WELL, IT`S FINALLY HAPpening. I`m talking about the long-predicted Aging Process. I see many signs of it in my own life. For example, I have become tremendously concerned about my gums. There was a time when I could go for decades without thinking of my gums, but recently they have come to loom far larger in my mind than the Greenhouse Effect.
Also, young people I meet keep using the word ”Mister,” causing me to whirl around and look behind me, expecting to see somebody with whom I associate this title, such as the pope or Walter Cronkite, only to realize that these young people are talking to ME.
Also, if I attempt to throw a softball without carefully warming up, I have to wait until approximately the next presidential administration before I can attempt to do this again.
Also, I have long, animated conversations with my friends-friends with whom I used to ingest banned substances and swim naked-on the importance of dietary fiber.
Also, I find myself asking my son, in a solemn parental voice, the same profoundly stupid old-fogey questions that my parents used to ask me, such as: ”Do you want to poke somebody`s EYE out?”
Also-this is most terrifying-I sometimes catch myself humming along to elevator music.
Of course, I`m not alone. Growing older is a Major Lifestyle Trend, potentially even bigger than cable television. Millions of us, the entire legendary Baby Boom herd of Mouseketeer-watching, Hula-Hoop-spinning, Beatles- admiring, hair-growing, pot-smoking, funky-chicken-dancing, lovemaking, resume-writing, career-pursuing, insurance-buying, breast-feeding, fitness-obsessing, LaMaze class-taking, data-processing, mortgage-paying, Parents Night-attending, business-card-exchang ing, compact disc-owning, tooth-flossing individuals, are lunging toward:
Middle Age.
Yes. Say it out loud, Boomers: We are MIDDLE AGED. The time has come for us to stop identifying with Wally and The Beav; we are now a LOT closer to Ward and June. SOMEBODY has to be the grownups, and now it`s our turn.
The problem is, I`m not sure we`re ready. I`ve been hanging around with people roughly my age for the bulk of my life, and I frankly do not feel that, as a group, we have acquired the wisdom and maturity needed to run the world- or even power tools. Many of us, I`m convinced, only LOOK like grownups.
For example, I work for a newspaper Sunday magazine whose staff consists mostly of people about my age. If you happened to visit us briefly from the outside world, we`d strike you as being regular middle-aged guys with ties and desks and families and various degrees of hair loss. ”Huh?” you`d say.
”This is a group of adults charged with putting out a magazine under constant deadline pressure! They must be very responsible!” Then you`d leave, and we`d resume playing chairball, a game we invented one day in the conference room while attempting to hold a conference, in which the players scuttle violently around on rolling chairs, trying to throw a foam-rubber ball through a hoop up on the wall.
I don`t mean to suggest that all we do, at the office, is play chairball. Sometimes we throw the Frisbee. Sometimes we practice our juggling. Sometimes we even put out the magazine, but you would never conclude, if you secretly observed us for several weeks, that this was anywhere near our highest priority.
And I don`t think it`s just me and my coworkers who do stuff like this. I think the entire Baby Boom generation is having trouble letting go of the idea that it represents The Nation`s Youth and has an inalienable right to be wild and carefree. The whole Iran-contra scandal, in my opinion, basically boiled down to some 40-ish guys in the White House basement playing an international Top Secret multimillion-dollar version of chairball.
But the alarming truth is, people my age ARE taking over the government, along with almost everything else. And what is even more terrifying, I`m seeing more and more important jobs being done by people who are even younger than I am.
The scariest example is doctors. If you wake up from a terrible accident to find yourself strapped down on your back in an operating room awaiting emergency surgery and a person walks in who is about to open you up with a sharp implement and root around among your personal organs, you want this person to look as much as possible like Robert Young, right? Well, today the odds are that you`re going to look up and see: Sean Penn.
And let`s talk about airline pilots. I have long felt that if I`m going to risk my life and valuable carry-on belongings in a profoundly heavy machine going absurdly fast way the hell up in the air over places such as Arkansas where I don`t even know anybody, then I want whoever is operating this machine to be MUCH older and more mature than myself. But now I routinely get on planes where the entire flight crew looks like it`s raising money for its class trip. I am very nervous on these flights. I want the crew to leave the cockpit door open so I can make sure they`re not using the navigational computer to play Death Blasters from Planet Doom.
I`m not suggesting that anything can be done about this trend. I mean, we can`t pass a law requiring, for example, that airline pilots always have to be older than we are.
No, the only solution is for us to face up to the fact that we are no longer the Hope for the Future. The Hope for the Future now consists of the kids who like to shave their heads and ride skateboards off the tops of buildings. We Baby Boomers are the Hope for Right Now, and we`re going to have to accept it.
Planning your midlife crisis
The last 20 years have seen tremendous advances in our understanding of these mysterious creatures called men-what motivates them; what kinds of complex and subtle emotions they`re really experiencing underneath their brusque ”macho” exteriors; and why they are all basically slime-sucking toads. Most of this understanding has been supplied by popular psychologists, dedicated men and women who-despite the very real risk that they will have to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show-are constantly churning out insightful groundbreaking books with titles like:
”Men Who Hate Women”
”Men Who Claim Not To Hate Women But Trust Me They Are Lying”
”Men Who, OK, Maybe They Don`t Hate ALL Women, But They Definitely Cannot Stand YOU”
And so on. Reading between the lines, we can see that men do not have a terrific reputation for being dependable, lifelong partners in a relationship. In this section, we will put on our pith helmets and begin to explore a major reason for this is, namely: the midlife crisis. This is a phase that all men are required, by federal law, to go through, as part of the official Popular Psychology Schedule of:
Male lifestyle phases
AGE PHASE INTERESTS
0-2 Infancy Pooping
3-9 Innocence Guns
10-13 Awareness Sex
14-20 Emancipation Sex
21-29 Empowerment Sex
30-39 Attainment Sex
40-65 MIDLIFE CRISIS OCCURS HERE
66- Death Contemplation Pooping
We can see from this scientific chart that if you`re a male who has reached age 40, you should be preparing for this exciting lifestyle phase.
What is a male midlife crisis?
Basically, it`s when a man, reaching his middle years, takes stock of his life and decides that IT ISN`T ENOUGH-that although he has a loving wife, nice kids, a decent job and many caring friends, he feels that he is trapped-that there is still SOMETHING MORE HE MUST DO, something that we will call, for want of a better term, ”making a fool of himself.”
There is virtually no end to the humiliating activities that a man will engage in while in the throes of a midlife crisis. He will destroy a successful practice as a certified public accountant to pursue a career in Roller Derby. He will start wearing enormous pleated pants and designer fragrances (”Ralph Lauren`s Musque de Stud Hombre: For the Man Who Wants a Woman Who Wants a Man Who Smells Vaguely Like a Horse”). He will encase his pale, porky body in tank tops and a ”pouch”-style swimsuit the size of a gum wrapper. He will buy a boat shaped like a marital aid. He will abandon his attractive and intelligent wife to live with a 19-year-old aerobics instructor who once spent an entire summer reading a single Glamour magazine article entitled ”Ten Tips for Terrific Toenails.”
What triggers the midlife crisis
Generally the midlife crisis is triggered when a male realizes one day at about 2:30 p.m. that he has apparently, for some reason, devoted his entire life to doing something he hates. Let`s say he`s a lawyer. He did not just become a lawyer overnight. He worked HARD to become a lawyer. He made enormous sacrifices, such as drinking domestic beer, so that he could afford to go to law school. He studied for thousands of hours, sweated out the law boards, groveled to get into a firm, licked a lot of shoes to make partner, and now, finally, he has made it. And then one afternoon, while writing yet another deadly dull formal letter to a client, a letter filled with standardized, prefabricated phrases such as ”please be advised” and ”with reference to the aforementioned subject matter,” he rereads what he has just written, and it says: ”Please be advised to stick the aforementioned subject matter where it hurts.” He may not be a trained psychologist, but he recognizes latent hostility when he sees it. And so he starts to think. And the more he thinks, the more he realizes that he hates everything about being a lawyer. He hates his clients. He (needless to say) hates other lawyers. He hates the way every time he tells people what he does for a living, they react as though he had said ”Nazi medical researcher.” He hates his office. He hates Latin phrases. He hates his briefcase. He hates it all, just hates it hates it hates it, and finally he decides that he really wants to have a completely different job, something fun, something carefree, something like . . . hang-gliding instructor. Yes! That`s it! He tried hang-gliding once, on vacation, and he loved it!
Meanwhile, somewhere out there is a middle-aged hang-gliding instructor who has just discovered that he hates HIS life. He hates not making enough money to own a nice car. He hates sudden downdrafts. He hates having to be nice to vacationing lawyers. What he really wants is a better-paying job that enables him to do something truly useful with his life. Yes, the more he thinks about it, the more he wishes that he had become . . . a doctor.
Of course, if he did a little research, he`d find that most doctors hate the medical profession. They hate getting sued. They hate the way everybody assumes that they`re rich (they ARE rich, of course; they just hate the way everybody ASSUMES it). They hate their beepers. They hate peering into other people`s personal orifices. They wish they had a career with less responsibility and fewer restrictions, a FUN career that permitted them to drink heavily on the job and squander entire afternoons seeing how loud they could burp. In other words, they wish they were: humor writers.
My point is that there`s no reason for you to feel depressed about being trapped in Career Hell because so is everybody else. Doesn`t that make you feel better? No? Hey look, at least you can put this down and go watch TV if you feel like it. I have to sit here and finish this stupid piece so I can meet my stupid deadline. You think it`s easy, being a humor writer? You think it`s fun, sitting here all day in my underwear, trying to think up new material? You try it sometime! You`d hate it! Especially my underwear! You`d soon see why I`ve reached the point where I`d give anything to have a job in which I could wear a nice suit and write in standardized, prefabricated phrases. As soon as I finish this, I`m applying to law school.
What a woman can do when her husband is having his midlife crisis
If your husband is exhibiting signs of a midlife crisis, at first you should try to humor him. If he wants to buy a ludicrously impractical sports car, tell him you think it`s a terrific idea. If he wants to wear ”younger” clothes, help him pick them out. If he wants to start seeing other women, shoot him in the head.
Sex after 40
-or-
Sex? after 40?
I realize that sex is a delicate subject, so please be assured that I intend to discuss it in a mature and tasteful manner devoid of crude and tasteless expressions. But we definitely need to take a long, hard, penetrating look at sexuality because, as we find ourselves plunging deeper and deeper into middle age, it becomes increasingly important that we have the knowledge we need to maintain a firm intellectual grasp on our private parts, so we can avoid becoming victimized by:
