Youth – Auxiliary Memory

Smoking Dried Badger Balls

By James Wallace Harris, December 20, 2015

If you were told smoking dried badger balls would restore your lost youth, vitality and stamina, would you? In some countries traditional medicine claims potions made from endangered animals will let you feel young again. We scoff at such ancient folk wisdom. Yet, in our modern culture we embrace mega-vitamins and esoteric supplements to turn back the years, even though scientific research warns us we’re just pissing those expensive chemicals away. If you’re young and reading this you won’t know what I’m writing about. But if you’re old, you do know. You know that feeling of dwindling vitality. You also know that feeling you’d grasp any straw you could, even smoking powered badger balls, to get back that energy you had.

Feeling old? Feeling old and tired? Feeling old, tired, depleted much quicker than you used to? Join the club. Are you retired and sensing that life is on one long slow decline? I just searched Google on how to gain energy and stamina after 60. Most of the answers I got were about exercise. A few were about weird diets, strange herbal remedies or special vitamins. I’m hardly alone in this quest. I already exercise three times a day, take supplements my doctor recommends, and I eat a natural plant-based died. I feel ten years young than I did before I retired, but I still feel like I’m on the downward slope side of the graph. I’m doing just about everything that’s recommended. Other than looking for the Fountain of Youth, consuming endangered animal parts, or seeking out a witchdoctor, I’m not sure what to do. Now I understand why people hope for magic. Why they pray. Why they take drugs.

I’ve been wondering about artificial stimulants for old folks, but I’m not sure I could handle cocaine or crystal meth. Hell, I don’t even tolerate caffeine and sugar anymore. Currently my best antidote for fatigue is a nap. Then I started thinking about things I do during the day that do give me a physical and mental boost. Could there be mental stimulants that don’t degrade the body? Last night I played my favorite Van Morrison tunes for a half-hour, very loud, that really pumped me up. My normal volume setting is 74 on my Denon receiver. Usually my company complains at 66. Last night I dialed it up to 80. It felt great! Watching an innovative TV series can bring back thrills. Reading an outstanding novel makes my neurons boogie. Playing with a new tech toy brings back a bit of that excitement I felt as a kid at Christmas.

I get up at 6am, and 18 hours later head to dreamland, but I do need three naps during the day to recharge my battery. I no longer have the energy to be physically active for a whole day. I can write for 2-3 hours, an activity that eventually fogs my mind. I need food and a nap to recover, but I don’t recover enough to go back to writing, or anything else constructive during the day. I’m left to socializing, reading, watching television or listening to music. I’d like to have the stamina to write longer, or get in two writing sessions. My old workday was four hours, lunch and then three and a half hours of more work. I can’t tell if retirement or age has ruined my stamina.

If I believed it was anything but age I could find a way back to when I felt younger. If I believe it’s age, do I just fatalistically accept more and more napping? All those vampire stories make sense to me now. Bite someone on the neck and suck out their vitality. It’s like Willie Sutton’s logic, “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.” It also explains why some of my peers aren’t acting their age. They believe if you act young, you’ll feel young. Or why people get plastic surgery, if you look young, you’ll feel young.

Friends tout that 60 is the new 40, but I don’t believe that bullshit. Looking around me, I see my fellow baby-boomers doing everything they can to stay active. Many have returned to the pleasures and pursuits they loved in their teens. I often see people in their 70s acting young. But why don’t I see people in their 80s doing the same? There’s a few outliers, but not many. What magic does it take to keep hanging on? At some point I know I’m going to be doing far more napping than doing. And after that it’s the big dirt nap.

I’ve already given up all my favorite fun foods to feel better. And I do. I exercise to feel better, and that works too. But I can feel those remedies have their limitations. What’s next? Mega-vitamins and smoking badger balls? I wonder at what straws I will grasp.

Essay #990 – Table of Contents

Rejuvenation Delusions–Searching for the Fountain of Youth

This is one of those essays I occasionally write that get no hits. Usually I don’t even publish them to the blog. It’s a Sunday night and I’m tired. I write this trying to capture how I feel, which is old, but how does one put that into words? When I was young and met old people trying to recapture their youth I thought they were pathetic. I knew they wanted young bodies and youthful vitality, but I didn’t know how it felt to have an old body or what it meant to be old. I heartlessly felt no empathy for them, and now the chickens have come home to roost.

My two days of freedom from work are about over, and I feel depressed that I have only three hours to accomplished something but I’m too tired to do anything other than to write this. I saw two tragic romantic movies this weekend, Anna Karenina and The Royal Affair – so I think I’ve overdosed on watching beautiful people leading passionate young lives, which makes me feel even older and more worn out than I actually am.

But you know what the weird thing is? My mind is just as ambitious as ever. The pain in my back and legs grows as I stand or walk, and I’m only good for about ten minutes of activity, but I daydream of hiking the Appalachian Trail. My dick has reached those hilarious ED years but it still has an ambitious role in my idle thoughts, sort of like daydreaming what you’d do if you won the $500 million dollar lottery. In other words, why should I think critically of people looking for the fountain of youth at the end of a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. Nor should I think “dinosaur rock” when I see that The Rolling Stones and The Who touring again.

Like George Bernard Shaw said, “Youth is wasted on the young,” because you REALLY don’t know what the hell he meant until you get old.

That’s the vexing thing about life, we all keep trying to be young way beyond our youth. None of us want to just give up and die. I’m reminded of a Vaughn Bode underground comic I read back in the 1970s, about a little cartoon creature that had been captured by an enemy who cut off his arms and legs, poked out his eyes, and left him in a dungeon. In the final panel the little disfigured cartoon creature whispered to his fellow prisoner, “I’m going to escape when they go to sleep.” In other words, we don’t give up no matter how pathetic and wrinkled we get. Just pass the Viagra, Botox and amphetamines – we’re all Joe Gideon from All That Jazz until our hearts blow a gasket.

Now, is that pathetic or heroic?

You know what though? I’m pretty sure I’ve written this all before, maybe even using the same words, quotes and similes, but my old fucking mind thinks its new. Ha-ha. Maybe we lose our memories so won’t just give up in frustration!

I still can’t capture in words what it means to feel old but think young, other than to say, “Tomorrow I’m going to buy an electric guitar and become another 1965 Bob Dylan,” or maybe I’ll join NASA and convince them geezers belong on Mars. Or maybe I’ll just write a book about a 61-year-old ex-astronaut who buys an electric guitar to become a rock star.

I never did like that crazy witch Scarlett O’Hara, but she did have it right, “Tomorrow is another day.”

[Wow, I still have 90 minutes of weekend freedom to do something still.]

JWH – 12/9/12

The Things I’m Learning From Getting Older

Today I was at Sports Authority buying a bicycle, which I hope to ride for exercise and lose weight. I have a bad back because of spinal stenosis and arthritis, and can’t walk for exercise, so the idea is to bicycle instead. My theory is losing weight will help my back so I can do more, which is really a wish to be younger. We all want to turn the clock back. But, those delusional desires are so instructive.

I think women want to look younger, and men want to act younger. While waiting for the salesman to prep the bike I bought, two strikingly beautiful young women came into the store. Is there anything more educational about aging than envying the young?

I try hard not be be resentful. I don’t feel bitter. I pretty much laugh at the failures of my brain and body, but there is a fair amount of resentment of having to grow old. I try to keep it wistful, but sometimes it gets heavy.

I noticed that most of the people in the store were young, and obviously pursuing different physical activities, activities I can’t pursue anymore because of my age and condition. It really made me feel old and crippled. Although I’m only 60 and can still walk to a degree, I feel very limited physically, but I know plenty of people that have far more limitations, so I can’t bitch. At 60 I can see the future of doing less and less.

By writing about my growing list of age related restrictions, I hope I’m being philosophical and not whinny. At 60, I’m only getting a hint at what it means to be really old, so I think I need to psychologically prepare myself for being a decrepit old dude that can’t remember shit.

While waiting for my bike to be tuned up, I found a kiosk with this film for extreme sports advertising the GoPro Hero video camera, and it really made me think about being young again. The youth in these films below are pushing the envelope of youthful vitality. It would be totally pointless to wish I could do stuff like this, but I’ve got to ask, what are the activities that I could pursue that would push the limit of my fading vitality?

What if I strapped on a helmet with a HERO 2 camera, can I do anything worth filming?

I highly recommend you play these videos in full screen at the highest resolution. I love these videos. They’re dazzling, beautiful, and exciting – a cruel reminder of all my resentments about getting old. It’s also a reminder of my own personal failings, and the limitations I’ve imposed on myself.

This doesn’t mean I’m ready to call it quits, I’m just hard-pressed to imagine doing anything Hero 2 worthy. But what if I was 90 watching myself write this blog while listening to music, would I impress my older self with an activity I won’t be able to do then?

Now, I know few people pursue these extreme sports – I think these people must have a gene for thrill-seeking which I obviously don’t have. I also assume they have a lot more money than I ever had. I think we all resent beautiful, rich, jetsetters, unless we’re beautiful and rich, so that’s not the resentment I’m talking about.

I’m sure there are plenty of twenty-five-year olds that would envy the folks in these films.

My issue is with myself, for not trying harder, for not making more of the time and the opportunities I had when I was young. I have the genes to be a bookworm that loves quiet indoor life. I think if I magically got to live life over I think I’d trade TV and movie watching for several hours a week of being active outside. I’d still keep books, writing, science and computers – in a do-over I’d just try to find a balance, maybe two-thirds geek and one-third jock, instead of 100% geek.

Most of my friends who are my age think I dwell on getting old, and that I just need to act younger. They tell me I’m getting old because I think I’m old. They think they are still young because they believe it to be so. I think they’ve forgotten what it’s really like to be young and are refusing to accept the reality of aging. But then I’ve always been a Puritanical Buddhist Atheist that’s enjoys the grimness of reality and acceptance.

I think age is relative, but until your body starts failing in some serious way, you can continue to believe that youthfulness is a state of mind. Once you experience real body failures then you know youthful state of mind is bullshit. Getting old is so goddamn instructive of how reality works. This is why one of my all-time favorite stories is “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany. It’s a multi-level story where we get to see the limitations faced by each character as they struggle to fight through their own personal barriers.

Getting older and learning about the value of youth is like that old saying, “You don’t know what you’re missing until it’s gone.” We all feel immortal when we’re young. We all feel like we’ve got plenty of time, time enough to waste. You won’t sense the reality of getting older until that sense of immortality goes away, and you realize time is running out, with none to waste.

Now, I don’t mean this to sound like, “Oh no, poor pitiful me.” No, what I expect is to scare the crap out of you about getting older. Don’t waste time, you have less than you think. Fight through the barriers you face because when you get older you’ll resent you didn’t try harder. What I’m learning about being 60 is I wished I had known what it would have been like when I was in my teens and twenties.

What I need to do now is imagine what being 90 is like to inspire me at 60. At 90, 60 would be an envious youth, and a 90’s mind would know how I wasted my time in my 60’s.

My back pain limits how much I can do. And my memory is also going, and I’m realizing the limitations that will mean too. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still functional, I just function differently. I’m getting some insights on what it means to get old and frail. My next door neighbor is 93, and can’t walk much because of a stroke. She spends her days sitting in a chair watching TV. I can now see a path from where I’m at, to where she’s at. I know I’ve got to be prepared for a lot more limitations. Maybe it’s lucky that I have all that practice at watching TV, because if I had been an extreme sports kind of guy it would have been much harder to give it all up.

When you’re a kid all the old people ask you what you want to be when you grow up. As a kid, you feel you have this potential to be anything and it’s a really hard decision to make up your mind what to do. Well, it feels the same way when you’re older. People ask you what you’re going to do when you retire, and you think of all the possibilities. Whether you are young or old, the key is learning to deal with reality and it’s limitations. Those dark-haired beauties I saw at Sports Authority today would never have given me the time of day, even when I was their age. And there’s never been an age that I could have been an extreme sports guy. If you’re going to be regretful, you need to be realistically regretful.

Don’t resent what never could have been real. Resent what you failed to do that you realistically could have achieved.

JWH – 4/29/12

The mood for this essay was provided by Donovan and “Ferris Wheel.”

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