The pleasures of ageing

Sounds like an oxymoron on the face of it, doesn't it?

"The pleasures of ageing?"

Get the fuck outta here!

What pleasure?

Well, first of all, unless you're popping those pills by the handful, you'll notice that your dick doesn't cause you nearly as much trouble as it might have when you were younger. When you're young, and you've got all that testosterone sloshing around, it's really easy to get side-tracked. I mean, a short skirt or a tight pair of jeans will lure you into risking everything you have and then some.

By the time you're in your seventh or eighth decade on this earth... not so much.

The stress of trying to figure out what you're gonna do when you grow up tends to lighten too. I don't know about you, but for me, when I was young, I had ridiculously high bars set for personal achievement.

My life would not be complete without a Pulitzer, or what the hell, a Nobel!

Ya, you get over that...

You get to a place where not having had a ride in a police car for twenty years is way better than a stupid Pulitzer anyway.

At least till you see that some twat just got a Pulitzer for documenting their ride in a police car.

I find there's a lot of pressure off once you make peace with the fact that you've peaked.

No more striving.

No more stabbing your workmates in the back to get a leg up.

You may have always aspired to be a great sinner, but you've made peace with the fact that you'll never get past occasional drunkenness.

One thing that's really cool about getting old is that your bullshit detector is getting sharper while all your other senses are dulling down.

You realize that anything any politician anywhere says is something you've heard before. Make America great again? Ya right... that's been done and done again.

Ditto for all the other bromides that attend our vaunted Western democracies.

We're gonna bring peace and freedom and democracy to Vietnam? To Central America? To Afghanistan?...

Turned out to be bullshit the last ten times I heard it, and therefore I'll hazard a guess that it's bullshit this time too. You have to have been the victim of bullshit a few times before you recognize the smell.

That only happens with age.

The pleasures of aging...