back in my day.....

I suppose it is inevitable when you have a birthday pass that you start thinking about aging and getting old and all that good stuff... and maybe start hearing your body complaining just a little louder than you remember it doing before....

Well, I've always had whiny knees. I've knocked them around quite a bit, most recently in a series of motorcycle accidents, but also in cycling crashes and that slip off that mountain a bazillion years ago. I've had a barometric super power for decades.

But I woke up this morning with my wrists throbbing and thought... what the hell?? And then looked at the weather report on the internets and realized that I was feeling the impending arrival of Ernesto (which, apparently, will be a tropical depression by the time it gets here. Something that always sounded a bit silly to me. I mean, a tropical depression? It's what I called that rather desperate couple of months in Danang during the wet season when Dissertations Number One and Two were quietly imploding: it was tropical, I was depressed. I suppose, it being the Rainy Season When Your Clothes Remain Damp Always And The Dirt Streets Run With Disease-Laden Flood Waters, that there are a fair number of layered and doubles usages in there. But I digress.). So my barometer has migrated over time.

The achy wrist thing sucks. As I made myself coffee and grumbled to myself about it I suddenly caught a snippet of my own complaining in my head and thought, holy shit! I'm like one of those old people at the nursing home who complains about their back all the time! And I suddenly also understood why they do that-- because the pain is distracting. It's hard to think about other things when your joints are throbbing. I had a flashing image of that last video of Pol Pot in Anlong Veng in that final interview before he finally died in 1997. He was an old man, and while the interviewer kept trying to get him to talk a bit about all the horrible things he'd done-- "Don't you feel bad about all the people who died because of you?" (he answered with the now rather standard genocidiere response-- oh no, I've made my peace with [fill in blank here-- God, gods, myself, my people, my family, etc.])-- but all Le Pot wanted to talk about was his aching back.