Last weekend I had an 8 hour round trip to join my Grandpa on his 87th birthday. Word is flying around it may be his last. As much as his situation is better than my Grandma I lost a couple of years ago, I do have to say getting old isn’t for the faint of heart. While Grandma got cancer and spent way too much time in a genuine nursing home suffering, My grandpa is in an apartment complex for the elderly in good health. Yet in some ways it may be more depressing. His good health just means he is in a holding pattern.
As I sat and talked with him, I came to realize nearly all his neighbors had died recently. I began to wonder what it must be like to have lunch for a good buddy one day and bury him a week later. Maybe every once in a while this is part of any of our lives, but for him it is the status quo. It is taken for granted just like getting the paper every morning and the mail every afternoon.
Truth be told, we’ll all be there before we know it. That afternoon, I had half a mind to go out and buy a pack of full flavored Marlboros and bite the filters off. I’d rather crap out from lung cancer at 64 then spent another 20 plus years waiting around for the inevitable. It all just seems horribly depressing.
Time, my friends, marches on. I’m just a few days from 31 and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I guess the good news is even at this point I’ll have another 34 years to follow that calling. So maybe the pressure isn’t on as much as I convince myself it is. I guess I’m trying to find my niche. I think the world doesn’t encourage you to grow up like it once did. Ask Grandpa’s generation and you’ll see they would be raising middle schoolers at this point in their life with about a third of their mortgage paid off and over a decade at the same job. We update our myspace pages and our blogs. Kids, a mortgage and the same job for more than a couple of years looks more like a trap than an appealing situation.
Maybe we are too well informed.
Growing up is hard work and every time I step up to plate and get ready to swing away I realize the game is fixed. Like it or not we all have the same ending. Some of us just have a little more fun getting there. So while I spend my days going to the gym, replacing bacon with turkey, living smoke-free and barely touching alcohol or caffeine, I wonder what the point is. In reality I’m taking a good deal of joy off these early years to spend a little more time on the back end waiting for the finish line. Poor narcissistic-blogger-man-child.
As I sat and talked with him, I came to realize nearly all his neighbors had died recently. I began to wonder what it must be like to have lunch for a good buddy one day and bury him a week later. Maybe every once in a while this is part of any of our lives, but for him it is the status quo. It is taken for granted just like getting the paper every morning and the mail every afternoon.
Truth be told, we’ll all be there before we know it. That afternoon, I had half a mind to go out and buy a pack of full flavored Marlboros and bite the filters off. I’d rather crap out from lung cancer at 64 then spent another 20 plus years waiting around for the inevitable. It all just seems horribly depressing.
Time, my friends, marches on. I’m just a few days from 31 and I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I guess the good news is even at this point I’ll have another 34 years to follow that calling. So maybe the pressure isn’t on as much as I convince myself it is. I guess I’m trying to find my niche. I think the world doesn’t encourage you to grow up like it once did. Ask Grandpa’s generation and you’ll see they would be raising middle schoolers at this point in their life with about a third of their mortgage paid off and over a decade at the same job. We update our myspace pages and our blogs. Kids, a mortgage and the same job for more than a couple of years looks more like a trap than an appealing situation.
Maybe we are too well informed.
Growing up is hard work and every time I step up to plate and get ready to swing away I realize the game is fixed. Like it or not we all have the same ending. Some of us just have a little more fun getting there. So while I spend my days going to the gym, replacing bacon with turkey, living smoke-free and barely touching alcohol or caffeine, I wonder what the point is. In reality I’m taking a good deal of joy off these early years to spend a little more time on the back end waiting for the finish line. Poor narcissistic-blogger-man-child.
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