Now I am a Septuagenerian

Today is my birthday. I am 70 years old.

Fuck, where did the last 70 years go? I just learned -- without having taken advantage of it, nudge nudge wink wink -- that for the last decade I was a SEXagenarian... Damn!

Well, you know the old saying. "Time's fun when you're having flies..."

If 60 was the new 50, then obviously 70 is the new 60...

Funny thing, I don't FEEL like I am 70. Not that I'm any kind of expert on what 70 is supposed to feel like, or look like. My father was dead by the time he was my age. It seems like pretty much everyone I knew growing up ended up dead before they were 70.

I don't get why I was spared. It's like one of those dystopian sci-fi movies I am so fond of, like I Am Legend (2007), which also appeared as The Omega Man (1971) or The Last Man on Earth (1964), based on the classic sci-fi novel I Am Legend by the notoriously-paranoid Richard Matheson.

Except not everyone around me is a zombie/vampire/etc.

Wait. I take that back. When I look around and see how many people still vote Republican, I know that I am surrounded by zombies. Or vampires. Or morons. Or something.

Anyway, throughout my 60s I kept remarking on the fact that when I was growing up, people who were in their 60s back then were old. As in Fucking Old! I kind of thought it was just a matter of perspective, like when you were younger than about 10 or so, the years seemed to just creep by, summer vacation was so looong that you were more than ready to go back to school when it was over, just for the novelty, and it took forever to get from one Christmas to the next. But now I am no so sure. Better medical care, better pharmaceuticals, better nutrition, a better lifestyle, better movies, better ... something...

Actually, I think it's all the preservatives that they've been putting in our diet. They not only preserve your food, they also preserve your body. Two hundred years from now, if you dig me up you'll find that I am still that same buff-looking 30-year-old studmuffin that I still see looking back at me when I look in the mirror... Of course now he is kind of peeking around the shape of some old man that I don't know, but he's still there!!!...

All this attention I've been paying to myself and my aging process has inexplicably tired me out. I think I'll be taking take a few days off.

Yikes, It's My 66th Birthday!

In the words of the Old Cigar Philsopher (my grandfather), it's a case of "too-soon old, too-late smart.

Sixty-six years ago I was born, in this building:



If it looks like an old train station, that's because it was one. When the city of Longview (WA) was built in 1923, it was undertaken with a number of unsuccessful plans that never came to fruition.

One was that the town would be a railroad hub. But the tracks they originally laid down went only to the train station and stopped, so trains would have to reverse themselves and backtrack for several miles back to hit the main north-south trunk line. Then a river flood washed out the tracks, they were never relaid, and the train station was sold and turned into a hospital.

And there, on the evening of April 21, 1945, I came into the world. It hasn't been the same since...

The old station/hospital itself is longer standing. Sometime in the1980s it was torn town and a new hospital built on the spot.