elfs | Entries tagged with aging

The other day, as I was heading home from an event downtown, three adorable women, college-age, walked onto the train and started making their way up the aisle. I was in one of the seats that faces toward the back of the train, so eventually they passed me and out of sight.

Across from me, facing the other way, was a man who had to be about ten years older than I am. After the girls had passed it was comically obvious that his eyes were locked to their asses for what even I thought was an unseemly amount of time.

I realized then that I had become old, because, dammit, I used to check out cute womens’ asses all the time. I’m a firm believer that being aesthetically pleasing in public, especially if you’ve put effort into being aesthetically pleasing in public, is a fine thing, and that others should be able to appreciate it.

But dammit, I miss the vitality, the drive, that went with my aesthetic appreciation. Getting old kinda sucks.

Current Mood: disappointed

Omaha and I went camping this July, earlier than we usually do, and for the first time in my life I experienced a new sensation I had never had before.

I felt old.

Like, I’m 54. People who have been following me from the beginning know that I started blogging and posting to Usenet in 1992, 28 years ago when I was 26 years old! And yet, I’ve never felt old. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis I worked out regularly and was well on my way to being able to squat my own weight, which would have led inevitably to pistol squats and other knee-threatening exercises.

The Crisis deprived me of a weight room and the need for a break from the day. I’m at home; as much as I’m “living at work rather than working from home,” I’m finding that being in my home means that I can take mental breaks at any time by stepping out onto the back porch or walking through the overgrown belt of forest behind my home. I no longer ride my bike to the train station for a ride into the city.

After four months of that, Omaha and I decided to take some “moderate” hikes, starting with a 4.4 mile that turned out to be exactly in one direction: up. The Big Creek Trail is listed as a moderate difficulty loop that’s exactly 2.2 miles uphill to the top, cross the creek on a wooden bridge, and then exactly 2.2 miles downhill to the trailhead.

When we got back to the tent, my legs felt unfamiliar. I was very familiar with the burning sensation of working my leg muscles in a long-distance hike, and I know what it’s like when they’re fully exhausted and no longer want to move anyway, but this time they felt something else: they felt heavy.

I am not heavy. I weigh 185 lbs at the moment, smack in the middle of the “175lbs - 195lbs” range for a 6-foot tall adult male. I have a small amount of liver fat, the typical spread of a 50+ male, and according to my doctor it’s less than most guys my age. 62.3% of men my age are overweight; I’m not. Not yet, at any rate.

But my legs felt like they were wooden logs I was carrying around, and it was a disturbing sensation because of its unfamiliarity. It was like they belonged to someone else. (I promise I’m not developing Body Integrity Identity Disorder. That's something that hits in childhood for the people who experience it at all.)

To me, this suggests an experiment: if I work at getting my legs stronger once more, will that sensation go away? Is the sensation I experienced due to age, or due to the general flabbiness this working at home thing has done to many of us?

I’m gonna need to run that experiment hard.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Gydra, Epoch

I had the pleasure the other day of talking to a 91 year old woman about her immanent death.

Omaha and I have season tickets to the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and last Saturday we went to the "Director's Choice" performance. Because they're season tickets we always have the same seats, and this time as I sat down the olderly woman to my left said, "Oh! You made it on time this time!"

It was a rightful twitting, as last time Omaha and I were an hour late to the more classical The Sleeping Beauty, and missed Act I entirely. Act I was so precisely an hour long that we walked in and took our seats, the only thing seemingly amiss being that nobody asked for our tickets, so it wasn't until intermission that we figured out we'd missed the Introduction and The Prophecy parts of the performance.

"That's fair," I said. "Good to see you again."

"It is!" she agreed. "I don't know how many more season of this I'll be attending."

"I'm sure it'll be plenty."

"I'm not so sure," she said. "I'm 91. My ma died at 93. She had a lunch, they lay down and that was it."

"Well, at least it sounds like it was peaceful."

"It was! I hope I go like that. I'm just glad that I didn't get dementia. So many people do, you know."

I shuddered. "I know. That's a terrifying thought."

At that point the performance started. But she was remarkably sanguine about the whole thing. Sharp as a tack, the only thing slowing her down was her cell phone. "Why can't they make it obvious? ABC. My phone is always AB then X then Z then C." Other than that, life seemed to be treating her well. Her "kid" ("I shouldn't call him that, he's 52!"— my age) drives her to the ballet from her home in South King County.

I can only hope I'm that content, and sanguine, about my impending demise, and I can only hope that it comes 40 years from here and now.

Current Mood: impressed

A couple of months ago I discussed having idiopathic dysgeusia, a benign condition associated with middle age in which everything tastes bad and funny. One of the hypotheses floated originally was posioning, that somehow I had encountered something that damaged the inside of my mouth.

But then it got worse, and I saw another doctor who sent me to my dentist. He was able to say, "It look like desquamative gingivitis, which happens at your age. I'm sending you to a specialist."

So I saw the specialist today. By now, the condition has almost completely cleared up. Everything tastes normal, I can enjoy spicy foods again, I'm no longer suffering "mechanical damage" (i.e. chapping from constantly probing at the weirdness in my mouth). There's a slight hesitancy at the tip of my tounge, but that's about it. The specialist is back to thinking it was poisoning, but we can't pinpoint what.

He basically said if it comes back, take pictures, document the hell out of everything I ate, drank or tasted that week, and make another appointment.

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1606809.html

This weekend I was at a politically critical event down in Georgetown with Omaha, and while she had to be there for all sorts of reasons, I was just the ride. I mean, I knew some of the people there, but once I'd said my hellos I didn't have a role there.

I wandered out to get some air, and wondered if rather than booze, I could find a coffee or a Coke somewhere. I strolled up the street and passed by a coffeeshop (closed, of course), and a barcade, one of those bars full of nostalgia machines from the 80s. It was mostly pinball (which can't be easier to maintain than video games), but upstairs there were a few uprights. Turning the corner, I saw a Defender. Defender is my machine; I once played for over 30 hours in front of one on a single quarter; I've seen Mutant Wave 990,000 and Level Zero.

It was a bit like religion. I put my hands on the controls and my hands knew what to do. Every reflex built from literally hundreds of hours of playing was still there. Not as sharp as they used to be, of course, but still solidly and really there. The knowledge about how to handle mutants, bombers, and swarmers. The secret line. Baiter timing. The four-star Smart Bomb trick.

Normally, I play for an hour on one quarter. The game lasted only twelve minutes. That's four times longer than the developers of the game expected anyone to ever learn how to play, but for me, it was terrible. 165,000? I can do better than that.

And someone had. Someone had the legendary score, 999,975. I'll see you in Hell, Mr. C.

Current Mood: happy
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1603496.html

The other day, I bumped into one of my old senseis from karate class. I apologized for not renewing my membership, but the elbow injury from the previous year had not resolved well and I wasn't going to go back into the class until I knew I was going to be able to keep hacking at the physical demands of the sport. I mean, I'm 48 years old, and karate is a young man's game.

"That's too bad," he said.

I shrugged and said it was little loss. I was progressing slowly compared to others, I often confused my left and right, and didn't feel like I was going to go far. "Nah," he said. "You would have done fine. You know how to move."

Which I think is very peculiar thing for someone to say. Because if there's one thing I'm painfully aware of, it's that I don't know how to move. I'm often very conscious of the way I walk, adjusting my gait and posture to achieve some efficiency of movement, some appearance of self-containment, some maintenance of the alignment of bones and muscles. I expressed this to him, and he said, "That's my point. Most people don't think twice about walking."

And then it was time to order our lunches and go our separate ways.

I've always thought of myself as ungainly. I bump into stuff a lot, mostly because I have a head full of something other than getting somewhere. But apparently, all of that is because I'm distracted. When I'm fully present, my gait is a deliberate and well-trained thing. I never knew.