But the most important thing is your walking technique. You have to make your arms and legs as stiff as possible and swing them violently forward and back in an awkward, vaguely Richard-Nixonlike manner. It helps a lot to have an enormous butt, waving around back there like the Fuji blimp in a tornado. You`ll know you`re doing it right when passing motorists laugh so hard that they drive into trees.
But as you age, you may find that even dork-walking is too strenuous for you. In this case, you`ll want to look into the ultimate aging-person activity, a ”sport” that requires so little physical activity that major tournaments are routinely won by coma victims. I refer, of course, to:
Golf
Nobody knows exactly how golf got started. Probably what happened was, thousands of years ago, a couple of primitive guys were standing around, holding some odd-shaped sticks, and they noticed a golf ball lying on the grass, and they said: ”Hey! Let`s see if we can hit this into a hole!” And then they said: ”Nah, let`s just tell long boring anecdotes about it instead.”
Which is basically the object in golf. You put on the most unattractive pants that money can buy, pants so ugly that they have to be manufactured by blind people in dark rooms, and you get together in the clubhouse with other golfers and drone away for hours about how you ”bogeyed” your 3-iron on the par 6, or your 6-iron on the par 3, or whatever. Also you watch endless televised professional golf tournaments with names like the Buick Merrill Lynch Manufacturers Hanover Frito-Lay Ti-D-Bol Preparation H Classic, which consist entirely of moderately overweight men holding clubs and frowning into the distance while, in the background, two announcers hold interminable whispered conversations like this:
FIRST ANNOUNCER: Bob, he`s lying about 18 yards from the green with a 14 mile-per-hour wind out of the northeast, a relative humidity of 72 percent and a chance of afternoon or evening thundershowers. He might use a 9-iron here.
SECOND ANNOUNCER: Or possibly an 8, Bill. Or even-this makes me so excited that I almost want to speak in a normal tone of voice-a 7.
If you really get into golf, you can actually try to play it sometime, although this is not a requirement. I did it once, with a friend of mine named Paul, who is an avid golfer in the sense that if he had to choose between playing golf and ensuring permanent world peace, he`d want to know how many holes.
So we got out on the golf course in one of those little electric carts that golfers ride around in to avoid the danger that they might actually have to contract some muscle tissue. Also we had an enormous collection of random clubs and at least 3,000 balls, which turned out to be not nearly enough.
The way we played was, first Paul would hit his ball directly toward the hole. This is basic golfing strategy: You want to hit the ball the least possible number of times so you can get back to the clubhouse to tell boring anecdotes and drink. When it was my turn, we`d drive the cart to wherever my ball was, which sometimes meant taking the interstate highway. When we finally arrived at our destination, Paul would examine the situation and suggest a club.
”Try a 5-iron here,” he`d say, as if he honestly believed it would make a difference.
Then, with a straight face, he`d give me very specific directions as to where I should hit the ball. Sometimes after my swing, the ball would still be there, surrounded by a miniature scene of devastation, similar to the view that airborne politicians have of federal disaster areas. Sometimes the ball would be gone, which was the signal to look up and see how hard Paul was trying not to laugh. Usually he was trying very hard, which meant the ball had gone about as far as you would hide an Easter egg from a small child with impaired vision. But sometimes the ball had completely disappeared, and we`d look for it but we`d never see it again. I think it went into another dimension, a parallel universe where people are still talking about the strange day when these golf balls started materializing out of thin air, right in the middle of dinner parties, concerts, etc.
So anyway, by following this golfing procedure, Paul and I were able to complete nine entire holes in less time than it would have taken us to memorize ”Moby Dick” in Korean. We agreed that nine holes was plenty for a person with my particular level of liability insurance, so we headed back to the clubhouse for a beer, which, despite being a novice at golf, I was able to swallow with absolutely no trouble. The trick is to keep your head up.
Important final word of advice
Whatever sport you decide to become involved in, you should not plunge into it without first consulting with your physician. You can reach him on his cellular phone, in a dense group of trees, somewhere in the vicinity of the 14th hole.
How to cope with with . . . wait, it`s right on the tip of my tongue
As you get older, you`ve probably noticed that you tend to forget things. You`ll be talking with somebody at a party, and you`ll know that you know this person, but no matter how hard you try, you can`t remember his or her name. This can be very embarrassing, especially if he or she turns out to be your spouse.
The first few times you commit this kind of ”faux pas” (literally,
”hors d`oeuvre”), you tend to gloss it over. But eventually you start to worry, to wonder if maybe you could be coming down with Whatshisname`s Disease. Well, let me offer you these kind words of gentle reassurance: Don`t be such a moron. The odds are that you`re merely suffering from a very common middle-aged-person condition known technically to medical professionals as
”having a brain cluttered up with useless crap left over from 30 years ago.” For example, to this very day I can remember the words and tune to an incredibly irritating song sung long ago by Annette Funicello called
”Pineapple Princess.” The chorus goes:
Pineapple Princess, he calls me
Pineapple Princess, all day
As he plays his ukulele
On the hill above the bay
Pineapple Princess, I love you
You`re the cutest girl I`ve seen
And some day we`re gonna marry
And you`ll be my Pineapple Queen!
I hated this song when it came out. I still hate this song. I favor the death penalty for whoever wrote it. So naturally my brain has assigned it Priority 1 Status and placed it on a special E-Z Access Memory Circuit, which means that whenever I`m trying desperately to remember the name of the party hostess, or where I left my car keys, or how old I am, there`s old Annette, yammering away in the forefront of my brain lobes:
I saw a boy on Oahu Isle
Floating down the bay on a crocodile. . . .
And if I manage to mentally shove ”Pineapple Princess” out of the way, my memory, always looking to help me out, alertly provides me with: a cigarette commercial jingle from 1959. Of course! The very thing I need!
While I`m nearing panic at the shopping mall, wracking my brain, trying to remember whether I had my son with me when I left home, it is very convenient that my brain is shrieking:
Every Parliament gives you . . .
EXTRA MARGIN!
The filter`s recessed and made to stay
A neat, clean quarter-inch away!
Of course, your brain doesn`t remember everything from your youth. Your brain shrewdly elects to remember only the truly useless things. This is why you can no longer do long division, but you remember the name of the kid who ate the worm in 3rd grade (Charlie Ringwold). When I was in high school, I read large wads of Shakespeare, but all I can quote is:
To be, or not to be, that is the question.
Whether `tis something something, etc.
And alas, poor Yorick doesn`t look so good either. Whereas I will go to my grave being able to flawlessly recite:
I`m a choice M&Ms peanut
Fresh-roasted to a golden tan,
Drenched in creamy milk chocolate,
And covered with a thin candy shell.
Is that pathetic, or what? And I`m not alone. If you surveyed 100 typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you`d find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one would know the theme song from ”The Beverly Hillbillies.” Right? Even as you read these words, your brain, which cannot remember more than two words of your wedding vows, is cheerfully singing:
Come and listen to my story `bout a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer barely kept his fam`ly fed. . . .
What can you do about this useless brain clutter? Unfortunately the only known cure is a painful medical procedure wherein doctors drill a hole in your skull so the stored-up information can escape. If the patient is a middle-aged man, the doctors have to leap out of the way to avoid being hit by a high-pressure blast of numbers such as the batting averages for the entire Toronto Blue Jays lineup for 1979 and all the other vital pieces of information that guys tend to remember in lieu of trivia such as the full names of their children.
The main drawback with this procedure is that if the doctors don`t plug up your skull hole in time, you can lose your entire brain contents and wind up as a pathetic drooling cretin with no hope for meaningful employment outside of the state legislature.
And speaking of politics, what about . . .
Politics after 40
Like most everybody in my generation except Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower, I used to be a left-wing anti-establishment protest-oriented march-on-Washington type of individual. Once, back in college, I even participated in a hunger strike to end the Vietnam War. By not eating, I was supposedly enabling myself to focus my consciousness on peace. What actually happened was that I became absolutely obsessed with cheeseburgers, although if I really, really forced myself to concentrate on the tragedy in Southeast Asia, I could also visualize french fries.
I kept this up for several days but failed to have much of an impact on Washington. At no point, as far as I know, did a White House aid burst into the Oval Office and shout with alarm, ”Some students at Haverford College have been refusing to eat for several days!” followed by Lyndon Johnson saying, ”Mah God! Ah got to change mah foreign policy!”
But the point is, at least I was TRYING, in my own naive and painfully earnest way, to do what I thought was the right thing. Whereas these days I never seem to get involved in causes. The last time I remember protesting anything with any real passion was when I was at a professional basketball game and the arena management decided to stop selling beer in the fourth quarter.
Sometimes I think I`d like to get more involved politically, but I get depressed when I look at the two major name-brand political parties. Both of them seem to be dominated by the kind of aggressively annoying individuals who always came in third for sophomore class president. Which is not to say that there are no differences between the parties. The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They`re the kind of people who`d stop to help you change a flat but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn`t bother to stop because they`d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. Also the Republicans have a high Beady-Eyed Self-Righteous Scary Borderline Loon Quotient, as evidenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, the entire state of Utah, etc.
It`s very common for people reaching middle age to turn into Republicans. It can happen overnight. You go to bed as your regular old T-shirt-wearing self, and you wake up the next morning with Ralph Lauren clothing and friends named ”Muffy.” Here are some other signs to watch for:
How to tell if you`re turning into a Republican
– You find yourself judging political candidates solely on the basis of whether or not they`d raise your taxes. ”Well,” you say, ”he WAS convicted in those machete slayings, but at least he won`t raise my taxes.”
– You assign a lower priority to ending world hunger than to finding a cleaning lady.
– You start clapping wrong to music. This is something I`ve noticed about Republicans at their conventions. The band will start playing something vaguely upbeat-a real GOP rocker such as ”Bad, Bad LeRoy Brown”-and the delegates will decide to get funky and clap along, and it immediately becomes clear that they all suffer from a tragic Rhythm Deficiency, possibly caused by years of dancing the Bunny Hop to bands with names like ”Leon Wudge and His Sounds of Clinical Depression.”
To determine whether Republican Rhythm Impairment Syndrome is afflicting you, you should take the Ray Charles Clapping Test.
All you do is hum the song ”Hit the Road, Jack” and clap along. A rhythmically normal person will clap as follows:
”Hit the road, (CLAP) Jack (CLAP).”
Whereas a Republican will clap this way:
”Hit the (CLAP), (CLAP).”
(By the way, if you don`t even KNOW the song ”Hit the Road, Jack,” then not only are you a Republican, but you might even be Cabinet material.)
I`ll tell you what`s weird. Not only is our generation turning into Republicans, but we also have a whole generation coming after us that`s starting OUT as Republicans. With the exception of a few dozen spittle-emitting radicals I saw at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, the younger generations today are already so conservative they make William F. Buckley Jr. look like Ho Chi Minh.
What I`m wondering is, what will they be like when they`re our age? Will they, too, change their political philosophy? Will millions of young urban professionals turn 40 and all of a sudden start turning into left-wing anti-establishment hippies, smoking pot on the racquetball court and putting Che Guevara posters up in the conference room and pasting flower decals all over their cellular telephones?
It will be an exciting time to look forward to. I plan to be dead.
