Showing posts with label Mortality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mortality. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

MY YEAR AGING UNGRACEFULLY

 



2022 has been an uncomfortable year for me.   I am a year older moving toward my mid-eighties and beginning to feel my mortality.  I have had a couple of heart flair-ups and ended up in intensive care for two days.   I look in the mirror and barely recognize the old man looking back at me.

 

It brings to mind the book Fool, by one of my favorite authors Christopher Moore.   It is the story of King Lear as told by his Court Jester.

 

“Goneril went to her father and took his hand, ‘Yes father you are old.  Very old.  Really, really, extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly –‘

 

She turned to me for a clue.

 

‘Dog fuckingly’, I suggested.

 

‘- Dog-fuckingly old; said the duchess.   You are feebly, incontinently, desiccatedly, smelling-of boiled-cabbagely old.  You are brain–rottingly, balls-draggingly –‘

 

‘I'm fucking old!’ said Lear.”

 

Like King Lear I fucking old, I’ll stipulate that.

As exposed in my blog, like most old men I am full of advice, mainly because I am too old to go out and set a bad example. 

the Ol’Buzzard




Saturday, March 1, 2014

DEATH AND THE HOKEY POKEY:




Nan at ALL THE GOOD NAMES WERE TAKEN just did a post on mortality.   

When you get my age you find death lurking in the shadows just beyond sight.    You are conscious of your mortality and your limited future – something that never really concerned you when you were young.  

I don’t worry about death, but I know it is the final payment we all owe to nature. 

My grandmother would tell the story that her family always got together at Thanksgiving at the great grandparents house and it was an unspoken joke that my Kentucky great grandfather always started the meal by saying that this would probably be the last Thanksgiving he would share with them.   This went on for of years - until he wasn't. 

I don’t have family to share with: just my wife.  At my stage of life I find it important to do the things I enjoy.   When I am finally gone I have only one request: that my wife put my ashes in a douche bag with bourbon and water and run me through one more time.

The last ride!



the Ol’Buzzard