s who are offended when men in their mid-fifties or older hit on them are offended not because they think the man is pathetic, but because the man is insulting them – how DARE he think they cannot attract an uber successful man in his early 30’s? The middle-aged man becomes the ultimate insult. For the middle-aged man who is rejected by the woman in her late 20’s or early 30’s, she’s just an idiot. No offense taken. He’ll find another.
Who is going to wait on the sidelines until she either dates down, waaaay down, the economic ladder (as men have done forever), or dates up, waaaay up, the age range (as men have done forever – after all, the 69 year old man happy to be dating her will be dating waaaay down the age range – middle aged women.
You may think that this is written from the perspective of a person who has money and financial success at the core of his soul. And maybe you think that if you have, for example, God there instead, you will have a different outcome. And you will. You won’t live in the middle of the big city, divorced or never married, hanging out in health clubs or wine bars or charity events to find love. You will be in church. That said, in the world of Urban Dystrophy, they are both a kind of self-delusion. The delusion being, that we are worthy just as we are. Self-love is delusional love, without God, or Money, or Beauty. Because, in the big city, all the self love in the world won’t get you laid – not without the other stuff, anyway.” M.F., Las Vegas, NV.