I have been feeling pathetically old lately. I’m actually only 51, but the gray-haired stranger that stares out of the mirror at me is someone who (to me) looks far closer to joining Marley (who was dead, make no mistake about that) than I’d like.
I need to arrest my slow decline by becoming much more active, one freaking way or another. There are folks my age who are out running sub-three-hour marathons. No, I don’t expect to do that. But when I was running regularly I had gotten my 5k time down to 28:00 or so. Then my doctor added metoprolol to my high blood pressure medicine regimen, and anyone who’s ever been on a beta blocker knows what those do to your metabolism. But I’m not on metaprolol right now and the beta blocker I am on (carvedilol) doesn’t seem to leave me as tired as metaprolol did. Perhaps I can regain lost ground. (Perhaps I can dig a hole through the Earth to Madagascar using a soup spoon and go off to live among the lemurs, too!) But I’ve got to try something in that regard.
Piddle, twiddle and resolve. Sigh.
When I’m home, I need to stop letting Carole dictate whether we go out and do things. Carole is God’s gift to “I don’t wanna” regarding any plan she didn’t’ come up with. As a result of my trying really, really, really hard to avoid fights and arguments with her, I’ve spent a ton of time just lolling around the house when I could have been out doing things I enjoy. (This is not character assassination, by the way. Carole knows she has problems with oppositionality. Big honking hairy problems. With googly eyes and fangs. That doesn’t make it any easier for her to overcome her passive-aggressive resistance to any plan I come up with. The point is, I’ve got to take responsibility for my own fitness, whether Carole wants to come along or not.)
I can’t do a damn thing about one particularly depressing aspect of aging — the realization that Carole and I are officially too old to have kids. I had been holding out hope, year after year, that we might still decide to have a kid or two, but as I’ve said before, even if Carole could conceive at age 48, I don’t want to be the guy getting mistaken for a grandfather at my child’s high school graduation. And besides, Carole says the question is now officially moot, time-of-the-month-wise. It depresses the hell out of me that I have no one to pass things on to. We achieve immortality through each successive generation of our families; when I die, the world ends.
Short-term — well, that’s where Garnier Nutrisse Medium Natural Brown comes in. (I hate dyeing my hair. I used to do it fairly frequently, but got out of the habit. But as a short-term mood improver, perhaps it’ll help to see something other than steel-gray hair in the mirror each morning.)
