Old Man Yells at Cloud

I am 48, which qualifies as middle age. I am not technically old. Funny thing about getting old—no matter how old you are, there is always some Boomer who refers to you as a spring chicken. I think that will continue to happen no matter how old I get. I could be 75, and 95-year-olds will be telling me how young I am. It’s not helpful.

I was warned about getting old. The young don’t listen to warnings about getting old. It started when I turned 30, when I discovered that I could no longer eat whatever I wanted without getting fat. I promptly put on about 30 pounds, peaking at a client dinner In Connecticut when I ate the largest lamb chop known to mankind. I was so full, and so fat, that I took off my pants in the town car on the way home.

Far more depressing are the sexual side effects. I go through these spells where I think that I still have it, when I do not in fact still have it. I try to look on the bright side. Up until about age 32, my sex drive was so out of control that I absolutely could not hold a thought in my head for longer than 5 seconds without thinking about my hammer. It was distracting beyond belief. It is difficult to accomplish life goals when you’re constantly thinking about launching your wiener into space. I became much more productive, and therefore successful, once my testosterone dropped to negligible levels. I actually took testosterone supplements for a while, mainly for the health benefits, but found the return of my sex drive so distracting that I abandoned the project altogether.

Funny thing about middle-aged men and their sex drives—you hear about these politicians (Andrew Cuomo comes to mind) who think they still have it. There is nothing more pathetic than a man in his 50s who thinks he still has it. That’s not your place in society anymore, dude. You’re here to provide wisdom and guidance, not to act out some pornographic Brazzers fantasy. That’s not to say you’re not allowed to have sex ever again, but the days of getting some strange are over. Regarding Cuomo, the nipple piercings should have been a sign.

There are the little things, too, like having sudden uncontrollable urges to pee, both at night and during the day. My upcoming colonoscopy. My cholesterol medication. I took down a smoke detector last month, wrenched my shoulder, and had pain for weeks. Shit like that. But hey: at least I have all my hair, although it has gone half gray in the span of about 3 years.

Not many people talk about the real psychological benefits to getting old, and there are many. I intuitively understand how to handle things that used to baffle me. I can navigate office politics and social situations with ease. I always know the right thing to say. I never used to know the right thing to say. And when faced with a stressful situation, I can usually pause and reflect before taking action in the heat of the moment.

The accumulation of all these things is what you call wisdom. If I were a Dungeons & Dragons character, my wisdom would be 17. But my constitution would be about 5. Wisdom is highly, highly underrated. People tend to flock towards the shiny objects on Twitter, the super-smart derivatives guys in their early 30s that blind you with science. Wisdom is a bit of a hard sell. I mean, in the business of finance, we shitcan all the guys over 47 because they get expensive. Then they end up selling insurance for a fraction of what they made before. All that wisdom down the drain. We do it over and over again. Maybe if the fucking banks would hang onto some of these old guys, they wouldn’t blow up on risk every few years or so and have to file an 8-K. Think of this: everyone on Wall Street under the age of 36 wasn’t around for the financial crisis. That should scare you, just a little.

The other thing you learn when you get old is patience, which is paradoxical because you actually have less time left on the clock. I will tell you a story. When I was writing All the Evil of This World, I was submitting the chapters to my literary agent for feedback. I was impatient as fuck. I used to walk around pissed off all the time because things weren’t happening on my timetable. I was a huge pain in the ass to deal with. Today, I am handling it differently—my new book will take as long as it needs to take. Sure, I think it could get done faster, but I learned that it’s more important to have a positive working relationship than get the book done two months earlier, which is another way of saying that it is more important to have friends than be right—something else I’ve learned with age.

I have a lot of patience to go around. A good measure of your spiritual condition is how you behave in traffic. If you find yourself getting agitated, yelling at other cars, and being a dickhead in general, you’re not in a good headspace. Traffic is an opportunity for me to sit and reflect on things. I will get home when I get home. There are few things that are that important that you need to pop your cork about. At one point in my life, I got to spend a few days in a convent, on a spiritual retreat. There was an elevator in the building, and a chair in the elevator. I asked, what is the chair for? Well, the elevator took about 3 minutes to go up or down one floor, so there was a nice place to sit while you waited. I think a lot about that chair in the elevator.

But really, getting older is about having richer, fuller, more meaningful relationships. When you’re young, it’s mostly about partying. I remember going out with some Lehman guys one night circa 2005. We drank our faces off. We were wandering off somewhere, probably to a strip club, and I fell back from the pack, walking about 30 yards behind the group. It occurred to me that they didn’t even notice that I was gone. And then I felt a sense of profound sadness. Were these real friends? The story has a happy ending—I still keep up with these guys almost 20 years later. But back then, I couldn’t be sure. You get old, and you start thinking some crazy thoughts, like: who is going to show up at my funeral? Everyone, I hope. When you hear of someone passing away peacefully, surrounded by family, that is pretty much the culmination of all my life’s goals.

And then you start thinking about death. I am going to make some people mad by saying this, but that never stopped me before. I think cancer is awesome. Cancer is the best thing in the world. Cancer gives you time to get your affairs in order. Cancer gives you time to come to grips with your mortality. Cancer is painful, but we must experience pain with dignity. Dying of cancer is not an undignified death. Cancer gives times for the survivors to adjust. I really, really do not want my soul ripped from my body as my head goes through the windshield of my car. I want my death to be long, and slow, and excruciatingly painful. We must grow spiritually all the way to the end.

A few weeks ago, I was at the Brooklyn Mirage, taking in some dance music. I got there at 7pm, and by a stroke of luck, Joris Voorn was opening, so I stayed until 10—and left. I looked around the venue—I was easily the oldest person there. Now, while I was standing there, I started to get pain in my left hip. I have a little arthritis, and when I stand for long periods of time, it starts getting to me. So I bent over at the waist to take some of the pressure off my hip.

A security guard immediately runs over and says, “Hey boss, you all right?” He was probably thinking I was dopesick from taking too much ecstasy.

“Yeah man,” I said, “I just have some arthritis in my hip.”

Big smile out of the security guy. “Maybe you’re getting a little old for this, boss?”

Ha ha ha. Go fuck yourself. I will be doing this until I am 70.

Go fuck yourself again,

Jared

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