Some friends are approaching, at, or past the 50 year mark. My brother becomes jubilee-worthy next month. A childhood buddy turns 49 this month. My anarchist comrade has been celebrating this moment for the last ~35 years. I believe that he turns to a sack of copper doubloons on the midnight following his celebration.
It's a hideous age to be, though there are worse ones, yet none that have the same definitive end to any self-held ideas of one's youth. 60 would be worse, of course, by almost twenty years, but one must endure 50 before they can arrive there. It is the way of time, being one way and always working against the one working hardest against it. One no easier abandon youth at 60 than they can at 70. It is already long gone.
Time used to be on Mick Jagger's side. Have a look. Then, do a search for recent images. He calls them laugh lines, but... nothing's that funny, mate.
Years await me, or that is the hope. The most patient hunter: numbers. The great bullfighter in the sky. Growing old used to be funny. I thought that the humor of it might persist, like jokes about the greatness of bacon, or beer.
I have to exercise five times a week just to look one year younger than I otherwise would.
I almost used the word "vigorously" in that sentence. It felt wrong. I'm not sure what it is that I'm trying to express or evoke today, or on any other day, but some words will always be wrong for almost everything. Vigorously is one of them. You can tell just by looking at it in the quotation marks. It seems like such a flimsy evocation for what it represents. Then again, capitalized in italics, it looks too vowel-heavy.
It's not vigory enough.
So, fuck, fuck, fuck. I meant to write another sentence after the one cited above, but now there's no way to get back up the page to it, where I might be able to gain a foothold to try and make some sense.
I did this to myself.
I did this to myself.
I set out to lose weight a few months back and now I have achieved a numeric goal that could be a sensible stopping place: 30 pounds. Though I'm tempted far more by the pursuit of some fucked version of self than self-satisfaction at achieving a numerical type of moderation. I've never been able to set strictly numeric goals, and have never been very happy when trying to achieve them only on that basis.
That being said, I still lost 30 pounds.
The exercise regimen mentioned above does help me feel better, which feels like being younger, insomuch as being relatively free from pain was one of the qualities of youth. The problem with feeling younger is that my behavior corresponds to my feelings. What people seem to want is for me to look young but to act my age, which begs the question: What would they plan on wasting their newfound feelings of youth on? Because youth is anything if not wasteful of itself, those that try to preserve it suffer this most pointedly.
I am given to indulgences, some of which have backfired on me, repeatedly. It is a lucky thing that I never developed a love for video games. I'd be masturbating over the top of my fat roll right now, watching myself in a mirror set up next to my gaming monitor, always in danger of spilling my cherry Slurpee.
Or, that is the closest approximation that I can think of for public writing: expected auto-erotic Slurpee malfunction, caught daily in well placed floor mirror.
Flavor: cherry red.
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