by Randy Granny
There’s nothing laudable about growing old. It doesn’t deserve a round of applause or audience approval.
It really doesn’t deserve any acknowledgement, because it‘s nothing you strived for or worked hard for, such as finding a cure for all deadly diseases; bringing about world peace; becoming a world-famous actor; becoming Father-of-the-Year, President of the United States, a great baseball player, a fabulous artist or brilliant CEO, who took a rundown company, turned it into a Fortune 500 company and spread the wealth by employing thousands of people.
It’s nothing more than winning the gene pool!
This rant was brought on by reading about the modern day status symbol for country bragging rights about being home to the “oldest living person.”
Currently the country of Georgia has laid claimed to that, with a 130-year-old Georgian lady. Some of the facts don’t add up, like the fact that she has a son who’s in his 70s meaning that she would have had to have been in her 60s when he was born, but stranger things have been known to happen without man’s intervention.
Additionally, I receive an email from a friend pissing and moaning over getting older, and all the accompanying aches and pains and worst of all for women…the inevitable thickening of the waist with belly fat that no amount of exercise or diet will overcome.
All I could do was write her back and commiserate by saying, “Amen to that!” Since I’m slightly older than she, I know just how she feels. Old age is the pits and full of Mom Nature’s dirty little tricks.
The list of age-old old age grievances goes on and on, but why bore you with them when -- if you’re over 40 -- you already know them too well.
What’s so terrific about being any number of years over 40 and, like an old car, have all the parts start to break down?
I’m reminded of this every morning getting out of bed.
For me, it’s not the getting out of bed part; it’s the last portion of the multi-part ritual of getting up. Unlike when I was a teen and could roll over and go back to sleep for a couple of hours, I have to pee so bad, I’m forced to get up or have a terrible embarrassing accident.
I run downstairs to chug down an aspirin to ward off the anticipate back pain, turn on the fire under the water kettle, grab the first cigarette of the day while making a dash to the ’facility’ before the pee starts to run down my leg.
Before I’m able to place my still girlish, flat-ass butt (don’t even ask about the belly fat and lost waistline) on the throne where I sit with the pee uncontrollably running into the porcelain bowl and spending another five minutes coaxing the last few drops to trickle out, or I‘ll be back in there a few minutes later.
Up to that point I feel just fine.
It’s the sitting that’s the killer! While I can jump out of bed like a teen, I can’t pry myself off the pot with anything that comes close to pain-free dignity.
In those few minutes of sitting, my severely arthritic lower back -- the portion between the small of the back and the top of the hips -- has become a frozen block of wood making it utterly painful to turn to flush and stagger half bent over to the sink.
I’m sure there are ways around it. I could grow a penis. I could strip naked and straddle the bowl. I could rig up some kind of trough. I could go out in the yard and lift my leg like the dog. I could come back as a man in my next life, but this is the here-and-now, and if there are past lives, we don’t remember them anyway, so there’s no advantage to that.
What a way to start every single goddamn day.
Of course, the logical retort to such a statement is ’at least you got up.’
Spare me the b.s. optimism.
I know there are people who have worse problems, but no one -- if they’re honest -- can feel someone else’s pain. If they say they can, they’re lying!
What ever pain we’re feeling, it is the worst and hardest to cope with.
And believe me, sometimes that morning lower back pain is so bad I wish someone would just shoot me and take me out of my misery. Then the aspirin kicks in.
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