In a world without women, what would a crazy man do?
Many of my middle age friends have cartwheeled out of control at some point with at least one bizarre behavioral crisis. When the economy was flush, some involved playthings and wheelbarrows of money. Now that money’s tight, the drive to act squirrely is just as relentless with tools of implementation that are decidedly less costly. Trouble, after all, is expensive.
Some of my pals got young girlfriends, oblivious at the time to the skill of the pickpockets masquerading as attorneys who often followed.
Other guys bought Harleys. Then custom leathers. It was noise and gleaming chrome, and rolling thunder. My wife would not let me join the cavalry.
“You can get whatever you want,” she said. “As long as you don’t need a license to ride it.”
That narrowed down my options. I did a lot of research and shopped smartly. Then I bought the biggest, most powerful street machine I could: a Honda Metro scooter, 50 cc’s, and fully automatic. Skinny people can get 90 miles per gallon. I get 67. Mine was used in the Rose Bowl parade. Or so I was told.
I like riding my scooter on sunny days. Downhill I can go 38 miles an hour. Uphill’s a different story. In the mountains it and I struggled to ascend our steep, winding driveway. By the time I reached the top I had slowed to five miles an hour. My neighbor was walking her dog and put distance between us. And she had a slow, fat dog.
It’s perfectly understandable why men have midlife crises and their occurrence is quite predictable. Life is a rollercoaster ride with one apex; and everything changes once we reach its mighty crest. Childhood chugs up toward youth and youth chugs up toward adulthood. Adulthood grunts and groans and grinds its way to maturity. And therein lies the problem. At maturity is the culprit: the apex. The apex triggers the midlife crisis.
Guys get bigger and stronger until roughly life’s midpoint (the apex). The first half of life is great for a man. We physically mature and grow bigger and stronger. Our sexual appetites growl, and prowess often follows. Even better, most guys have hair where they want it but not where they don’t.
Accompanying that physical growth is compounding wisdom. We learn through experience, plus we gain insight and smarts. If the cards fall properly, some of us even learn that Christmas trees shrink as we get older because we get taller and they do not.
But life has two stages, the up stage and the down stage. During the ascent up the rollercoaster, all of life sprawls before us and everything is possible.
But one morning, unfairly unannounced, that changes. Everything is not possible. We wake up, look in the mirror, and wrinkles stare back. From that morning on, life is no longer in front of us. It’s behind us. Gone are the dreams and ambitions of a perfect life.
Instead we reminisce, less open to new ideas and more stubborn to defend our ways. We listen to oldies stations, collect trinkets of our youth, and remember high school as if it were Oz instead of Trauma City. High school is never seashells and balloons when you’re kung-fu’ing through it; it only becomes that way in retrospect. For most of us the formative years of our past were minefields of invisible emotional shrapnel. This is good? Egad!
The mind keeps accumulating wisdom, so the knowledge lines keeps going up. But the body works differently. It betrays us. Without warning a man’s appearance goes from relevant to irrelevant. That line–the physique–goes down in importance. Where the two lines cross–the mind increasing, the body decreasing–is where the crises are born. With that linear collision comes the craving for the sports car, the young girlfriend, the gold chain, and hair plugs, or maybe the investment for implants.
Desperate folks at middle age can rent but not buy the body of their youth. Because of that, destiny offers an easier option: throw money at the confusion. Accumulate toys and play. Stave off aging by regression.
But a man’s downhill physical metamorphosis is gravity propelled and comes with no backup lights. We can push back on inevitability for the short term but not forever. Since gravity is relentless, sooner or later it shall win. We are no longer George Clooney. We are Fred Flintstone. At least that’s what I was called a couple years ago in Romania. I took it like a man. And cried in private later that day.
I still ride my scooter on sunny days. It is red and adorned with Piggy Church bumper stickers and my personalized nameplate (“OCEAN”). I have ridden 1100 miles around the neighborhood on streets where the speed limit is 45 or below. On those roads (45 mph) I am a nuisance. But get me in a school zone and I score a lot of looks from soccer moms in vans.
I’ve done more than my share of irrational things since my first gray hair infiltrated the forest but an apology would be empty and insincere. I was a B student in high school and C student in college. I am a writer who got a C in penmanship. I do not have much to work with and I’m doing the best I can.
Some of my buddies have had dramatic, costly crises. Countless more would be in the same boat if not for the infinite patience and tolerance of wonderful wives and girlfriends. You know who you are and thank heaven for your angelic kindness.
We are, after all, just pudgy, gray-haired, old-little boys with tummies and odd shoes. And slow rolling motor scooters. Our lives demand more than ESPN and ice cream. Thanks for understanding.