SENILE DEMENTIA CAN BE A BLESSING.
Some men, I’m told, remain sexually active well into their eighties or longer. Not me. I gave that up long ago, or it gave me up. It is truly liberating not to have sex on my mind all the time. I think about all the money I spent buying girls presents, taking them to movies, plays, dinners at fancy restaurants, listening to their banal chatter just to get in their pants and frankly, I don’t miss it. I also recall those who hopped in bed with me without so much as a how’d you do, and then phoned to tell me how much their abortion was going to cost me. Yes, sex was good, but it was not only expensive, it also took a toll on the mind; I regret the time wasted in pursuit of nookie, the care and maintenance of sweethearts and wives who couldn’t go the distance, who let cancer shorten their lives, who gave up without a struggle.
I count myself lucky to have found a young wife just as I was turning forty; she gave us a daughter who has kept us in touch with the weird generation of born in the 1970s and converted us from Jazz aficionados and Blues devotees to Metallic and Punk Rock—well, at least her mom could dig that noise. Furthermore, our daughter introduced me and her mom to computers, to the Internet and to this wide world of Web Logs. That was a boon, I think.
What I miss most is my mind. I’m losing it rapidly now. Now, what was once a veritable sponge is being wrung day. As a lad my thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. I read anything I could get my hands on. I even read the textbooks and the manuals. I read both fiction and nonfiction books, and pamphlets, when I had nothing better to do. Alas senile dementia is not so gradually eroding my memory; I’m forgetting all that I learned.
Another aspect of aging is the loss of friends and relatives, wives and lovers have been dropping off with astonishing regularity during the past decade. But there comes a time when one stops grieving the losses and begins to think: Well, they don’t have to worry about bills, mortgages, the price of gasoline, milk, bread, etc., and how they’re going to cover the basic cost of living with their meager Social Security checks. Yes, Virginia, we do have to worry about making ends meet when we get old, just as we had to do in our youth and all those years in between. So what am I doing here? Before my memory began to fail, I wrote a lot of stories. Some of those tales may be of interest or have entertainment value. I’ll paste them up here for you to judge their merit.
