The loyal spouse is always the last to know.
I just found out my wife is sleeping with a senior citizen.
Oops, hang on—what’s that you say? That senior citizen is ME?!
Oh. Right. Well, never mind, then.
I hit 65 on my birthday last week, finally providing me with Senior Status and the accompanying Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card that declares I am now an addled old fart who can no longer be held accountable for just about anything.
Last year, I was just a young punk still stupid enough to go tenting with daughter Sam. Now that I’m a senior, I ain’t going anywhere except to hell in a handcart.
Granted, there are some who claim I have lived like that ever since elementary school, but I never listen to such naysayers because they’re just a bunch of dried-up crones who can’t remember where they put their car keys, never mind recalling my sterling qualities.
Most of you who know me as a mild-mannered, new-age sensitive kinda guy who never had any hard-held views on anything except silly little irritants like planet-raping SUVs, stupid golf, boring soccer, traitorous Florida vacations, anti-Canadian sissy air conditioning, soul-destroying lotteries, take-out coffee, anti-smoking pogroms and other insane things like rear spoilers on four-cylinder Hondas.
But now, if an original idea ever pops out of the survivors in the swamp of beer-killed brain cells, I can speak my mind without fear of correction or retribution because I am now, officially … eccentric. And you punks have to listen to my outrageous bullshit and maudlin memoires because I am now also a respected elder. Tuning out or even rolling your eyes would constitute senior abuse and get your sorry little deadbeat asses thrown under a jail.
Let’s face it, the next generation can learn a lot with the 843rd retelling of the tale of how I grew up raised by wolves in a cave and trotted 50 miles a day to get to school. Naked. Uphill. Both ways. In testicle-deep snow. Year-round. And had to run down a deer to bring home for supper. Keeping an eye out for Nazi assassins who would have stolen my bike if we could ever have afforded to get me one.
Yup, I think this senior thing is going to suit me just fine. Especially since I intend to abuse all the avenues offered by this new Golden Years status—because I want the gold to run out before the years and leave my rotten offspring with nothing but the fond memories of those wonderful slice-of-life stories.
So pay attention (fellow seniors might consider taking written notes), because I’m going to tell it like it is—unless I get distracted by a nap or maybe a massive coronary—in what I like to call …
Gord’s Guide to the Fun Things about Being Old.
- You use Fedex to get your dental work done.
- You can fart anywhere by invoking some strange senior’s condition (“Sorry, but it’s a sad consequence of Flatulentic Autonomic Reactive Tourette’s Syndrome. The smell is caused by Burritocirrhosis.”)
- Sex gets a lot better, even if it is the surprise result of self-examination probing for suspicious lumps.
- You finally understand cats, now that you nap as much as they do.
- Women in their 60s now look HOT, except you can’t remember why that’s important.
- You’re no longer stuck in an employment monkey suit and can dress in a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers—exactly the same uniform as worn by all the other Baby Boomer retirees.
- You get to give people a hernia when they feel guiltily obliged to suppress giggling when you announce: “Excuse me, I’m going outside to suck on a fag.”
- Waiters are understanding when you make an old-person request like “can you get the chef to go easy on the salt and maybe pre-chew the steak?”
- If you get home late from the tavern, you can just tell the bride you forgot where you live.
- Because you have nothing else pressing to do, you can cause telemarketing companies to go bankrupt by engaging their agents for hours with questions about duct cleaning and Nigerian lotteries.
- After decades of being a pervert, you’re now just a dirty old man.
- When you don’t tip the bartender, he now assumes you’re senile rather than a cheap prick.
- If you want to pawn an antique, the dealer doesn’t require paperwork to prove provenance after you simply assure him that you bought it new.
- When the wife says: That was great, let’s do it again!”, you can get some sleep by replying: “Do WHAT again?”
- Neighbours stop bugging you to babysit after you assure them: “I’d love to look after the kids—they can help me bag the old asbestos in the attic.”
- And finally, here’s the ultimate expression that brilliantly sums up the totality of the human condition that is senior citizenship. It’s the final word, the defining encapsulation, the carved-in-stone rallying cry for our Great Demographic Group. It goes like this …
…
…Oh, shit, I forget!
And it gets even worse. I can’t recall whether that scatological outburst means I’ve forgotten the ultimate defining expression or whether maybe those four words are really it—“Oh, shit, I forget.”
This smacks of deep thought. Instead, how about a rambling saga of my sad hard-scrabble early life as an orphan marooned in a Haitian suburban ghetto of Notre-Dame de Canadian Tire, Quebec …?
