It’s my birthday, and my age is the kind of stupid joke I might have sniggered over when I and my friends were virginal nerds going har-de-har-har around the D&D table fifty years ago. Reality is less amusing.
Here’s the objective assessment.
My knees…if I were a racehorse, I’d be shot. If I stand for long periods of time, the bones tend to sink into the cartilage like its marshmallow fluff and they lock up on me. I might be able to walk away stiff-legged, but I’m desperate to put my butt on a chair and not move for a while. Fortunately, in this day and age I don’t have to worry about running away from sabre-toothed tigers, and even if I had the knees of an athlete, the tiger would catch me anyway.
My back is the current troublemaker. After my little fall last month, it feels like my spine is made of disjointed legos, fishhooks, and shards of glass. It’s much better than when it first happened and I was in so much pain I thought I was going to die, but the process of repair is far from complete. I’m not in pain most of the time, except when I bend, or go to bed — and then it takes forever to find a position that minimizes the grinding. It’s healing, but annoyingly slowly.
My brain seems to be functioning OK, but how would I know?
One nice development is that I developed a scotoma several months ago, a blind spot in my right eye caused by a broken blood vessel. It hasn’t gone away — if I blink fast so the visual field changes from light to dark at a rapid rate, I can still visualize it as a horizontal line of dark blurriness — but neural plasticity for the win. I don’t notice it most of the time, because my brain has rewired itself to compensate and fills in the gap with information from my visual map. I suppose if you aimed a frisbee at just the right angle at my right eyebrow, it could fit into the visual gap and I wouldn’t see it.
So, my weakness right now is against charging frisbee-flinging tigers. I’ll try to avoid them so I can make it to the next funny number, which is 420, I believe. I was fortunate to have timed my birth to completely skip the whole 6-7 nonsense.
My current plan to deal with the onset of age is to start wearing purple.
I hear it works wonders.
Don’t worry. For the current generation another number in the sixties, that you have already passed, has dethroned 69.
I have the pleasure of sharing the date with you :-s — here’s wishing you a very happy round-the-sun day, PZ!
So I won’t say, “Happy Birthday!” But let’s make it “Happy Looking Forward to When the Pain Goes Away”. Because it does, bit by bit.
Take it easy, PZ; don’t push yourself.
Have you considered becoming a vampire or other kind of nonagenarian? Insert bowhead whale DNA and live to 200? And we should not forget the Guild Navigators with their Spice infusions.
The talk about tigers gives me ideas. Maybe you could convince the Trump kids to follow you on a safari to the Sundarbans. Too bad they only had blanks in their rifles, wonder how that happened…