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I joined a gym today. Well, I started the process of joining the gym today. It’s a wellness center associated with a local hospital, and I filled out the paperwork and a letter is being faxed to my family doctor since I am over 50 and they need to have them sign off that I will not drop dead the moment I begin an aerobic activity. Which, I mean, fair enough, but it is not lost on me that from the age of nine to the age of 54 I have gone from needing a permission slip to go to the bathroom to needing a permission slip to go to the gym.

I chose the Wellness Center because it was cheap, it had a pool and water aerobics courses, and it isn’t a hip influencer or musclehead outfit. I’ll be there with olds like me, and most likely anyone younger than me will probably be staff. Case in point, the person who processed my paperwork at the gym today was in one of my mass lecture courses when I was a Doc student, predating even Balloon Juice. So all those reasons, and did I also mention it was cheap and you can pay monthly instead of requiring quarterly or annually?

At any rate, I have been thinking about aging a lot, for obvious reasons, but it’s also clear to me that a lot of the decisions I make RIGHT NOW, both healthwise and about the future, are quite critical. But one of the more surprising things to become evident to me with with all the discussions about Biden’s age right now is that it is painfully obvious that a large number of Americans simply have no idea between the normal aging process and dementia/alzheimers/parkinsons/etc. Just none.

And I don’t know why that is. I mean I know that this is a culture that values youth and beauty over all else, and that we push elderly out of sight so they are neither seen nor heard, but I didn’t realize that so many Americans are so alienated from older people that they don’t know the difference between someone who is just old and someone who is cognitively unwell. It’s very weird to me.

I guess on reflection I have spent a lot more time with older people than many, or maybe it is because even as a child my parents would say things like “he’s 11 going on 74” when talking about me, but I have always gravitated to people older than me. Growing up, there were always college kids around and even thought they were only 18-22, as a 9 year old, that is older. Then all the college professors that lived in town who I did yardwork and stuff for, or the old guys from WWII who used to take me to County GOP meetings, or when I was a dj at the radio station I would engineer Monday Night Oldies with one senior and the Ashbourne Hour (a three hour classical music show) with Dr. Taylor, or so on. Plus, WV is an aging population, so proportionally I have always been around a lot of older people.

And I understand how the culture can change your perspective- after spending a few years on active duty in the military, where old is someone who is a SFC or E-8 means 28-32 years, when I got out I could not believe how old everyone was. After spending a couple really long and intense years with nothing but 18-25 year olds, it was a culture shock. But it can’t be that bad, can it?

It’s just so weird and it means that people aren’t even paying attention to their own aging. I mean you still feel like the same you even though you are older, right? It’s just there are somethings you can’t do as well as you did before, but you didn’t just become worthless, did you? You just adapt and do things smarter or differently. Except in the cases of actual cognitive decline, the vast majority of elderly people you see still have a young person on the inside, just the outside is a touch dinged up and you just gotta run the engine a little longer to warm up and maybe can’t reach the same top speed you used to.

It’s also kinda weird that this is the way things are in the US, especially in the post ADA world, the United States is so much more accessible than other countries are for people who are a little older and have a hitch in their giddyup. As a younger country (and I am talking about the country itself, not the residents), we aren’t dominated by 800 year old buildings and the like. Modernity makes accessibility easier. So you should be seeing more elderly people out and about and be more used to interacting with them.

The whole thing is bizarre, and as someone who is rapidly becoming a member of the “olds,” it is really depressing. God damned kids.

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