Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "middle-aged"

Here I go again, bitching about getting older when the truth is that there are a lot of dead people who never got the chance to be in their mid-50s.

So. I won't bitch this time. I'll just make a few observations.

One is that time does indeed seem to move faster as you get older. When you are ten, a year is 10 percent of your life. That's a lot of life between Christmases. When you're fifty, a year is only 2 percent of your life. It moves a lot faster.

On my way to work this morning, I heard a song that I hadn't thought about in a while: "Love Spreads" by Stone Roses. I got to work and looked it up and found that it was a hit in 1994.

You know, 1994. AKA: Yesterday.

Actually, 1994 was 18 years ago.

If "Love Spreads" were a person, it would be eligible to vote this year. (That's provided, of course, that it could gather the paperwork now necessary to prove its identity.)

I called my daughter while the song was playing because its feminist slant makes me think of her. I didn't get her, of course, because she's busy. I did, however, leave her a message. I also let the refrain of the song play on her voicemail.

Twice today I found myself reflecting on the body-as-shell-for-the-spirit concept. I always counter-balance that sort of positive thinking with Freud's quotation "Physiognomy is destiny." Sure, it's just a shell. But it's my shell.

Work exhausts me. Part of that is because I try to stay busy all the time so that the hours will pass quicker. The other part is that I'm too old to have such a physical job. (And I have a really crappy shell.)

There was a funny cartoon a few years ago of two prisoners chained to a dungeon wall, with one saying to the other, "At least the weekends don't fly by here."

So. That's all I've got for now. A few less-than-morose thoughts on aging.