Ya Know What I Was Thinking?

The Age of (Un)Reason

Make the bed
Do the Laundry
Add mattress topper and change bedding
Flip the huge heavy couch and figure out if my side is loose because of hardware or because my wide load keep sitting it
Collapse exhausted after only two hours of work

And don't forget doing my daily flash, writing a blog entry, trying to get in a thousand words somewhere… It's barely into the afternoon, I've done hardly anything, and I'm ready to pack it in. My age and my expectations are once again spending the day having an argument.

A couple of years ago, I was working light construction while I was between jobs. We weren't running backhoes and digging trenches, but I was hauling drywall, lumber, buckets of paint; tearing down plaster walls and cleaning up from it (the latter task being more arduous than the former); climbing ladders and replacing windows. Now, I make noises like a defunct diesel engine whenever I get up and get down and get winded after taking the trash to the curb. I know— everybody is going through it, or will be, at any rate. The problem for me? I don't think like I'm fifty!

Well… that actually may not be accurate. I've reached the point where conversations longer than ten minutes become an exercise in trying to find my ticket for the train of thought I been riding to begin with. It's also not uncommon for me to walk half the distance to the office printer, stop still in the hall, and ask myself why I left my cubicle. (That's a true story. People used to stare at me funny, but they've come to understand I'm just a monkey in disguise and go around me like a dumb rock that got splashed in their normally smoothly flowing stream of the day.)

But that's not what I mean. I mean, when I think, I have the same thoughts and self-understanding and opinions (most of the time) as I did when I was forty— in some instances, as I did when I was twenty! My first and last thoughts aren't: "I'm fifty."
Trouble is, whenever I do anything, my body reminds me at the outset: "Dude…remember this time that you're fifty."

At which point my mind says: "No problem, I've been doing this forever, no worries."

And after I'm invariably huffing, puffing, groaning, grouching and wondering how the hell I hurt my calf while hammering a nail into the wall, the body pipes up again: "What did I say?! You're FIFTY, idiot!"

"But I've been hammering nails in half my life!"

"But that's before you were fifty and all your OEM parts have worn out and oxidized into sculptures instead of joints!"

At this point, my calf is throbbing so bad that I've lost track of the conversation, couldn't tell you my brithday for the life of me, and can't figure out why I'm standing in the hall holding a pillow, a coke bottle, a 10mm socket sans ratchet.

I'm tired of the deterioration of our society, the deterioration of our morals…and the deterioration of the run-down shack of a body my mother used to tell me was a temple to God. I'm tired of having more projects than stamina to do them. I'm tired of being tired after I rest up because I was tired.

I'm tired of being fifty.

In summary… Um… Damn it, I can't remember why I even started this blog entry, let alone how to summarize it. I think I had a point, but I don't remember what it is. Oh well, probably a good time to wrap it up anyway so I can put this pillow away, throw this bottle in the recycle bin and try to figure out how the hell I managed to accumulate something from a toolbox I keep in a completely different outbuilding!