aging gracelessly – savemaple.org

Today is as dreary as it gets. Cold drizzle all day long. Might as well write something to match.

My retirement

Is not a cruise ship ride.

My retirement currently shapes up like this:

I have many regrets about my life.
I can’t do anything material about any of them.
I’m going to die before I spend all my money.
I don’t believe in an afterlife.

Suppose, for a moment, that’s the hand you’d been dealt.

What are you supposed to do with that?

So far, the only answer I’ve come up with is “live with it.”

And, thanks to an early retirement, contemplate it at length.

A well-stocked purgatory

Most retirement-related advice will have been written by or about “successful” retirees. Those who have managed to arrive at a fulfilling and meaningful golden-age promised land.

I, by contrast, would best describe my retirement as a well-stocked purgatory.

Physically, I want for nothing.

The joke being that, unfortunately, I want nothing.

To the contrary, I’ve been focusing on döstädning. Or, at least, getting rid of enough unwanted items and junk to start approaching a state of döstädning.

Now throw in a year-long diet, on top of that. No, scratch that. A permanent state of diet.

For 11 straight months, I lost five pounds a month. But this month, the weight loss stopped. I have reached a “plateau”. Apparently this is a near-universal phenomenon of significant weight loss, though damned if I can find any coherent explanation of it.

I’m still obese by any standard measure. I’m not losing any more weight. And I must continue “to diet”, lest I put that weight back on. All pain, no gain.

Apparently my body was OK with losing the beer gut, but the man-boobs have to stay? I’m not seeing a lot of cosmic justice there.

And then there’s the whole thing Dave Barry wrote about in a column titled “Red Hot Memories”. The propensity of your brain to bring up memories of the most cringe-worthy moments of your life. As I age, I increasingly suffer from the ailment he described.

If I were tasked with designing purgatory, that would surely be part of the plan.