"I'm old!"

My friend Mark has been uttering this phrase quite a bit of late. He is, of course, my age – we went to high school together. In what was the most ungraceful drunken exit from a hot tub I may have ever witnessed a few weeks ago while at the coast (there was a broken stepstool and a loud 'thump' involved), this was his exclamation. Not “I’m drunk!” or “I’m uncoordinated!” but, “I’m old!”

It’s beginning to catch up to me. I saw a chiropractor yesterday.

“When was your last adjustment?” he asked kindly.
“Let’s see…I think when I was nineteen.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“About nine years.”
“Wow.”
“How often should I be getting adjustments?”
“Generally every four to six weeks.”
“Oh.”


I apparently have something called Upper Cross Syndrome. Otherwise known as Little Old Lady Syndrome – my shoulders hunch forward, my right even more so than my left. This could explain the knitting, the sudden inclination to get a cat.

“Have you ever been in an accident, had any kind of injury?”
“Maybe…” which means ‘No.’ I just naturally have wicked upper back pain and fuckedupedness (totally a word by the way). People don’t believe me, possibly because I ignore it all the time. Massage therapists scoff until they get to my upper back and can’t get the knots out. “Wow, you weren’t kidding!”

No shit. I’m old!