This is What it Feels Like to Get Old

It’s like watching someone drown in quicksand.

I must be turning into the Tin Man because it hurts to move now that I’m not working out regularly. I’m just doing housework and it’s 8:17 PM and I’m flat on my back on top of a heating pad. 

 I know that I used to go to the gym where I would spend three hours, lifting and swimming. 

And now I can barely get around the grocery store, the Walmart. 

I looked for that electric cart today. I used it. The bottom of my feet was hurting so bad. I don’t know why I was out early. I’m out during pensioners' hours. It’s a bunch of old people, gray and white-haired people moving slowly with their aches and pains. It must be evil spirits because I can’t be slowing down already even though I feel like the Tin Man. I feel rusty.

 I feel stiff and it’s mostly my back. The magnets work. I ordered some magnets from Amazon. (Sidenote: they work, you tape them to your back. Tape comes with it but after a couple weeks, I felt like I was on borrowed time. I still needed to rest my back.) Collagen powder helps.

But this is what it feels like to get old. People are mean. When we get older we don’t look the same. So are we really showing up to events to see how much we’ve aged and to gab about it? That is mean. I’m jowly and puffed up in places I don’t want to be swollen.

I never understood how good my generation’s music was until I had something to compare it to. Until the new generation of kids came along. OMG I stopped at Cardi and Meg an Nem. Gen Z is so different from the previous generations I now understand why the Boomers held on to theirs. It is the last known working musical configuration. I don’t see Sade regenerated. Nor Mary J Blige. These guys have their own thing and it mostly sounds good, the R and B, but the Cringe generation— I can’t. I'm too old and previous generations have limits with me too but not as many. Gen X and Millennials are similar because we raised them. They are like us for those Gen X ers who got married early, we’ve aged together because your 20s is the earliest to have kids. Earlier than that…well it happens.