It’s a devious process that creeps and crawls, moving in fits and starts when you aren’t looking, stealing life and energy and gradually but unrelentingly replacing vigor and strength with sloth and infirmity. Worst of all it introduces pain into your life as a constant companion. No wonder no one ever talks about it.
Spending those golden years on the bench?
I’s practical to be philosophical about aging. You can’t stop it or slow it down. You can mask it’s effects with creams and chemicals. You can mitigate the damage with exercise. You can confuse it with drugs. In truth, however, it makes you mad because it’s a death sentence. No matter what you do (or don’t do) aging just keeps rolling along and finally carries you off. You die. In the meantime you have to manage its consequences during all those years of decline. It is 40 years of denial.
Society plays along with the fantasy of those ‘Golden Years’ full of happy youthful and active senior citizens living a fantasy life of old age bliss. The reality is better depicted in the TV drug ads targeting a multitude of debilitating conditions and in those ads you never see old people. The ads imply that everything that comes with aging is merely a treatable condition. Any one might need these drugs and if you find yourself needing them, it’s just a normal thing. It has nothing to do with your age. Drugs are the key to a healthy life. What a load of crap!Continue reading »
**Editors Note: Today is actually a happy day here at Cantankerous Old Coots! My friend Bob has here, written below, what is the 100th post published on this site! That is a great milestone and one we are most definitely not going to stop at Not bad for a blog that started on a whim with a sarcastic comment. Thanks for coming and reading our stuff and you can look forward to more, number 200 is coming! Now onto Bob’s post! -Justin**
Sometimes I just think the know-it-all kids might be able to run things better than us old farts (and fartettes). Maybe we just ought to turn all the country’s problems over to them to solve. They’ll probably do it in about a week and a half.
Just ask them…they’ll be glad to tell you. Apparently, from about age 18 to age 25 is when a human is the smartest and can do the best analytical thinking, and after that it’s all downhill. So…if they are so damn smart, let them figger things out for us.
This was brought home YET AGAIN this past week when Megan McCain, the dumb blonde bimbo highly intelligent and discerning daughter of Sen. John McCain opened her mouth…again.
Does anyone besides me wish she would just shut…the…hell…up? If she weren’t Sen McCain’s daughter she’d be just another dumb blonde…like, awesome…Valley Girl wannabe. Instead, the media treats her like the second coming of Socrates, spreading her insight far and wide.
How does a 26 year old who hasn’t yet learned to wipe her rear without a diagram and written instructions get so smart so young…and she must be smart…
Last week she shared with us…and with the breathlessly listening main stream media…that Christine O’Donnell, the senate candidate from Delaware, shouldn’t be elected because she is not qualified. Well, just what makes one “qualified”, Megan?
(“Megan” because you are a know-it-all snot-nosed brat. Gain some age…and wisdom…and you might earn a Ms. McCain.)
Megan, just what kind of qualifications do you feel someone needs to have in order to hold elected office? Let’s look at a couple of elected officials for guidance, OK?
There once was a small town country lawyer from Illinois. He was mostly self-educated, and was not a lawyer with a polished resume. His political career consisted of several failed attempts to get elected to local and state office before his single win. He was not a polished speaker and was not notably educated on national and foreign policy of the day. He was much like Christine O’Donnell in that he was simply a good man of average intellect who wanted to just do the right thing.
The second politician was also of average intellect, but had a far more extensive unofficial political education having been raised in the politics of a navy admiral’s household and absorbing the politics of national defense. He attended the US Naval Academy and served as a Navy carrier pilot where his only notable act was to be shot down over North Vietnam. As a POW he showed himself to be an American patriot. So far, so good…but after being released from captivity and leaving the navy he was bitten by the political bug and was elected by his wife’s money and his war hero status to the United States senate, where he changes his position on issues as often as I change my underwear, always sticking his finger in the air to test the currents before deciding what he thinks.
I like inexperienced and unqualified better.
Meghan, the first inexperienced, unqualified (by your standards, anyway) politician was Abraham Lincoln. The second is your father.
I think it’s best you, like, you know, just shut up.
Sometimes I don’t even understand what’s going on. Life is a great adventure and it is easy to get lost in the weeds and focused on minutia. One way for that to happen is when you let yourself get sucked into the news. The media only make money after they persuade you that what they are selling is something you need to know. And they work damn hard at it.
I’ve learned over time that stuff happens whether I know about it or not. I have about the same influence over events whether informed or ignorant. However I find that I am much happier when I am ignorant. So I turn off the news and ignore the newspapers. This allows me to pretend that the world isn’t falling apart right before my eyes. It keeps me closer to sane and reasonable than I would otherwise be. When the wheels fall off the bus, with any luck I will be otherwise occupied.
It’s not easy!
It takes superhuman effort to block all the news however. Here and there a story will leak through my protective shield and over time, it is impossible not to notice that the world is changing. And not for the better.
One of the things that really bugs me is the future. Back when I was a kid we worshiped the future and believed in progress, technology and science. The future was where life got even better, where there were new worlds to conquer and frontiers to explore. Cars changed every year. And those changes were substantial. Tail fins came and went. Windshields wrapped and unwrapped. Everybody knew when you had a year old car and snickered unlike these days where cars hardly change at all and nobody can tell that your car is five years old and they are all ugly.
Or take airplanes. The 707 was a breakthrough but 40 years later today’s planes don’t fly any faster, they just carry more people, have overhead bins and lousy service. The Concorde was a dead end and the airliners on the drawing board are just effete refinements of old technology not breakthroughs.
Who killed the future?
Not in your future
When I was a kid, the future was exciting. We would be traveling at supersonic speeds long before the new century. Where are those supersonic airliners? Nobody is even dreaming about them any more. And take space travel. When President Kennedy launched the Apollo Moon Project we all got excited because it meant that man would finally escape Earth and embrace a new frontier. Well America had enough oomph to get to the Moon but that was it. NASA frittered away our space heritage and technology for the timid and useless space shuttle which could never reach a useful altitude for space exploration and bored us to tears even when it crashed.
What impresses me today is that it isn’t part of our culture anymore to embrace the future. NASA has turned into the IRS with no vision or dreams about space and no magic. Our leaders don’t talk about the future like they did when I was a kid. And people aren’t upset that we don’t have a future. It is all they can do to keep their eyes on the ground for fear of making a misstep and falling. These days we can’t afford a future.
So what went wrong?
I don’t know for sure what went wrong. I don’t know why people stopped dreaming big and expecting the future to be bright. I do have my suspicions. For me, the optimism stopped when President Kennedy was shot. It was the end of the era of optimism and can do spirit and the beginning of second guessing America and the American way. It was the end of progress and the future and the beginning of self-doubt and introspection. Take it for what it is worth but my judgment is this.
The future died with President Kennedy
What! Me worry?
The future of America died with President Kennedy. All the problems, loss of focus and dithering in our country started with one man and his anti-American agenda and once the country made a worng turn, nobody has ever even tried to get it right again (well maybe one guy but it is going to take an army).
So who might I be talking about, you ask? Who was that destructive, subversive man and what was his anti-American agenda? I’ll tell you.
It was Lyndon Johnson and the catastrophic Great Society.
Yogi Berra is reported to have said. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Coots and Coots in training are well advised to remember this advice because decisiveness is more important than being right. Others may worry about making the right decision. Cantankerous Old Coots know that getting all the facts and weighing the pros and cons is less important than action. Right and wrong are irrelevant so long as you keep moving. Hesitation is for the weak and insecure. Action is for the Cantankerous Old Coot.
This may be difficult for some who have been trained to analyze and ponder about consequences. Society encourages hesitation and caution. If you have been over socialized, this may make it difficult for you to act. You continue to let your mind consider the possibilities and judge the outcomes and the decision keeps getting deferred. You dither. Nothing undermines the essence of Cootness more than hesitation. It looks weak. It says that you have no convictions.
But how do you break those life-long habits? The best answer is to let your gut decide. There is always that little voice that tells us what to do right before we break it all down into percentages and probabilities and go all indecisive. If you can learn to hear what that voice tells you and then shut the brain down, then your problem is solved. Hear the voice, act on what the voice tells you and don’t look back. That is the way of the Coot. Claim victory and move on the the next lesson.
For some of us, however, it is not so easy. If you can’t turn off the analysis and let the voice speak, I have another suggestion. Just say no. Immediately you eliminate any analysis. You know the answer before there is even a question so the analysis can just stay in bed. You might ask if yes would work as well. In theory, yes or no should be equally useful. It is just that yes usually involves some action on your part where no does not. Say yes and you have likely committed to doing something you might not want to do. Say no and you are protected.
To sum up today’s lesson, always act immediately when you face a decision. If possible always go with the little voice in your head unless you can’t turn off the analysis and begin to dither. If you can’t then just say no. And don’t forget that practice makes perfect.
As anyone who has read much of what I write knows, I am more than just a little bit retro. The fact is I could easily be described as rather Luddite-ish. I have often been heard to say (only partly jokingly) that I am one of less than 10 people in the country who actually wishes Y2K had been as bad as advertised.
One thing I have enjoyed since I was a teenager is cars. Real cars. Not the sissified crap cranked out by automobile manufacturers these days, but serious cars, cars with large bore Detroit iron.
I use to watch the NASCAR races, or as they were called colloquially in the south “stock car racin’. You could spend a Sunday afternoon watching the likes of Cale Yarborough, Fireball Roberts, and Coo Coo Marlin banging on each other’s doors, and then go down to your local Ford, Chevrolet, or Dodge dealer on Monday and pretty much buy the car that won the day before. Except for stripping out the interior and adding a roll bar, there wasn’t much difference.
But times change. The original crowd retired (or died in wrecks, like Fireball Roberts, RIP), and the next generation turned out to be a bunch of pansies. Instead of getting their start runnin’ moonshine and being chased by the revenuers, a lot of them got their start up in Yankee land, drivin’ those things with a big ass motor, four wheels, and a wing on top big enough for a 747. And when they got to NASCAR? Hell, they all had PR people and couldn’t get out of their car after a race without combing their hair first. Pussies.
Another change, the most disappointing really, was the cars. Except for a very faint resemblance, Detroit never saw iron that’s on the track today. Sure, they put a model name on ‘em, but I defy you to go down to your local Chevrolet dealership tomorrow and find anything that really looks like what Dale, Jr. climbed out of on Sunday.
Then came the final straw. NASCAR, which like baseball is as American as apple pie, let furriners in.
Toyota.
That’s when I quit watchin’ stock car racin’, except at the local dirt track.
And then, on Sunday February 20, 2011, it was Déjà vu all over again.
First, let me give you just a little bit of back story. In the 1970’s I was a teenager, I loved stock car racin’, and David Pearson was my hero. Pearson drove the Woods Brother’s Mercury, red top, white bottom, and the number 21 on the side. At the time, the biggest rivalry in stock car racin’ was between Cale Yarborough, Richard Petty, and Pearson.
One of the few NASCAR races I ever personally attended was the 1976 Daytona 500, a race that will go down in history as having the most exciting finish NASCAR ever had, or ever will, see.
David Pearson won that race. Driving the Woods Brothers Mercury number 21. Despite numerous wins in other races, Woods Brothers Racing has never won another Daytona 500, the Super Bowl of NASCAR.
Until yesterday.
I didn’t watch the race. I gave up on NASCAR several years back when Toyota joined Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge on the track. I just never got used to the idea of watching little Japanese sewing machines trying to run with the big dawgs.
I was trying to get some writing done and had the TV on mute several hours after the race ended, when I glanced up at the screen. To use an old southernism, I didn’t know whether to “shit or go blind”.
There, in living color, was a sight I had not seen in 35 years… A Woods Brothers Racing Mercury(well, Ford), red on top, white on bottom, and the number 21 painted the side, crossing the finish line in the Daytona 500 in first place.
