The times are changing (and so am I)

[billy]

I hurt my back.

I was hooking a trailer up to the truck when all of a sudden I couldn't stand up straight anymore. This was about a year ago. Today my back feels great- tomorrow who knows?

Around the time that I was down in my back I began to think about how I was getting older. I still feel like a teenager sometimes, but I'm over thirty now. For all of the old-timers who will jump in and banter on about how thirty isn't old and that I'm still green, I realize that I'm not old. Its just that no matter how we sugar-coat it, I am in the beginning of the end.

As soon as you stop getting better and stronger, you start dying. Its just something we have to deal with.

I think I noticed it first with music. Throughout my teens and twenties I have always been on top of new music. I was always listening to demos of bands months before they got signed (sometimes years) . . . now I can hardly find anything to listen to that has been recorded in this or the last decade.

The music certainly has changed, but I'm beginning to think that if I heard this shit that they call music today when I was fifteen I might have been crazy about it like these hollow-headed skater kids riding past me as I type.

Its also evident that my way of thinking has changed otherwise. At one time I was unaffected by the news, but now I have to know everything that is going on anywhere in the world. I care about politics a lot more and it crept up on me! When I was younger I could have cared less who was elected or what laws they passed.

Getting old has its perks, or so I've been told. The only thing that I've seen so far is that I had to change bars because the only people that hang out there are little teeny-bopper-barely-legal-drinking-age folks. Now I'm slurping down beer and talking to the vets at the VFW. Not complaining- they are some cool guys.

If you are still reading (doubtful) and wondering if I have a point, I don't. I just felt a little overwhelmed and wanted to vent. I'll imagine that someone read it.

life is most definitely fluid though it does get thicker as travel through it.
i think that while we may lose our youth or recklessness etc, we gain so much more. lumbago being one of those things, broken hips being a couple of others i think i arrived at a point where i know what most people are going to do without them telling me, i'm pretty good at reading people, mainly through the experiences that scuttered up my life. i do remember being a lot more gung ho when i was thirty and back in the day when i was 18 or so i hung out in bars with the older drinking man, i loved fighting back in the day and those hard drinking hard working navvies etc wouldn't let you down. now i still have the mouth but lack the clout i have gotten milder, but in general i don't really care about stuff as much, age has it's ups and down. i like being mellow but at times i still like to rage