LXV

As of this November, I’m Medicared for, officially recognized by the government as an old man: 65—and now universally eligible for those senior ticket prices. Woohoo. I do not subscribe to the notion that we are 65 years young, that we are only as old or young as we feel. Happy talk. However our individual circumstances, we are in decline and slouch toward death. Average lifespan of an American male is 77 years and a few months. The Bible allots threescore ten. Family demographics suggest mid-80s; the Old Man lived to 95. So according to various permutations, I could live 5, 12, 20, or 30 years longer. Five, even twelve years, is not a long time. Gives one pause. Or I could throw a clot and fall off a ladder tomorrow (upstairs/outside window sill repair). Better folks have suffered worse. But here, at this moment, I’ve survived the first five years of seniority, advanced beyond the atrium of old age, and move now relatively freely in its chambers.

The outside world in which I dwell as an old man seems, at the moment, in dire straits, seemingly more dire than my own personal straits. Barring some kind of apocalyptic tipping point, the planet should outlive me in spite of our climatological woes and crimes, that is, the biosphere at large. Of civilization as we know it, I’m less sure. AI, pandemics, UAPs, social media and Bigfoot loom and lurk and threaten. Global geopolitics—Russia/Ukraine, China, North Korea, Israel/Gaza—are not encouraging. Thoughtful persons think that we, humanity, are at our most dangerous time in memory. And the future of the American Republic remains a serious question mark, if not a profane abbreviated aberration—WTF. That Donald Trump continues to exasperate the body politic with a singular virulence says much about the immunological state of the union. We are not just old, we are old in troubled times, and weakened.

 

But while we have never been quite here before, we have been here before, or someplace like it—one of the uses of old age: experience. Not that we know what to do in this case, under these circumstances, but that whatever we do, we’ll likely survive, until the day we don’t. Which is a resolution of a sort.

 

Still content to be here. Still curious.