I’m WAY Past Fifty.

Thoughts and unsolicited opinions about articles on aging

Depending on how you gauge age, I’m ancient.

Fellow Medium peep Helen Cassidy Page, at 81, has fourteen years on me and I don’t consider her old. She’s older’n I am but that doesn’t make her old in the sense that she’s a doddering fool barely able to cross a room. She can outdo me on a plank any day.

Age is relative. No, not your aging relatives. Just…relative. As in, what are we comparing, pray tell?

You ask a five-year-old where the “kids” are and she’ll point to the group of three-year-olds.

You ask a 75-year-old where the “old folks” are and he’ll point to the corner bridge game full of 85-year-olds.

My mother, at ninety, called people in their seventies “kids.” For her it was a last gasp at establishing superiority, a sense of feeling powerful.

Age is relative. We are always and forever gauging age based on where we are. We also judge others (as we do in all things) based on what living has taught us — or not, as the case may be, which we may or may not realize.

True aging isn’t aging so much as curing in place.

Okay, well, aging cured me of being young. It also cured me from having no wrinkles, excellent eyesight and no cellulite, but I digress.

The word cure derives from the Latin curare, to take care of.

Okay, okay, okay. Age does indeed work like South American curare, as it sure as hell kills us off. Eventually. But that’s another article.

I suspect, like Helen does every so often and with great humor, that reading material by Medium writers exhorting how much they’ve learned by the Ripe Old Age of Thirty is a source of unending hilarity. Is for me, but that’s not the whole of it. More on that in a sec.

What I love best, though, are pieces like this, which skewer an age:

Yeah it is, Sister. What a great piece.

In 1973 when Pam fell out of her highchair, I had just joined the Army. I think I hit my head a lot harder than Pam did.

If my life is any indication that is, because I’ve whacked my poor coconut some 22 times since then. My general behavior is a testament to the fact that what few brains I still possess rattle around like a two rocks in a metal box.

But I’m still here at 67, as Helen is at 81. As Pam is at 50.

So are you, as is my athletic buddy Joseph Geary and a lot of other aging, cured-of-their-fear-of-aging Medium buddies who share their stories, and live enviable lives.

Unafraid of the next milestone.

We’re all energetic and funny and engaged and living out loud.

Our lives aren’t easy. Not at all. We have aches and pains and aches in our hearts and lost loves and mistakes and all that stupid shit we smoked, drank, ate, imbibed, and popped all those years we were convinced we were immortal and invincible.

Until we weren’t.

However, my age doesn’t convey me any agency whatsoever if you will forgive the godawful pun.

LIFE does.

Hitting your stride happens at any point, at any age. Then, you stumble again, because of a shitty marriage or an illness, because, well, life. Or whatever. Then you gotta find your stride all over again.

This time you may have a limp.

Look, I limp right now because one of my pinky toes decided to do a really Stupid Yoga Trick around the foot of a bench. That toe is almost as purple as Ann Litts’ storied hair, but I digress.

I look and feel like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

I’ve got a hand down, a finger down, various body parts on hold, healing, aching, barking and otherwise generally, well, getting used.

‘Tis but a flesh wound indeed.

So is aging but a flesh wound.

That’s the whole point. Thirty years ago none of this would have been funny. Now it’s my best stuff.

That ability to make hilarity out of the shit sandwiches that life serves us is precisely what makes us fearless as we age.

I have lost my stride many times in 67 years, from bad men, bad food, bad friends, bad luck, bad jobs, bad choices, bad just-about-everything.

Didn’t make my life bad. Put a hitch in my giddyup plenty of times, as now, but I keep moving.

Stride you must if life is to continue.

One of the reasons I write so prolifically on Medium (and kindly, since March of 2018 I’ve produced more than six thousand articles despite one hell of a travel schedule, massive life demands and a lot more, so please, to all you Medium gurus, kindly beat that) is that every so often some thirty-something will pen me a comment that indicates that what I say about living vibrantly as I cure in place (all over the world places, that is) rewrites her narrative about what’s possible.

In a nutshell, that is one of the primary reasons I write.

Not the $2.23 payment I get for several hours’ work on an article. It’s the human impact. That the stories I write about my experiences might very well be instructive in helping someone else cope, laugh and thrive.

Kindly, reading about the lives of people like Beryl Markham did precisely that for me. Please help me understand how it is not my sacred responsibility to pay it forward.

We’re pounded with largely false images of what it means to be old in America- which clearly (and illegally, thanks) for IBM, means anyone over forty:

Pardon me, but…shitheels. If anyone over forty at IBM is out to lunch and deserves to be dumped, why is the corporate executive board still on board? to that, please see

These days, kindly, over forty now includes Millennials (see? Told ya, all you had to do was wait a while).

Fifty is now elderly, if you buy into the White Supremacy’s Make Women Great Again. So Pam Gaslow, at fifty, might as well adopt 87 cats, fill a drawer full of buzzers and let her breasts fall into the frying pan when she makes breakfast. According to MWGA, she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between her boobs and the bacon anyway.

Look I already suffer that problem and I don’t fry anything. My chest is already fried.

Geez Louise.

Then there are all these articles about the 417 Things I Learned by the Time I Turned Twelve.

I might offer that a great many of those things were copied verbatim out of a Tony Robbins self-help book, but it got eyeballs. Clickbait titles usually do. That doesn’t mean they’re either useful or particularly true.

If I might offer some seriously-unsoliticited-but-possibly-although-unlikely-useful advice, that kind of article has a shitload more agency when you write personal stories that validate what you’ve learned. There is nothing like authenticity. Other that you and I are simply churning out useless listicles about shit we don’t know. Wish we knew. Badly wished we knew. I did that too four decades ago, albeit not on social media.

But hey, it sells.

But as with all things, it’s more complex than that.

The cure for age is to age.

The real cure for aging is to age a great long time.

You and I defeat the aging process, and defeat the anti-aging lie, which is a massive, burgeoning business, by aging well.

Aging well does not mean investing your kid’s Harvard education in Botox treatments.

Aging well does not mean having your body cryogenically preserved (do you really want to come back with THOSE ears?)

Trump is stupid enough to believe it. The good news is that the Russians would be happy to freeze his ignorant old ass, and in the process, kill the mother fucker. Have at it, Sparky, do us all a favor, wouldja?

Aging, the single great inevitability of life, seems to be the one insult so many of us cannot bear. We will do anything but anything to deny getting, being, feeling OLD.

I just Googled the phrase stupid things people do to look younger.

Guess what I got (with a massive and hearty shout-out to my buddy Gillian Sisley): Goop.

Yep, Goop. The foolish female’s guide to ruining her health, damaging her ladyparts, scorching her brain on stupidity and keeping Gwyneth Paltrow in designer pants, rolling in our dough while we shove rocks up our vaginas.

Gillian, m’dear, I hope you’re laughing as hard as I am.

One of Pam’s best lines from her piece is that she tried very hard NOT to turn fifty and it happened anyway.

While that made me and a lot of other folks laugh out loud, we are now dealing with this very real desire to be Peter Pan:

Folks, on one hand, some aspects of this can be funny. But on the other, fear of aging is just plain stupid. It’s also deadly. It’s already killing off too many of our kids:

Kindly, those young people see no future in getting older.

Just more of the same pain they feel now.

So while, with all respect, I like to make fun of those articles that claim such great wisdom at barely thirty, there is indeed a cry for validation implicit in their material.

I’m hearing it.

To my fellow writers, I hope you do too. For the proper response to such pain is not to make fun of it, compare their legitimate pain to yours (I WALKED FORTY-SEVEN MILES BAREFOOT IN EIGHT FEET OF SNOW ONE WAY TO GET TO SCHOOL EVERY DAY) and try to minimize their challenges through mockery.

Please. Just. Don’t.

The only cure for aging is aging, learning to embrace the tough stuff that aging brings, and to enjoy those empowering aspects of life that ONLY age can convey: Learning to navigate said tough stuff, which Millennials have been forced to endure, and minority Millennials most especially.

Kindly, just saying, if you think being a Millennial is hard right now, try being Black or Brown (or Red or Yellow) and Millennial. Or an immigrant under DACA, the modern-day Sword of Damocles.

Please. Just. Stop and think.

See what I mean? Some of these folks won’t make it to fifty, as Pam did, with funny stories to tell, for all they see in getting older is pain, loss, and punishment.

This is why I cringe when I read harsh, judgmental comments from Boomers on Medium articles that express the inaccurate sentiment that kids these days don’t get it. Yeah, they do. They get it that getting older isn’t worth it.

Unless you and I as older folks (kindly anyone over thirty qualifies these days) change the discussion.

Folks like Helen and Pam and Ann and Rosenna Bakari PhD and Joseph and so many others write smart, funny material about life and life lessons that add value to the discourse about aging, and they also make the future a lot safer.

By that I mean that if you and I read an article by someone older (for me that would be Methuseleh) that demonstrates that yes, life sucks AND it can be funny; yes, life can be shitty AND it is full of joy and hope; that yes, life is full of losses AND you laugh and love and survive and evolve not only anyway but because of those things, well then.

You and I as old farts have done our jobs writing a piece on aging.

Folks read Pam and Helen and others like us because kindly, they want hope.

Hope that things will improve.

Or put more honestly, that shit still happens, and it will, but that we learn to see with different eyes. Age, and only age, with experience, delivers that gift. That gift gives us our funny bone.

The only cure for aging is aging well. The secret to aging well is learning to laugh at the shit that might otherwise kill us off.

The only way to learn to laugh at the shit that might otherwise kill us off is to bloody well live through it, not give it permission to hijack our lives, and on occasion, listen to us old cranks past thirty who might have discovered an errant funny bone.

Humor is life’s superpower.

Humor is life’s ONLY superpower.

Wanna know why Slackjaw and MuddyUm have so many readers?

Because there is so much pap on Medium that reinforces what is bad and unhappy and depressing. Kindly, I’ve been through a lot of it. Just went through a shitload MORE of it, with kidney disease, kidney stones, an horrific accident that damned near killed me off.

I’m quite sure plenty of trollers are saying DAMN IT. She’s still alive.

It’s my best comedy material.

That’s a superpower.

Here’s that superpower writ large, from Pam’s Not Funny-but Very Funny piece on turning fifty, above:

If you’re lucky enough to make it to 50 you should at least give yourself credit for hitting the milestone. You should appreciate your life and the fact that you didn’t OD, fall off a junky roller coaster, or get swallowed whole by a snake, like they do in Indonesia. I am truly grateful for those things. I’m also proud of myself for not giving up, because there’s so much to look forward to. The movies I won’t see, the meals I won’t cook, and all the men I still won’t go out with. At the very least I can be an example for younger women; a powerful role model to trembling 49-year-olds everywhere. And despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have evolved. For example, in 1978 Wednesday Addams was my role model, in 1990 Madonna was my role model, and today AA is my role model. Well, AA and Jane Fonda. And with Jane Fonda being 82, and AA being 85, I think I’ve chosen wisely.

This is how we change lives. To my fellow curing-like-bacon ( keep your boobs out of the frying pan) aging Medium peeps, let’s share the wealth, shine the light on the shit that scares us, and keep striding forward.

We have an example to set.

Aging. ’Tis but a flesh wound.