On Growing Old

I look really old. How the hell did that happen? My face has old man blemishes, my eyes are surrounded by old-person wrinkles, my hair sometimes poofs out in stringy little old-person strands ... WTF? I'm also starting to walk old, though this is mostly due to the twisted ankle.

Twisted ankle story. So we were dozing it off on the sun-warmed sand at Ocean Beach the Sunday afternoon after Valentine's (yes, it was in the 70s in San Francisco in mid February), and my beautiful young lady was admiring the interplay of light in the sand and my hair when she suddenly realized we needed a drink. I took her to Cha Cha Cha in the Haight where we had a full pitcher of sangria, and then another pitcher, by which time it was dark and we were messing with a couple who were out on an internet date and the woman got her first girl-kiss. But when we tried to follow them to a jazz club the world kept rolling (that might have been us) until I finally shouldered my sweetheart and sherpa'd her up Cole St (I think, could have been Belvedere) whose hill seemed a lot steeper than it really is and I took a misstep and over we went. The rest of the evening passed in a haze of rumpled sheets and bad hotel lighting.

Another factor in growing old too fast is lack of exercise. I hope to avoid giving excuses, it's simply a fact that routine escapes me, and exercise (along with many other useful things) is best enabled by routine. After a year or two now of too much eating junk and too little working out it's finally starting to show. I have enough of a gut now that going out as I used to shirtless but for a vest is simply not a good idea.

Not being shirtless story. So on Valentine's we went to a party at a secret location south of Market, behind a nondescript door in a nondescript building on a narrow nondescript street. A two-story venue was packed to the rafters with people in all kinds of weird Valentines-themed costumes, many of them very Burning Mannish. Atop the broad staircase a sort of sex-themed vaudeville revue was under way when we arrived, surrounded by dressed up couples, single women in their sexiest lingerie, etc. Should I say dressed up? They weren't dressed down either. Dressed sideways. A good-looking crowd generally, and great dance music when the show was over. But before going we spent a fair amount of time sifting through our oddments to find me an outfit that didn't reveal my inappropriate stomach. We succeeded -- succeeded so well in sartorial creativity that when we barged into the downstairs play room to have sex amongst a dozen or so other couples doing the same, I barely had to remove a thing. We only learned later we'd broken the rules by just choosing a sort-of open spot rather than tagging in when someone else tagged out. We thought that pretty funny. It was also funny that no one really watched anyone else, all the couples being just into themselves, which sort of begs the point of doing it in a crowded room, if you ask me, but eh.

Thankfully, I don't feel old for liking old music. I may be all into EDM, house of various flavors, even the marching band trend, but I also dig 90s grunge and 70s blues and 60s hippie music and doo-wop and bee-bop and swing new and old and trad jazz and Orff and Stravinsky and Sousa and Bruckner and Beethoven and Mozart and all the way back to Gregorian chant.

Old music story. I also like a lot of Motown and we found it at an arty bar at Divisadero and Fell the evening of Presidents Day. The place was pretty empty when we walked in, just a few people about as decrepit as me hanging about wiggling to the DJ's warmup tracks. We admired the framed etchings on the wall and the hand-painted machine guns and talked to one obvious regular who told us about the owners and MS-13 and the French mafia and pointed out the severed hand in the jar behind the bar with tattoos on its knuckles before realizing he'd told us too much. There was nothing for it at that point but keep drinking (we'd been at it since noon) and be a part of Motown Monday coming to life. The crowd got younger as the dark got darker until by the time we should start our two-hour drive home the place was packed with twenty-somethings happily dancing to the meatiest deep house / Motown mix I'd ever heard, complete with forty and fifty year old videos (I know, I can't believe it either). It was a great end to an amazing weekend. Will these crazy weekends ensure I'll grow old quickly, or that I won't actually grow old at all? This, oblique references to the alternative notwithstanding, remains to be seen.