Tag Archives: aging

My Shopping’s Done. You?

Pardon me while I wax nostalgic such that it’s all shiny and the water on it bubbles up to where you could use it to wrap fragile mailings, but Christmas just isn’t what it used to be.  It probably has something to do with my considerable and snowballing oldness and its accompanying cantankerous irritability.  Get off my lawn, by the way.

When you’re a kid every Christmas is like, well…Christmas.  It was an enchanted time of sugarplums and fairies and sugarplum fairies and more sugar but not quite so many fairies.  They were days of innocence in which an infant could travel to grandma’s in the back window of an LTD and if you sat too close to the fire in your PJ’s they would melt right onto your skin.  It was back when it was perfectly safe to drape a month-old, dried-out evergreen tree in the same red-hot incandescent light bulbs we used in toy ovens to bake tasty treats. Continue reading →

Go Ahead, Take My Advice…Please

Being middle-aged and rapidly ascending the slopes of Mount Geezerhood, I find myself in the increasingly awkward situation of not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. Like any strapping, red-blooded American boy, I went through much of my life more than a little concerned about what it meant to be ‘strapping’.

I also went through the typical childhood process of determining my future profession from my consumption of 1970s television. Over time, I weeded out many of these options based on the information I gleaned from my expert friends at school who seemed so much more worldly than I—the very same ‘experts,’ I later realized, who ate boogers and paste. Continue reading →

Just Say No to Rugs

Now that I’m into my mid-forties, I am looking for ideas on what to do for my mid-life crisis that 20 years from now I can look back on and say, “Wow, was that ever a mid-life crisis!”  I’m talking crazy, dangerous things like juggling flaming machetes or switching to briefs.

One idea I’ve had is to get my iPhone out and use my Sprint service to get my Facebook friends together and go to Sears to purchase a bunch of Columbia tents, then pitch them in a public park while we survive on Starbucks and Kraft Mac’n’Cheese cooked over a Coleman stove in our soggy Levi’s and Patagonia rain coats in the hopes of getting ABC, NBC or CBS to cover us as we rail against evil corporations. But somebody’s already done that. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday to Me!

I had a birthday last week that put me over the top from forty-something to forty-something + 1 and entrenched me even more firmly into the despairing chasm that is middle age. Middle age is that time in life where you are at the half-way mark from birth to death and your focus transitions from things like wondering whether or not the chicks dig you to things like wondering whether or not you turned off the iron or whether or not you are getting enough dietary fiber.

I admit that I have of late been noticing such signs of aging: my menus are getting further away, my socks are getting darker, and the phrase “feeling your oats” has taken on a whole different meaning. Continue reading →

Ryan’s Song

It’s finally happened. The Bon Jovi songs I knew and loved in college have been transformed into lounge-lizard orchestral elevator muzak. I found myself humming “Whoa-oa, we’re half-way there” as I passed the sixth floor on my way to the twelfth. This is a sure sign that I am aging.  Another one is that…

Well, I can’t remember right now, but a third one is that someone out there is looking to run the free world who is (ulp) younger than I am.

Unless you reside under a rock or perhaps work for the New York Times, you have probably heard that Slick Mitt from Mich and Mass is seeking help with his perennial presidential bid from Paul Ryan, a green-horned baby-face with way too much hair and less body fat than a 2×4. Continue reading →