Half a Feckin' Century...

On Getting Old Gracelessly

This August, I turn fifty. Fifty! Even writing that feels weird. Half a feckin’ century. And to be frank, it’s a miracle I’ve made it this far. Better folks than I have not, and I’ve certainly done plenty of things throughout my life to make it an unlikely proposition (smoking, drinking, clinging to the hoods of fast-moving cars, jumping off bridges, getting hit by a bus, almost drowning twice, picking fights with fellas three times my size; heatstroke, sunstroke, transient ischemic strokes, heart problems, lung problems, face problems…) So yeah, I’m a little baffled by my continued existence. If it were an entry in the Final Destination franchise, it would be fifty hours long and feel edited by a lunatic.

I don’t feel my age, not deep down inside. Whatever comprises a person beyond the physical and mental, be it the soul or your essence or your ka or whathaveyou, that little ding-dong still thinks it’s in its mid-thirties. As for the rest of me, well, most days I have the constitution of a dinosaur in the weeks after the meteor hit.

Nobody prepares you for the myriad ways in which your mind and body start to decline after you reach a certain milestone.

First, your eyesight. I’m wearing reading glasses as I type this, and that’s a relatively new development. I like to think they make me look distinguished, but I probably look like an employee at a vacuum factory who still pines for the days of carpet rollers and could enthusiastically sell you a lint brush even if (especially if) you didn’t need one.

And because I’m a broke-ass writer (one of the perks of the job), I don’t have insurance, so rather than procure some stylish pince-nez that will address the problem, I got my chunky face-glazers from the spinning rack at CVS after trying on every pair until I could see my hands. I think they cost about five dollars, but I’m not sure. The checkout screen was a blur so maybe it was $500.

And while we’re in the area, let’s talk about eyebrows. I remember when mine behaved themselves. They were flat, unremarkable, eyebrow-like, but at some point they decide to get bushy and angry, as if old age makes you more prone to conducting electricity. Reminds me of my mother’s perm in the 80s. Worse, the hairs are long and curly and will often obscure my vision. Should I fail to tend to them, I’m cursed to walk around all day with a fuzzy spider leg bollixing up my eyesight. Why? Because they curve inward.

You can forget the tired “was Childs or MacReady THE THING?” because the answer was neither of them. It was Garry’s fucking eyebrows. (And can you guess how old the actor—Donald Moffat, RIP—who played Garry was when that movie was filmed? 51. The prosecution rests.)

“The fuck are pince-nez?”

I’ve tried to be proactive about it. Plucking does the job most of the time, but when (sometimes overnight) the hairs get so long I could conceivably lasso a family of cows, I’ve turned to more drastic measures. Once, I incautiously tried to boop the affected area with an electric razor, only to end up with a pair of shorn stripes like a Temu Vanilla Ice. Other times, I’ll gel them down, which works at the cost of being able to arch them villainously, which I’ve found I do surprisingly often. Another time, I dared use scissors, but chickened out as the blades loomed large in my vision and my mind flashed on a dozen Italian horror movies at once.

Arching. Villainously.

Next, my hearing. Whether because I played for years in a band or still enjoy going to rock concerts or because I’m older than the portrait I keep locked in my attic, my hearing is starting to go. Perhaps I wouldn’t mind this so much if I didn’t find myself saying “Ha?” all the time when people talk to me, an exhortation that never fails to summon the ghosts of my grandparents. I’ve never looked in a mirror when I say this, but I’m sure I wear their frustrated expressions too, as if the fault is always on the speaker for not being loud enough or e n u n c i a t i n g their words to my satisfaction. One ear seems more capable than the other, which sounds like a plus until you catch yourself tilting your head in weird ways like Michael Myers trying to figure out how he was able to use a kitchen knife to pin a hundred-and-fifty pound guy to a door.

And then there are the assorted aches and pains. Used to be I’d only pull a muscle during intense physical activity. Now it can happen if I say words with too many consonants. In Fallout 4, the ungrateful settlers are inclined to intone to the point of monotony that “my back hurts, my feet hurt, everything hurts”, but at least in their case it makes sense because they spend their entire lives hammering the same nail into the same wall. Me, I’m just trying to make toast.

Gone are the days when you leap from your morning bed with all the enthusiasm of a Disney character. Now it’s a more sloth-like situation, marked by a curious resentment at being awake and outright hostility at the thought of moving. When you finally rise with an indecorous “rrrrrurrrrrrgh” and with every joint screaming like a Norwegian death metal band, the stairs look three times longer and more treacherous. You navigate them as if your kneecaps came from the same CVS where you got your glasses.

It’s not all bad, though.

I quite enjoy how at peace I am with myself, finally. It’s like the resistance quit and all the soldiers went home after realizing the war was bullshit, and now they’re all sitting with their feet up watching reruns of Columbo. When the world continues to blaze and spin wildly out of control, there’s a measure—however tiny—that the one battle you’ve fought and the only one over which you ever had any control, has finally relented. Also, I think my writing is better, more mature, which might seem like an obvious development, but that’s not always a given. As writers, we can sometimes be hampered by nostalgia and our own refusal to let ourselves and our writing grow up. My work seems to fit who I am now, for better or worse, and the stories I’ve produced seem more thoughtful, my handling of character more confident now that I better understand my own.

Similarly, since getting old enough to both qualify for AARP and feed ducks at the pond with winsome sincerity, my relationships with other people (when I can hear them) have matured too. Gone are the days when I seemed prone to intentionally misinterpret things just so I could revel in the offense, thereby making myself the victim. Nowadays I’m slower to anger, slower to disproportionate emotional responses, and slower rising from the couch (this last always with a kind of involuntary sound that in lesser hands could summon Cthulhu.)

Maybe it’s a natural reaction to the aging process. Maybe when your vision and hearing and mobility start entering into hostage negotiations with you, you realize that you’ve spent your life as the main character asking readers to understand you, when all along your time would have been better served trying to understand everyone else. Half a century is a long time to go without truly hearing what the world is saying, or what your own self is trying to tell you. So listen now, because there will come a day, maybe soon, hopefully later, when you’ll no longer be able to hear it.