Here's the sad thing: work runs me through the wringer, and after a few days at the salt mines I feel distinctly knocked around and wrung out. But I realize that when I retire I will probably stay on, because I've seen what happens to gentlemen who've stopped working. They eventually become vegetables. We have piles of limp soggy sauerkraut fermenting in the back room, opinionated, mentally unchallenged, and inflexible, with creaky joints and stiff minds as well as hips and elbows. This may explain why many American men watch sports.
It's their fond longing for the days when they had balls, bumps, and bruises, instead of girth, dullness, and languor. I have no intention of joining them in that lack of pursuits.
Also, I've seen what sportsfans eat. Crunchy greasy starch clusters.
Everything in some parts of the country is deep fried.
One of my friends had her hips replaced a few years ago. And, being a stubborn Cantonese American woman, played fast and loose with the recuperative therapeutic exercise advice of her medical team, meaning that instead of walking much better she now hardly walks. I have repeatedly told her husband, a fellow Caucasian, that the sure fire way to improve matters is to tell her about the fresh seafood restaurant with live tanks two blocks away, then three blocks away, then four. Always ever slightly further distant. With no nearby parking.
And always stand further away than heavy object throwing distance. She'll force herself to walk more, if only to clout you a good one and get fresh crabs.
He has taken the easy way out. He pushes her wheelchair, and himself walks with a cane.
Now, I too have a cane. I only use it on my days off. It helps me find seating on the bus, gives me something to lean on while smoking under an abandoned awning during a rain storm because when my apartment mate is home I cannot smoke inside even if her door is closed what is this world coming to I remember the old days when coffee shops and restaurants were smoke filled dives full of skeevy people and I had an onion tied to my belt as was the style at the time, and, crucially, it makes me feel dangerous and Irish, and I could clop some one if necessary. Many fellow-residents of San Francisco would strongly benefit from a clopping. Angry old man shakes stick at cloud.
So my cane is, perhaps, more a rhetorical and dramatic prop than a necessary adjunct. I can hurry to the bus stop to get to Marin on workdays perfectly well without it, and don't bring it with me. Besides, I would like to emphasize when I'm there that all those old fossils are considerably older and more decrepit, and I can still outrun them.
Mentally and physically.
In addition to watching football, and baseball in lieu of football, and basket ball, they also watch golf. Golf! All these things are like paint drying, but golf is probably much more so than anything else. And they talk about it. Incessantly. Ooh, Jeff, did you see the fabulous way he stroked the ball? It was fabulous. Fabulous! Yes, John Henry, it was fabulous. Stylish and fabulous. Don't you wish you could stroke a ball? Quarterback, referee, let's see it again, pom tiddly pom. Fabulous, replay, fabulous. Ooh arr, team.
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