There are three key stages in a bloke’s life and I’ve just hit the third. I knew I was putting on weight when my wife started making ‘oink’ noises and puffing up her cheeks at me whenever I reached for second helpings. My wife of course is tall and willowy and it really doesn’t matter what she eats, she never ever puts on weight. There is, as we all know, no fairness in this world, particularly when it comes to matters of personal physique. We are all challenged in one way or another, it’s just that some of us would prefer to swap our own challenge for someone else’s.
I’m 5’11’’ (c.178cm) and my ideal weight is around 174 lbs (80 kilos), but that’s a bit like remembering when one had a 28” (70 cm) waist at 22 and could get into one’s 505’s. Things have moved on a bit since then. So between the ages of 50 to 60 I’ve sort of settled down with 36” waist and weighing in at under 186 lbs. At least that’s the persona I’m sold on, telling myself once in while I’ll sort myself out seriously one day soon. Of course that day never dawns, in fact I rather struggle to keep below the 194 lb mark, which is when I inch into action and do just enough to exercise and food reduction to weigh-in again in circa 184 lbs. As for a 36” waist, the less said about that the better. Only now for some reason even this low threshold of expectation no longer works and I am confronted with the full shocking reality of my true weight and shape.
Here I am in Hong Kong having just stood stark bollock and pear-shaped nekkid on a weighing machine at California Fitness that I can’t call a liar and to my utter horror I am forced to accept that I now weigh nigh on 205 lbs. I’ve not yet shared this news with my wife who, in between making piggy noises, says she’ll divorce me if I ever go over the 200 lb mark. Thing is, back in Bali I have a very friendly if mendacious relationship with a bathroom scale that last I looked clocked me in at around 194 lbs, so while I had some future plans to return to the early 180’s sometime soon, nothing too drastic or immediate was required of me, I reckoned.
Since I’m far too honest to ever lie to my wife, on the grounds that there’s no point ‘cos whenever I do she knows it, and now that my bubble of self-deception has been irretrievably busted, I have to lose 5 lbs in the next few days before I’m accused of exceeding the porky limit so I can honestly deny any such thing and thus save our marriage.
The worst thing about all this is that now I’m faced with the inescapable fact that something has to be done. Either I get divorced, settle for a shortened life as I enter my porcine elderhood all the while enduring the aesthetic contempt of the slender elégante paired with el fatso; or I do something about it, leap into action, undergo an epiphany. A stage has been reached and a decision has to be made. Yet the real truth is, I don’t want to do anything. I’d much rather let thing’s continue as they are. The absolutely last thing I want is to haul ass and get tough on myself. I mean I’ve done that already. You mean I’ve got to do it all over again?
So here I am in my early 60’s facing fair and square the third of those challenges that face most of us blokes, but before I manfully rise to the occasion, defy gravity and inclination, or succumb to growing old self-indulgently, perhaps I’d better cover the first two challenges I’ve mentioned.
The first is when you meet a pretty girl with another guy, not half as good looking, intelligent or charming as yourself, but you’ve got 10 years on him. The girl zeroes right in on him and you are just nowhere. This is not what you’re used to or the way it’s supposed to work. Suddenly you know for the first time and with a dreadful clarity that it’s nothing personal, she may even really like you and admire your amazing intelligence and dazzling wit, but you just gotta face it mate, far as she’s concerned, you were never in the frame as a sexual partner and you’d better get used to it. This is the way it’s going to be from now on. Kids are into kids and 35 is simply very, very old for most of them. The parameters are brutally and hormonally clear.
The second stage comes in your late 40’s when you stare into the shaving mirror one morning and actually see yourself for the first time….as others see you.
Not that guy you saw in the same place yesterday morning who looked pretty much the 28-year old you used to be, just a tad weathered round the edges is all. No, now you really see the jowls, the face flattening into the neck, the unsightly furrows around the mouth, the wrinkles that are a lot more than laugh lines, a hairline that’s more than just receding and the tonsure in the making. The spectre of a midterm future of heart disease, decrepitude, and joining the ever-increasing statistic of an early death mid 60’s from one chronic degenerative disease or another loomed right there in the mirror before me. It was enough. I embarked on a fascinating journey of physical and psychological salvage that’s brought me to the stasis where I am today.
Which is to say, back at square one, but without the motivation. My epiphany lasted me a juicy decade. Unfortunately it is a universal rule that nothing lasts and the last 5 years have slowed the process to a standstill. I may be a couple of turns further up the spiral of self-knowledge but I’m confronting exactly the same view, only I can see a bit further. Which is to say, I still have to summon up the wherewithal to rekindle the fire of life from an ember to a blaze out of nowhere, or wait for some life event to kick me into the game again, or out of it altogether. The Catholics know this of old, it is the mortal sin of accidie, which they define as a refusal of joy (sloth to you, sunshine). If precious life ain’t all that precious to you and you’re not prepared to con yourself into some ready-to-wear set of precepts, and yet no intention of checking out any time soon, what do you do?
Yeah, yeah, I know…. haul ass anyway.
So here’s my author’s message and what I’m saying applies to all you blokes whatever your age, and for all I know possibly even to women with the appropriate hormonal variations, is this:
for the first 40 years of life I reckon you should just go for it hook, line and sinker. No point pathologising, no benefit following anybody’s advise or example, it’s probably crap anyway and even if it isn’t, it almost certainly doesn’t apply to you. By the time you hit 45, if you’ve survived, it’s time to start looking around you. That’s interesting and lasts about 20 years. Then my friends, for the next 20 to 30 years, or for as long as you last, you get to ponder on what the hell all that piss n’ wind was about anyway.
One of the major contributors to that process is what St Francis called “poor Brother Ass”, by which he meant the humble bloody carcass that has the job of lugging your immortal incarnated soul around the place. So let’s hear it for poor old Brother Ass. If you don’t look after him you can end up on your base chakra with a bump.
The essence then is this. Go for it like a bandit. Clean up the act at 40 and heed the first intimations of mortality. By the time you hit 60’s the bad news is you’ve got to harden up on yourself, when instinct says “hey, go easy on yourself, you’ve earned it!” Yup, no escaping it. Older you get the more you got to do to keep Brother Ass in good nick. As the late great Bette Davis succinctly put it “Growing old ain’t for sissies…”.
The pay off, and I’m sorry to tell you there’s no guarantee about this, is you could get to keep your marbles and mobility into your senescence. Look after Brother Ass and the rest will look after itself, leaving you free to contemplate the suchness of things, the zen of golf, or whatever’s your bag until you shuffle this mortal coil after a mercifully brief illness.
Well that’s my take on it anyway, which is big help since I still got to get off my butt, stop writing about it and actually do something.
