REPEATING THE MAGIC MANTRA

This blogger, it should not surprise you, is not particularly given to existential crises, but is a rational and well-balanced individual.
I often deliberately overlook the slights that would wound more fragile people, and tolerate a fairly wide range of behavioural peculiarity from the folks around me. It is smoother to do so.

And I'm enough of a realist to realize that life, in the main, is a rather trying experience. Disappointing, and sometimes arid. Although it is vastly better than any alternatives that I am aware of.
Living is participation in a flawed process.
It's something one just has to do.
Enforced attendance.


Never-the-less, I am presently keenly aware that I am fifty four years old, and not loved. Sort-of liked, yes, and that by several people.
Not loved. I do not arouse passion or tenderness.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing -- Charlie Manson inspired love, and consequently no one told him that he was a lousy musician -- but you will agree that being just "sort-of liked" is not very inspiring.
I would much rather be loved.
It sounds zesty.


FIFTY FOUR

Middle-aged men are rather like Humpty Dumpty; words will always mean what we intend them to mean. And in this blogger's vocabulary, fifty four years old is EARLY fifties. Not, as some unbearably young people might assert, MID fifties. Early fifties. As in "early middle age". Or barely even an adult. Early at best.
The middle fifties are only after one has hit fifty five or fifty six, all the way to one year before sixty. Which is the 'late fifties'. At which point one may describe oneself as 'middle aged', rather than 'early middle aged', or 'barely grown-up'.

Old age doesn't start until a decade after retirement. At least. And then only if one is deaf, has severe arthritis, and there is leakage of some sort. Or the moral equivalent of leakage, if not any actual leaking.
A minimum of three symptoms have to be present to qualify.

Given that I am quite spry, vibrant, and flexible even, it will be a very long time indeed before anyone will describe me as old. Well, except for extremely young people seated on the bus, looking up at the lovely silver-blonde in my beard, and mistaking it for a sign of antiquity.
They're youthful, they're so very very inexperienced.
I shall forgive them, and no I don't need a seat.
Really, I am quite comfortable standing.

[The view is much better this way.]

Fossilhood is late eighties at the very earliest. Deafness, arthritis, leakage, querulousness, off-tangent remarks, and tremors.
As well as multiple reasons for physical embarrassment, plus mumbling, and voting the Republican ticket.
No longer an interest in boobies, but having become one.

By that last criterion, even mature adulthood may be a very long way off.
I'll have to re-think my definition of middle age.
I am still quite young, adolescent even.
Life is very good indeed.
Boobies. Nice.



It's the 'child within'.
Playful. Infantile.
Boooooobies.




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