How to have fun while embracing decrepitude

My old pal Kipling gave a ring the other day, so we could coordinate the next breakfast at the Teviotdale truck stop. We got around to comparing notes on the toll the years are taking. He recently fell off a storage bin he was filling with firewood. Hasn't been able to lift his left arm over his head since. Time to let go of the dream of operating a muffler shop, I guess. For my part, between the eye surgery and the shakey hands, my bathroom reno looks way different than the last bathroom reno I did 30 years ago. It's taking three times as long too. You mighta been a git-r-done kinda guy somewhere in the past, if only in your imagination, but once the get up and go has got up and left it seems to take forever to get nothing much done. So where's the fun in all this? "Fun" is perhaps too glib a word. But you can get a lot of satisfaction out of staying the course, never giving up, learning from your mistakes, keeping your nose to the grindstone and the pedal to the metal, and 101 other cliches. Point is, at our age we win just by being here, so let the fun times roll... Savor and celebrate! Just book your hip replacement early.

Obituary blues

I've got the obituary blues, baby, but I feel all right tonight.

Oh, I've got the obituary blues...

That's a messed up situation. Every day I read the obits. Every day I get the blues.

Used to know an old guy, Wallace Nodwell, read the obits first thing when he picked up the paper. Used to joke that he wanted to see if his name was there.

Then one day it was.

Now I'm an oldish guy. I read the obits religiously just to see how many of the dearly departed are younger than me. It's about fifty-fifty.

Half the dearly departed are younger than me.

And there seems to be a complete absence of rhyme or reason. Some really decent people die young. Some vile shitheads die young too. Other decent people and vile shitheads live to a grand old age.

There are a lot of anomalies in the obit section of your local paper, especially if you know the folks involved.

The guy who manages the local fitness club and has run the Boston Marathon twelve times will drop dead at fifty-two.

Then you'll read about the guy who was in the Waffen SS, started the local chapter of the Bandidos on his release from Nuremburg, was implicated in the largest cocaine seizure in history, was aquitted on sex-slavery charges by a hung jury, aquitted on jury-tampering charges because half the jurors went AWOL, and may he rest in peace he just passed away in a nursing home in Tampa at age 104.

It's a fucked up business, this aging.