Uncontrolable
Member
- Location
- Tucson Az
I thought you were going to say that you died. Nice work.
Once, long ago in my youth, aging was an inconceivably horrible curse, something that only happened to old people: old ladies with blue hair, old men with pants hiked up to their sagging chests.
But then it happened – I began to age.
It didn't happen all at once, of course – not like some stellar explosion or even the resulting black hole. No, it snuck up on me. It was quiet and gentle and nondescript, but come it did. In bits and pieces.
Where I used to walk for 15 miles without breaking a sweat, I now experience stabbing pains in my right calf at 5. Where I used to party for 48 hours straight, doing the full spectrum of legal and illegal substances and associating with women of questionable virtue, I now doze off in front of Perry Mason with a half-eaten bag of pretzel sticks at my side and an overweight cat on my lap, the coffee (without sugar) growing cold in the convenience-store travel mug.
Where I once threw a Band-Aid on a sword wound, I now urinate blood.
But those are just the physical things, the things that hit you like a long-extinct 4-4-2 steam locomotive on a downhill run through the Rocky Mountains' South Pass of the Union Pacific line. The mental changes came next.
I began to forget. Little things, like where I was and who I had been married to for 15 years. I blamed the demon rum as long as I could, then took to telling myself it was flashbacks from the drugs. I stopped having ideas that shook the universe.
Now they just quivered in my skull, microscopic Chihuahuas of fear.
Worst of all was the spiritual. They say that the mind/body/spirit triangle is unbreakable, that when one falls it drags the others kicking and screaming with it. I stand here before you today (well, actually, sit) as proof of the validity of that statement. Where once I stood tall and proud, unbreakable, resolute, I now scurry about roach-like, drooling and babbling.
And yet …
To paraphrase Sophie Tucker: I've been young and I've been old. Young is best.
Screw old.
How to fight it? How do you engage in fisticuffs with The Natural Order of Things? Low blows? Eye gouges? Alum on the mouthpiece? I'm totally not-ready for this. I'm still 6 years old, playing with my G.I. Joes in the sandbox. I don't want this old crap.
But it comes ...
I'm supposed to have received a few niggling benefits at this point, or so I was always told. Grow old gracefully. Gain wisdom. Become distinguished. Be a mentor. No, it didn't turn out that way. I feel like a fake, like a carnival huckster on Quaaludes.
Hurry …. hurry … hurry … crawl right up … smell the aging flesh, see the sadistic tortures still in use today …
I feel cheated. There was so much I was supposed to do, so many places I was supposed to see, before I got old. Too many things to feel. Too many women left unsatisfied. I left the real world and nestled into this electronic one, hoping that it would somehow prolong the inevitable.
It hasn't. If anything, it's made me age faster.
I'm still a gentleman, though. I DO have that. When the young ladies smile at me when I hold a door for them I can still dream, much like an old hound dog dreams of former glories in the field. I think my legs even kick when I'm dreaming.
Speaking of dreams, they just aren't there anymore. Oh, sure, the mandatory once-a-year Freudian falling dream, or the occasional Woody Allen-ish nightmare where I'm spinning around on the sidewalk so that no one can sneak up on me. But the good ones, the really memorable ones, the ones where I'm Major Nelson and Genie is all mine, forever, are long gone.
What's left yet to experience? Food? It does nothing for me. I've always been an eat-to-live type, not a live-to-eat one. Most food now is poison anyway, so maybe I can shoot for the Taoist ideal of existing on only breath and morning dew.
And pepperoni pizzas.
As sad as it may sound, pepperoni pizza is one of the few things left that truly give me some measure of joy. I know, I know – the grease will kill me, the calories are excessive, all that cheese will produce phlegm … You know what? I don't care. It makes me feel good, and at this stage of the game that's all that matters.
I no longer drive, so I can't just hustle out and pick up the latest Corvette to cover up my crippling insecurities. There are no beautiful sunrises or sunsets where I live, nor any breath-taking constellations at night. The only wildlife I can enjoy watching, for a brief moment, is a few threadbare sparrows fighting over an empty crack vial.
So … this is it? This is old age? These are The Golden Years?
Bah.