Guys Over 50...What 5 Super Powers Do You Wish You Had Back...?
Being 50+ is an odd time for me, my brain still thinks like a twenty something sometimes and that usually results in three days recovering from an attempt to do something physical that I stopped doing 10 years ago for a reason.
Now I'm not in denial, I'm not getting ink done, I don't care what the latest cool music groups are (unless I'm making fun of them) and nothing in my wardrobe has a punisher skull or deadpool logo. To the contrary when I see people my age and they are wearing AC/DC shirts or sporting blue hair I wonder what the hell is exactly wrong with them.
My grandparents probably did a lot of shit in the 1940s but they dressed and acted like normal people when they became grandparents. My father didn't try to relive a lost childhood in his 50s, mostly because he had a newborn daughter. He didn't take himself too seriously but he also managed to mostly maintain a level of dignity.
That said, if I could change a few things I would, and it wouldn't be to know what the kiddies are doing and what they think is cool.
1. The art of eating anything I want to...anytime I want. This is a big one. I used to be able to eat pizza at 4am and go to sleep with no negative effects whatsoever. Now if I at pizza after the sun went down, I'm usually fighting some acid reflux and no caffeine after 9pm if I plan on falling asleep by 2am. Long gone are the days when I could eat slim jims for lunch and chase it with a yoohoo. Thankfully I can still eat things like Pizza, I just have to have a plan.
2. Effortless sleep. I used to get tired and fall asleep and that is all there was to it. When I was in my early 20s I once feel asleep on a bus stop bench during the day and almost missed the bus and once in a Wendy's after a 10 hour work shift (not working at Wendys) I ate my burger and fries and promptly knocked out at my booth for 10 minutes. At night I usually had to play music to fall asleep, especially in my DJ days, because if I didn't have some background noise I couldn't fall asleep. As a consequence I could sleep through almost anything.
Then after moving back to Florida and discovering it was prudent to keep an eye on things especially after dark and developing a "one eye open" sleep skill where motion detector lights woke me from a light sleep so I could quickly get dressed, grab a light and a Glock and find out exactly "What are you people doing in my yard? Why are you near my car? What is wrong with you people?" And after pulling what amounted to guard duty for 20 years, now pretty much everything wakes me up and I've a really light sleeper. Would love to get the ability back where I lay down on a couch to watch something, accidentally fall asleep and the next thing I know I've lost two hours. That would be nice.
3. The ability to bounce back like nothing happened. I've been a martial artists all my life, plus like to do stupid stuff like climb things and other physical things that most people my age stopped doing when they started speed walking at the mall. I'm still in reasonably good shape and can give and take with black belts half my age but man do I feel it later. Even if I don't take an injury (but I usually take a couple minor ones) I'm screwed for days and look like an old handicapped man as I try and climb stairs or just sit down in a chair.
4. Focused determination. That's a big one. I used to wake up knowing what I wanted to accomplish that day and had figured out exactly how I was going to do it and I simply ran down my "to do" list with room to spare. Now I waste 30 minutes on the phone with tech support trying to figure out why mobile data on my new phone isn't working, even thought I had to buy a newer phone for the current mobile data feature. Talking to idiots who don't closely listen to me explain the problem and just reading off a script feel like I've walked 10 miles. After that I'm mentally drained and just don't have it in me to go fix the toilet. So every day my unfinished "to do" list gets a little bit longer. Still haven't got the phone working the way it should, but at least I finally got the toilet parts installed and so far no leaks...I hate working on toilets.
5. The sex drive. Usually it was one of the main reasons I woke up in the morning and got out of bed. Somewhere out there was a female that I could be hooking up with, even if we hadn't met yet. I didn't care about money, beyond the ability to handle my stuff. Wasn't to caught up in clothes, cars or jewelry beyond the ability to be presentable to females I might find interesting. But spending the entire weekend with a girl who had strong compatibilities was interesting. I mean only getting out of bed to shower off, order food and the like and then back into bed for a weekend long marathon session of all day, all night hard contact sex is the sort of thing I lived for. I'm talking about you don't stop until the bed simply got too disgusting to be in anymore so you moved things to the couch and then drank a lot of fluids.
These days I think I'd rather have 8 solid hours of sleep than 8 solid hours of time with a girl who is as big a slut as I used to be. Also probably pretty sure that 8 hours would amount to one really amazing "best effort" 20 minute session, followed by lots of gatorade and maybe a pizza, then a couple hours of Netflix to recharge the batteries and then perhaps another 10 minutes followed by lots of food and some more Netflix and then can't we just cuddle or something?
I now understand most of my teen years were wasted on teen girls who mostly couldn't handle a single hour of intensive personal interest. Sadly I didn't have any super hottie 30 something high school teachers who could have better directed my energies.
All in all things aren't really that bad, but I can sure tell the difference.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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