You Are As Old As You Feel

A study in the New York Times has confirmed what I suspected. You are as young as you feel. Researchers took a bunch of men in their seventies and eighties and put them back in an environment where they felt young again. The entire world was turned back to their time when they were young men. And when they came out after a week they were more spry, sharper, more with it in every way. Hmmm...

When I was in college I knew a guy who came back after a divorce and a bad job. He looked at that time like he was in his thirties when in fact he was probably just twenty seven. After two years of college he looked to be in his early twenties. Living the college life again had turned back the clock for him. Certainly we see this time and time again. People who look and act old are old. Whereas people who see themselves as young, feel young and a lot of times look younger.

They are now doing a study with cancer patients. The mind body connection is a lot more powerful than medical science has let on. The patients are all being turned back to a time when they were cancer free and are being surrounded by shows and movies of that era. It all begs a really interesting question. How much of aging is our mind telling out bodies how old we are?

It makes you wonder.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Talking About Age

Some people just cant get over that they have gotten older. You know who they are. The same people who went into a bar when they were thirty five and complained everyone was younger. No shit. Gee I guess people do age don't they. Hope I die before I get old has not worked out for the boomers. Now they are being chased down by commercials galore for getting it up to wearing diapers and not shitting themselves in public. The whole youth culture thing has gotten really nasty now that the whole country has gotten old.

Since we quit accepting that people become adults somewhere back in the fifties when Elvis started gyrating we now are a people at sea. We have committed the ultimate sin by aging. In America no one ages or haven't you heard? Except for Judy Dench or Maggie Green or Helen Mirrah. They have aged and done it magnificently but for the rest of us it is a dirty sin. And the whining is disgusting. I now have to listen to people say...WE"RE OLD. Gotta love the way they include you in their sweeping declaration.

But it happens all the time. People who feel old figure everyone must feel the same. And it is simply not true. But our culture shames people when they age. They have betrayed our culture and have passed from youth into something dirty and unspeakable. An adult. Whoa. Stand back Jack. Once  upon a time people were allowed to be adults. But since Roger Daltry said he hoped he died before he got old we are all screwed. By the way Rodger did not die. He sang at the Super Bowl. But we are left now with the whiners.

And it is pathetic. People age. People don't stay young forever. People die. Get over it and enjoy the ride.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

What if We Didnt Keep Track of Our Age

Been feeling something heavy lately. Oh yeah. My birthday. Funny how that goes from when you were a kid and you were all about it to carrying this heavy piece of sludge. Yeah. Another year and all that means and purports. Look we aren't wine. We are not getting better. But isn't the whole digit thing what really brings us down? Wouldn't we be better off as an arrow shot from nothing to nothing with no one measuring the arc? I mean, really,what is age but a way for other people to get a handle on you.

The old people love it. I don't mean the old people chronologically, I mean the old people. You know the people who started talking about being old when they were twenty. They love being old. They love talking about their back or the feet or their sight or their private parts. They were the ones who started going to bed in college at ten o'clock and talking about the "kids" staying up. They really take pleasure in aging and nailing all the people who stayed up all night and then went jogging in the morning.

The old people send you those cards. You know. Hey, sorry to hear your penis just fell off. Guess age gets everyone eventually Ha Ha. And they comment on those kids (thirty somethings) who are habitually doing foolish things. Sometimes they call each other mom and dad. But imagine if these same people never knew their own age. They would still act old but they couldn't point to you and go. Ha! Your the same age as me! You're old! They would have no idea.

Imagine that. If you felt young then you would be young. In fact you wouldn't have any idea how to age because you would have no idea how old you were. So if you felt like acting twenty your whole life then that is what you should be. Why shouldn't you be twenty to the day you die. Or if you wanted to be sixty you could be sixty. Right up to the day you kicked. No more obnoxious cards. No more obnoxious cakes. No  more disingenuous people saying, oh how do you feel now that you are blah blah.

No. I think I'm going to go for that. Eighteen. Cool age. Guess I'll stay there. Until I decide I want to be nineteen.

www.billhazelgrove.com

The Sword of Age

In this country it is all about those two numbers that correspond to that weird date on your birth certificate where you left the cosmos and started your life on the planet earth. And from that day on the bastards started tracking you. They  just had to know how many years had passed since the day that nurse spanked you on the ass and you screamed out in protest because you had just left this nice warm dark place and you intuited that from here on out it was every man or woman for him or herself.

And so you tooled along and went along with the birthday parties where they made this big deal about this number and gave you presents and cake and ice cream and you were down with it because it all worked in your favor and who cared about a little number anyway? Then the little number started to grow and the birthdays changed. Not so many presents or cake and ice cream ,but still everyone wanted to always know what that number was. In fact it was the first question out of a lot of peoples mouth a lot of time.

And then somewhere it started to become this thing around your neck. People didn't seem to care about your birthday at all anymore, just the little number. And you noticed people used the little number against you especially if their number was smaller. And the weird thing was that people always guessed your number about ten years off. Thinking your number was ten years light. But they always persisted and had to know...really what is your number...how old are you really?

And then you realized at at point that number was a sword. They couldn't get you any way else. People a lot dumber than you, slower, uglier, still wanted to know that number. And so you start to lie to them. Just to piss them off. And they would look dismayed. But i thought you were...nope. Not that number, this number. Really? Oh yeah. My number is less than yours. And you leave them there wondering, staring at you and you think to yourself, fuck em.

I mean, what's in a number, really?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...funniest novel since Straight Man...Chicago Sun Tiimes

The Unforgivable Sin in America

It's not yourself that you see getting old, it is everyone around you. Somehow that mirror doesn't cut back to you but it is there if you bother to look. But the point is everyone is guilty. In America there is really only one thing you don't want to do and that is age. Lose your mind, become a coke fiend, shoot up a McDonalds and who knows you might end up with a book deal or a made for TV movie. But get old and you are done.

Probably the boomers. Yeah, blame it on them. Watch Woodstock or Spinal Tap again and see the the crappy rock and roll culture that can really only hold up one thing although our King  Rockers are sixty something but somehow they get a pass. They're rockers! Rockers don't age. The rest of us it is every man or woman for himself. And the sad thing is there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

Lets say you pull a Joan Rivers and turn into a plastic doll. Everyone says, wow, there goes a really old plastic doll. Or maybe you are Demi Moore who figures she can keep Ashton around by just being Scotch voiced Demi but the bitch of turning fifty is you turn fifty and Ashton had that annoying habit of looking like he was twenty. And so he dumped Demi and Demi can says she dumped him and they had differences...yeah, like twenty five years.

But we paddle on. How come Humphrey Bogart never was considered old? Or Frank Sinatra? Or Clark Gable or Spencer Tracy or all the film noir guys in long coats and fedoras.? Was it they had a heater in their coat or was it the fact our Justin Bieber youth culture hadn't kicked in and made everyone into adults who look like children.

In the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story At Your Age he gets his hand around age with a story about a fifty year old man pursing a twenty year old girl. In the end when the man loses her to a younger man, he goes to visit the home where he grew up. Fitzgerald eloquently sums up what he really lost out against.
"He was just trying to break his tired old heart before he was too old to care. What he really had done was  to commit  ages unforgivable sin...refusing to die. "

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the funniest serious novel since Straight man...Chicago Sun Times

How Americans Age

They don't age well. They talk about aging. They worry about aging. They age and look used up before their time and act old and feel old and they are old. Forget demographics Americans are old because they can't feel young forever and that makes them older. The youth culture has bit everyone in the collective ass and we have now become a nation of aging whiners. Here is one for you: how many times are you out with people who talk about how old they are? If you are over thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, then the number is increasing. Sounds like fun huh.

Now why is that? Why don't Americans just shut up and age. It's almost like someone told they would not age. Would that be our culture? You know those ageless rock stars who still sing songs about being young. Hmm. Some sort of disconnect. Or our movies and our television shows where everyone looks more and more like highschoolers and less like adults. Or maybe it is the plastic surgery industry that tries to make everyone look younger but really makes everyone look like martians except Joan Rivers who looks like someone froze her twenty years ago in a cake of soap.

So the collective message is this: you should not age. In fact you should feel guilty you did get older. And worse you should whine about it like a kid who was not told he would in fact grow up. The problem is not aging but the self consciousness of it. Somewhere Americans thought they were bionic. Guess what? We're not. We age and die. Whoops. Sorry about that. The best thing Americans can do is raise a  drink and have a good time and shut up. No one wants to party with a whiner

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off soon

Ageless Rock

I watch bad television late at night and so I am victim to all the bad shows and infomercials. I am the man riding herd on the late night charlatans and collections of the Greatest Music of All Time--The Sixties! So of course I had to watch the reunions of the British Invasion. They dug up bands from the sixties who were still around and put them on a stage. I watched these rebellious souls in senior tennis shoes and floppy flowered shirts sit on stools singing their anthems of rebellion forty some years after the fact. They sounded amazingly the same, but of course the lyrics didn't really match up. "Baby we got out of this place, if its the last thing we ever do...baby you are so young and pretty..." A bit like almost sixty Bruce Springsteen shouting, "tramps like us, baby we were born to run!" Enjoyable, but the truth is the art form doesn't really work anymore. Rock and Roll born from youthful rebellion does not work in the same way after fifty...maybe even after forty. The reason is that Rock was never meant to be an art form that could stand the test of time. Yes, the old songs are around and we can spin them and listen and travel back to that time, but watching the old rockers perform them is something of an embarrassment. It is not that they cant' perform them, it is just that rock and roll is fundamentally adolescent in it's sentiments. I know, I was an adolescent for many many years. It would be as if F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise when he was forty. Why would he do that? His first novel was a coming of age and written when he was twenty two. Style and substance came together to form the nexus of his voice. Now why would he write something extremely young adult when he is middle age? He wouldn't, it simply wouldn't t fit unless it was a retrospective of his youth which he did with the Basil and Josephine stories. But he could not write This Side of Paradise because his intellect is not the same. Could he read the novel when he is forty? Absolutely, but he does not become Amory Blaine in the reading. In that way, rockers are imprisoned. Sixty year old rockers must hop around singing I cant get no satisfaction or My Generation because the form does not lend itself to much beyond the youth culture. It is the reason Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane retired, declaring that performing as a fifty year old is ridiculous. We have seen the transmogrification of these older rockers and it is not pretty. Lets look at U2. The last super band. Five nights on Letterman and mega saturation. Why? Because for all their vaunted individuality and not wanting to become a "shitty band" as Bono puts it, they have become corporate marketers. Why? Because they have become older and the men who wrote Boy or New Years Day are now cognizant of market share of the shrinking musical dollar. And the fact is their relevancy will not depend on their music but on their marketing and in that way they are doomed. The will bust out at number one, but like the old champ who makes a comeback they know their days are limited. The core form of rock and roll is still one of rebellion and youthful questioning of the status quo. That is a hard thing to do when you are the status quo. So, it doesn't matter so much that I won't stay up and watch the remaining members of the Byrds or Hermans Hermits, because it is entertainment. But the short shelf life of an art form started by a truck driver from Tennessee was never meant to speak for the ages. Really, just one age.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com