What it is to be old.

I’ll show you me, eventually. In the interim I’ll show you celebrities my age.

Bond. Old Bond.

Bond. Old Bond.

William Fat Petersen.

William Fat Petersen.

Almost as smart as Robert. Name of Malkovich.

Almost as smart as Robert. Name of Malkovich.

But I'm Irish! Sleep with me!

Colm Meaney. I’m Irish! Sleep with me!

Young women should rest easy. Old guys are just old guys. Maybe not harmless but utterly dismissible. Herewith me:

Older than dirt. I still remember carburetors.

Older than dirt. I still remember carburetors.

1953. It was a big year. Look it up. No wonder everyone looks old. Of course, not everybody has a portrait in the closet whose job it is to keep getting older while somebody doesn’t. Wish I had that arrangement still. If only I could remember what the deal was…

4 thoughts on “What it is to be old.

  1. I’m trying to remember what Bukowski said in his last book “The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship” about getting old. “You don’t look ugly; you just look like a candle that has collected dust.”

    If it’s any consolation, you have a good old face, the kind of long-suffering well-lived look, more akin to Al Pacino’s mug than the kind of dissolving into nothing face that a lot of men (particularly those who were pretty boys) get when they’re older, i.e. Ryan O’Neil. I’m surprised Colm Meaney aged so well, as Irishmen typically don’t. A lot of Jews look more sagacious as they age, like my father or Leonard Cohen (though Bob Dylan looks like a bridge troll).

    Jeff Bridges is becoming the next Sean Connery, in that women still find him attractive, actually moreso as he ages. Someone should make a master list of sexual double-standards, both for the ones that benefit men and women, and they should definitely put “aging” in the male column. It’s a lot harder for women, and I think the cottage industry of talking about how someone like Sophia Loren is still hot and how in “cougars” are is well-meant but disingenuous.

  2. Sean Connery got old without getting gross. Jeff Bridges should probably quit giving the impression that he wants to fire tobacco juice into the nearest bosom.

  3. My dad was born in 1945. He got home from the doctor today with word that the funky thing on his back was caught early enough that it’s probably not a big deal. My dad was a young punk — the movie Grease doesn’t exactly capture my parents’ early years, but it’s pretty damn close — and looking at the picture of you, you look like you’ve got a lot of young punk left in you too. Keep it going.

  4. It’s hard to show your face, even when you are young, even though it may look easy, it’s not really. It’s never really easy to accept this human form we live in for a time until we move onto some other form. When your young, older people hate you for your youth and when you are old you just keep getting older. I look forward to old age because then I won’t have men following me around all of the time. Sounds flattering I know, but if you don’t get gifts out of it what’s it really good for???

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