Oh man! I entered the ranks of the geezer elite sometime between age 60 and 65. At age 62 my suture lines increased by about a foot from spinal cord surgery, and from there my grumpy quotient increased by 62.4%. My pet peeves are being asked questions by the missus, that I know if I answer, I'll be pestered for weeks. Questions about things that need fixing, paperwork that needs filing, or some damned physician's appointment she wants me to schedule. The older you get the more they want to stick things in various orifices that were perfectly happy being ignored. Those of you who watch the NatGeo Wild Channel's show "The Incredible Doctor Pol" know what I mean. Poor cows!
Then there's just about everything in life today that's an annoyance. Things such as smartphones glued to ears, or little Bluetooth thingies that cause people to walk around talking to themselves that remind me of people who used to carry on conversations with giant rabbits named Harvey or unicorns in the garden. Then there's what I call urban jungle thump music, and others call rap or Hip Hop. I turned my hearing aids up once to catch the lyrics, and promptly back down, when it became obvious that some inter-dimensional warp had opened between Hades and Earth.
Then there's television commercials. Since when did the white American male become the object of ridicule? In these commercials they never seem to know the answer to anything and have to be instructed by a wife, girlfriend, counter person, smart ass kid or a refugee from some exotic faraway land. And then there's the products that once were taboo, the stuff that resided behind the pharmacy counter. Stuff that the customer just handed a prescription or hand scrawled note to the pharmacist, lest they have to ask out loud for embarrassing stuff, and waited while the pharmacist ducked behind his wall of secrecy and dropped the offending product in a brown paper bag, a brown bag mind you, not even a white bag with the store's name printed on it. I really don't want to know about yeast infections or absorbancy of various absorbent products, or even little pills you take so you can bathe in dual bath tubs with a woman on a beach at sunset. Have you ever sat in a bathtub with sand in the bottom? How abrasive can that be?
Then there was the time I was driving along in my new truck only to have the Driver Information Center light up and begin an annoying dinging alarm. I looked down and it told me my turn signal was on! Oh my gosh, they put a old man alarm on the thing. After driving nearly a mile with the signal on, it tells the old fogey to turn it off. I felt humiliated, betrayed as a geezer by my truck.
But the worse thing that happened, positively the lowest point in my life so far, is realizing that I became the old guy in the grocery store line that I hated when I was younger.
