“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.”

~~~

The “buzzword” for most men I know is relevance. 

To my late father, it meant carrying a business card with his name on it next to “Chairman and CEO.”

This gave him relevance no matter what else happened to be going on in his life.

Symbols like these are the quintessential calling cards that legitimize driven, proud men.

It’s otherwise known as a good “back story” every man needs to get the right party invitations.

I inherited this “gene,” if you will, and continue to struggle with what it means to feel a viable part of a world I’ve already traversed a thousand times.

Aging rockers continue to tour long after the songs have been written and the money’s in the bank. They don’t know what else to do with themselves, and more importantly, the limelight is better than no light at all.

Movie producers keep producing movies because they want to feel like they have more stories to tell, that there’s still juice in the tank…that they’re still viable.

I even heard a guy in Aspen say that no matter how much money he had to throw around during ski season, he still felt invisible:

“Hell, $200 mil is a drop in the bucket for a lot of these people. I can’t win.”

What he was saying was that he felt invisible in a world where money and power and influence and connections are the sole determinants of human value.

Sadly, for many men this is the fuel that keeps the soul alive.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t exclude myself from any of this.