A Pretty Good Country for This Old Man: An Interior Dialogue
By Scott Dickensheets
Hey, you’re old.
Tell me about it. I didn’t use to be. Then, suddenly, whammo. “Old age,” quoth James Thurber, “is the most unexpected thing that happens to a man.” True in my case.
Surely you had some inkling ...
Well, I don’t mean suddenly in a bodily sense. I’ve had crunchy knees since JV football, and my back has been 85 years old for a decade. No, the suddenness was more about, I dunno, headspace.
Headspace?
I think the term is “subjective age” — how old you feel. According to an article in The Atlantic Monthly, most people picture themselves as roughly 20 years younger than their chronological age. I skewed even younger, thanks to a 10th-grade sense of humor that accounts for 50% of my cognitive activity. This naturally deluded me into thinking I had plenty of life ahead. But, recently, with a savage forward snap, my subjective age caught up, and, as noted, whammo.
Did something happen?
Some things, plural: a cancer diagnosis (not mine), several deaths (same), and a 62nd birthday (that was mine). This slurry of old-guy-sees-the-light clichés jolted me with a new urgency, and, after 39 years in Las Vegas journalism, I decided to stop putting off doing what I really want to do. A boringly common realization, I agree. But one that abruptly reset my timetable. So, even though I worked for a terrific company, the newsletter and podcast outfit City Cast Las Vegas, which afforded me plenty of creative leeway, once I hit 62 — the earliest you can collect Social Security — reader, I retired. That was in February.
Sounds terrific. How’s it going?
Haphazardly! Turns out that, much like skydiving, there’s more to it than jumping.
Oh, really.
Yeah. See, after brining for decades in corporate productivity ideals, shucking that mindset hasn’t been the easy downshift I expected. I still judge the value of my time through an internalized boss-gaze: Why *am* I reading a book in the middle of the workday?! Even though I don’t actually have a workday. And more reading time was my number two reason for retiring. My brain’s tired old dopamine receptors still crave that zap of validation I once received from getting stuff done, from vanquishing a to-do list. It’s almost like nothing’s changed. Yet!
Sounds like you should learn to relax.
Absolutely! Which I thought would be easier, since aimless procrastination comprises the other 50% of my brain. However, I do plan to eventually try some of the usual retirement things — maybe take a class or two, make some artwork. And I think I’m required by retirement law to engage in whatever domestic activities “puttering” involves. That should help me chill.
By the way, what was your number one reason for retiring?
I kept phrasing it as “a life of gentlemanly freelancing.” That is, freed from an employer’s agenda and released back into ordinary life, I want to apply whatever creative energies I have left only to projects that genuinely interest me, regardless of their gravity, newsworthiness, or stakes. No more throwing elbows out there in the attention economy! I’m more curious about offbeat people, peculiar encounters, outlandish thought experiments; life-and-death musings one day, a funny list the next. Along the way I also mean to unlearn a career’s worth of deadline writing tricks and workarounds. I want to write slowly, pay deeper attention, think in funkier time signatures. I don’t want to care about readership metrics. Also, I have a backlog of adjectives and semicolons that AP Style discouraged me from using. Note to future editors: You’ve been warned.
That all sounds like quite an adjustment!
A bigger one? Trying to be okay with the diminished cultural presence that typically goes with old-fartdom. Let me quote the poet Erin Belieu: “In my early dotage my edge / begins to bubble ...” Younger generations drive the culture now, and I have fewer relevant observations about a society slowly defamiliarizing around me. Indeed, now that I don’t have a media company to regularly convene me an audience, will anyone care about my geezercore stylings? Can I accept being rizz-less and mid, left behind by time and TikTok? We’ll see. But I adamantly don’t want to be one of those bitter olds clenched around their ancient certainties and kids-these-days scorn. Trying to avoid that.
Good call. So, what’s ahead for you, other than puttering?
I have no extravagant ambitions, actually — no secret novel I’m itching to write, no big manuscript to summit. I’ve been writing essays for Desert Companion magazine and arts coverage for Double Scoop. Beyond that, my goals are fairly humble: poke around southern Nevada and noodle about it for whomever might want to read that sort of thing. Will I inflict yet another Substack on the world? Or just write wildly, with a flagrant lack of discrimination, publish what I can, and instruct my heirs to burn the rest? (Use extra lighter fluid on those poems, kids.) Who knows?! I’m only a few months into this. The best part? It’s entirely up to me.
Now a freelance writer and editor based in Henderson, Scott Dickensheets has worked all over the Las Vegas media scene: most recently as a daily newsletterist for City Cast Las Vegas, and before that as features editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, deputy editor of Desert Companion magazine, and editor in chief of the local alt-weeklies CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly. For Nevada Humanities, he has edited or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes anthology series, and co-edited Sagebrush to Sandstone: A Humanities Guide to Outdoor Nevada.
Photo courtesy of Scott Dickensheets.