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I can’t help but feel old, lately. Oh, I’ve already talked about turning old, but now I’m really starting to notice shit and I don’t like it. I don’t like it one goddamn bit.
Last Friday, we were tuned to KZOK during the commute home. They’re the classic rock station of Seattle, and they were playing some really good tunage. A block of Peter Gabriel was played after a Genesis trivia question. The songs were The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, Solsbury Hill and Red Rain. I didn’t think much about it, until I realized Red Rain was released on So, and that album was released in 1986. Holy slow-roasted hell! That’s twenty one years ago! I clearly remember the day I bought that album on cassette tape. I was attending an art college for photography in 1986, and still living at home. I’d take the 104 SEPTA bus from West Chester, Pennsylvania to the 69th Street Terminal, then take the el to downtown Philly. I was coming home from school on the 104, and got off at High and Gay Streets in West Chester. I walked to The Mad Platter record store and bought the cassette. I popped it into my Sony Walkman, and walked to work at Turk’s Head Pharmacy. Man, that seems like forever ago. Fuck. It was forever ago! Does decades ago equal “forever?” It does in my book. When the time period in question is more than half the time you’ve been alive, it qualifies as “forever ago.” I just made that up. Feel free to add it to your vernacular.
Hell, they say memory is the first thing to go. As proof of that, I offer this: While trying to remember the name of the record store in West Chester, all I could recall was the street. I couldn’t remember the name of the store for the life of me. I did a quick Google search and turned up nothing. So, I flipped open my cell phone and called my brother Steve, and explained query. Off the top of his head, like the fucker was in the store just 15 minutes ago, he rattles off “Mad Platter.” What the fuck? I asked how he remembered the name after so long, and all he had to say for himself was “I don’t know.” “I don’t fucking know?” Okay, Steve lives in Philly and our mother still lives in West Chester. He still has friends in West Chester. Since the store is still there, I’m throwing the bullshit flag. He had to have been by the store, been in the store, something. No way he just plucked that out of his gray matter. Either that, or I’m further gone than I thought. Shit.
My feeling of oldness doesn’t stop there. I TiVo the television show Jeopardy! and more and more of the clues given are not from things I learned in history classes, but from things that have happened during my lifetime, and I fucking remember them! Hell, Gerald Ford just died. He was the first president I was “aware” of as a kid. I was eight or nine years old, and I guess we were taught who the president was in school. Now the man is dead, and I feel so much older because of it. It’s only a matter of time before Carter and Clinton are next.
Maybe you think I’ve gone off the deep end, and I’m not really that old. I beg to differ with you, and I have one word to prove my point – underwear. Yes, I have underwear that I’ve owned since before I met Tina in 1998. It’s old, worn, and torn, but do I get rid of it? No. I keep it in the drawer just in case — just in case I don’t have any clean newer underwear to wear that day. Guys will keep underwear like it’s a family heirloom. Somewhere genetically coded in our brains; we cannot part with our ratty drawers. Why is that? Maybe it has something to do with our testicles. Come on now, our man panties keep our junk safe from the cold, and help prevent jeans from pinching. Perhaps there’s some weird connection on a cosmic level that keeps us from tossing our old nasty drawers. I don’t know. But us guys don’t save anything else near as long… except maybe rogue battery covers and keys to cars we no longer own.
Here’s another X on my scorecard of aging fuckupness. I still have the cold I talked about on the 11th. I go into coughing fits and hack up big wads of greenish-yellow phlegm like I’m some septuagenarian with an oxygen tank and a two-packs-a-day habit. It’s real pretty. Of course, all the inhalers, cough drops, medicine, and tissues aren’t helping a goddamn bit. As I start coughing up a lung to beat the band, sometimes little tiny farts simultaneously squeak out of my ass with each cough. Do you know how hard it is to cough and laugh at the same time? Tears are streaming down my face because I’m coughing so violently, and laughing so hard. I don’t care who you are, farts are funny… especially when they escape with each cough. Let’s just hope it stays as farts. The last thing I want to do is purchase new underwear because of some tragic coughing/crapping mishap.
It’s only a matter of time before I’m telling kids to turn down their so-called music and driving with my left turn blinker on. Pass the prune juice, and stay off my damn lawn!
