Ungovernable

When I cut my last tie to Centre Stage July 15, I anticipated something like the transition from sleep to wakefulness. A brief period of disorientation, a hot shower, a meal and a brisk walk to … wherever.

Instead, my health deteriorated so quickly and so sharply that I thought I was dying. I paid a lawyer to draw up a will and various powers of attorney. I laid grim contingency plans. I tried to feel satisfied with a life reasonably well lived.

The dietitian tells me that my gluten intolerance was foreordained, triggered by a genetic alarm clock wound in the womb and set to go off on or about the age of 50. Maybe so. Maybe it’s just coincidence that I hit 50 so close to the moment of impact with so many stressors. I have doubts, but maybe so.

Whatever the causes, it’s taken almost a half a year for their effects to dissipate. And counting. It’s taken almost a half a year for me to regain any interest in working as an actor, to feel at ease in my old haunts.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) determines that there’s been an economic downturn or upturn only in retrospect. That, I guess, is how it will be with my transition from 49-year-old hyper-partisan marketing director to 50-year-old freelance actor/designer. In a wider sense, that’s how it will be with my transition from long-term cohabitation to whatever’s now and whatever’s next.

Turn, turn, turn.

The banker’s chair that I picked up at Southern Gents in Savannah earlier this week is installed. All it needs now is some wheel lubricant and the chair pad that I ordered yesterday from Pottery Barn.