boy is this right on

[ImStillMags Mags]

Nobody Warned Me About the Nap.

Observations on aging by Tom Gibble

No one ever explains aging properly. People talk about it in these vague, inspirational terms, as if growing older is a graceful migration into wisdom, like a flock of swans crossing a golden lake at sunset. That is not what happens. Aging is less “swan migration” and more “slowly discovering your body has unionized against you.”

In your twenties, the betrayal begins quietly. You notice your metabolism slowing down. You can no longer eat an entire pizza at 1:00 a.m. and wake up looking like a Calvin Klein underwear model who also volunteers at animal shelters. Suddenly, a single dinner roll appears to remain with you for months, clinging to your abdomen like a frightened refugee. At the same time, the hair at the front of your head starts thinning. Not enough for anyone else to notice, of course. Just enough so that every mirror in every restaurant becomes an interrogation room.

You’ll stand under harsh bathroom lighting tilting your head forward thinking, “Was my forehead always this large?” Then you’ll spend forty-five minutes online researching “mature hairlines” while studying photographs of actors who are somehow sixty-two years old with the hair density of a twelve-year-old Amish girl.

By your thirties, strange physical events begin occurring without explanation. You throw your back out sneezing. You wake up injured from sleeping. Sleeping — once a restorative activity — becomes an Olympic event in which your neck can lose. You’ll tell people, “I slept funny,” which sounds whimsical, but what it actually means is, “I briefly turned my head at a dangerous angle and now require prescription medication.”

Then come your forties, when your eyes begin to blur while reading. Men react to this with the denial usually reserved for royal scandals. You’ll hold a menu farther and farther away until you resemble someone attempting to receive satellite transmissions from space.

Eventually, you buy reading glasses, though at first you insist they are temporary. You purchase one tasteful pair, imagining yourself as a sophisticated intellectual. Six months later there are fourteen pairs scattered around your life like tiny optical raccoons. One in the car. One in the bathroom. One somehow inside the refrigerator.

And the noises. No one mentions the noises. Somewhere around forty-five, your body begins sounding like an old wooden ship at sea. You stand up and your knees produce the exact sound effect used when opening a haunted crypt in a low-budget horror movie. Every staircase becomes a percussion instrument.

By your fifties, medical conversations become bizarrely casual. Friends no longer say things like, “We went to Cancun.” Instead they say, “I found a terrific orthopedic surgeon.” People compare colonoscopy stories over appetizers. Someone will lean across the dinner table and whisper, “You absolutely must try my guy for rotator cuff repair,” with the same enthusiasm once reserved for concert tickets.

This is also the decade when parts of your body begin getting replaced like appliances in an aging rental property. Hips. Knees. Shoulders. A friend will casually announce he has “a titanium ankle now,” as though he’s become part dishwasher.

Then your sixties arrive, and with them comes the nap. The nap becomes not merely enjoyable but erotic in its appeal. In your youth, an unexpected free afternoon meant sex, road trips, poor decisions, maybe tequila. At sixty, the possibility of lying horizontally in a dark room while no one speaks to you feels like winning the lottery.

You start saying things like, “I just need to rest my eyes,” which is adult code for “I intend to lose consciousness immediately.”

And the truly horrifying part is this: old people lied to us. They made aging sound terrible. But nobody explained that despite all this — the creaking joints, the reading glasses, the mysterious skin tags, the medication organizers large enough to store fishing tackle — you somehow become weirder and happier.

You care less. You stop trying to impress strangers. You realize most arguments are stupid. You become deeply excited about bird feeders. A comfortable chair can move you emotionally. Cancelled plans feel like a spiritual gift.

Young people pity old people, but they have no idea how exhausting it is spending decades pretending to care what everyone thinks. Age finally frees you from that burden. By seventy, if someone dislikes you, your response is essentially, “Wonderful. One less person coming over.”

And perhaps that is the great cosmic joke of aging: your body deteriorates precisely when your personality finally becomes interesting.

Aging is realizing the person you always wanted to become arrived about thirty years after your warranty expired

[Lobo]

<< You care less. You stop trying to impress strangers. You realize most arguments are stupid. You become deeply excited about bird feeders. A comfortable chair can move you emotionally. Cancelled plans feel like a spiritual gift.  >>

The one compensation of geezerhood: No longer having to give a shit. Because you finally realize that nearly everything is just illusion, and it's ALL stupid.