You have to face some hard truths about yourself when you listen to a 28-hour audio biography of Ulysses S. Grant in its entirety

According to the comedian John Mulaney, "All of our dads are cramming for some World War II quiz show, and I can't wait to watch it. We're just gonna change channels and see our dads winning $900,000...on Normandy trivia."

He was referring to the penchant many men of a certain age have for military history. For me it's more about World War I, while a lot of other guys I know are fascinated by the Civil War, but his point is well taken.

I never thought much of this until a couple of months ago when I checked out an audiobook biography of U.S. president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and proceeded to listen to it from start to finish over the course of three weeks.

All 27 hours and 51 minutes of it.

When you happily invest that much time learning – in minute detail – about the life of someone who died nearly 140 years ago, you're forced to step back and ask yourself a seminal question:

Why?

Why did I do that? What drove me to want to know all about, say, the Grant Administration's fiscal policy in the 1870s? Or his military strategy in the Vicksburg campaign?

Why did I care so much? Why was the whole experience so enjoyable?

My first instinct is to say I don't know, but that's only because I don't want to acknowledge the truth, which is this:

At some point in the recent past, I have become an Old Guy.

There's no denying it. If you were able to break down the readership of that Ulysses S. Grant book ("The Man Who Saved the Union" by H.W. Brands...highly recommended), I'm certain the vast majority of its readers/listeners are men between 50 and 80.

There are exceptions, of course, but there is little doubt we are the target demographic.

Listening raptly to a 28-hour retelling of President Grant's life also suggests that you have given up caring about the things that really matter in life. Instead, you have decided to focus on the most irrelevant details. "Save for retirement? Who cares? What I really want to know is where Ulysses S. Grant ranked in his graduating class at West Point!"

This probably goes without saying, but it also suggests you're a nerd.

Well, I should say I'm a nerd. And an old guy. And someone whose head is filled with useless knowledge and a strong desire to obtain even more of it.

C'est la via, that's me. But I'll bet you didn't know that when President Lincoln promoted Grant to General of the Armies in 1864, he was the first commander to hold that rank since George Washington.

That's impressive that I know that, right? I mean, that's pretty cool?

Right? Pretty cool?

Sigh...yeah, I know.

If you need me, I'll be in my room reading my next fascinating book, the life story of World War I French general Joseph Joffre.

Don't act like you're not jealous.

I can drive 55, but can I live it?

By way of context today, kids, you should know that for a time in the 1970s and 80s, the maximum speed limit on our nation's highways was a uniform 55 miles per hour. And it felt every bit as slow as it sounds.

In 1984, a guy named Sammy Hagar released a song called "I Can't Drive 55," supposedly in response to having received a ticket for going 62mph in a 55 zone.

The gist of the song was, "Go ahead and give me a ticket or throw me in jail or whatever you want to do, but I can't stop myself from going faster than 55."

I don't drive as fast now as I once did, which I attribute to getting a little older and hopefully a bit wiser.

Speaking of getting a little older, we arrive at the point of the post, which is this: Tomorrow I turn 55 years old.

This is not an especially momentous occasion for anyone, least of all me. I'm not a huge birthday guy to begin with, though I do enjoy hearing from my kids and other family and friends wishing me well, making fun of my advancing years, and generally touching base in the course of their otherwise busy days.

This just happens to be one of those birthdays that has some significance to it. When the second digit of your age is a '5,' it means you're halfway between age milestones. In my case, I'm five years from having turned 50 and five years away from a number that sounds particularly imposing: 60.

I don't know why I think this way, though. Those who are 60-plus in my immediate family (my sister Debbie, my brother Mark, my sister-in-law Chris) are all energetic and youthful and fun. They look and act nothing like 60 seemed to me when I was a teenager.

There is evidently much truth to the idea of age just being a number.

Still, I remember clearly when my dad turned 55 in 1984. Despite having always had gray/white hair since I was a baby, it was the first time I thought to myself, "Oh man, he's getting OLD. This is a little scary."

I don't feel that way now, though of course none of us feels a certain age is "old" once we ourselves approach it.

You get to a point where "old person" just means, "anybody older than me."

I think I'm going to go with that approach for now.

In the meantime, while I do drive faster than 55, I'm still sticking to the right two lanes along with all the other geezers. You reckless whippersnappers can feel free to blow past us in the finest Sammy Hagar tradition.

BLOG RERUN: Wait, is that brain surgeon in high school?

NOTE: This is our monthly Blog Rerun in which we bring back a post from years past. This particular one originally ran on March 30, 2012. For the record, and not at all surprisingly, the feeling I describe here has only intensified over the last 12 1/2 years...

You know when it hit me? When sports announcers started describing athletes who were my age as "old men" or "crusty veterans."

That's when I realized I wasn't 25 years old anymore and never would be again.

When you're growing up, most of the people you meet are older than you. That's all you know, and therefore it becomes your default world view: "I'm a young person."

There is no definite, defined time when you cross over from "young" to "middle aged" (or, in my kids' view, just plain "old"). You can't definitely say it happens at your 30th birthday or your 35th or your 50th or whatever. It just happens gradually and at different rates for everyone.

But at some point, you inevitably become not-so-young-anymore. And that's when you start to realize that many of the people in positions of authority seem to be 12 years old. Like police officers, for example. There apparently was a worldwide effort to install adolescents as police officers and no one bothered to tell me about it.

I look at the cops driving around my city and I want to say, "That's awfully nice they let you take the big police car out, Johnny, but you better get back and do your homework."

Same thing with doctors. I was under the impression that it took a certain minimum number of years of training to become a physician. Then I underwent a very male-oriented birth control procedure and my urologist looked like he was in grade school. Seriously, I couldn't figure out why they had assigned a sixth-grade intern to perform what I considered to be a very delicate procedure.

(For the record, Dr. Schneider was very good at his job. But that doesn't change the fact that once he finished with me, he probably went home to watch reruns of the "Power Rangers.")

It's the athlete thing that really blew me away, though. When I was a kid, professional athletes seemed impossibly old and mature. Then I turned 18 and noticed that most of them weren't much older than me. Then I turned 30 and realized that, if I had had the talent to become, say, a professional baseball player, reporters would probably be describing me as "on the downside" of my career.

Then I hit 40 and couldn't help but observe that there aren't a lot of 40-year-old professional athletes. And the ones who are still around are able to maintain their jobs mostly thanks to very favorable genes that make them appear to be 25.

Now many (or most) of the coaches are younger than I am. My last refuge is that the owners and front-office people are generally my age or older, so I at least have those guys to make fun of and call old fogeys.

Of course, athletes work on a very compressed timeline in which today's 24-year-old phenom is tomorrow's 31-year-old veteran journeyman. The life cycle of an athlete is relatively short, and I suppose the goal is to make as much money as you can by the time you're 35 so you can figure out what to do with the next 50-plus years of your life.

Another interesting thing I've noticed is that certain ages no longer seem old to me. When I was 12, if you would have told me that a 60-year-old had just died, I would have thought, "Well, YEAH, of course he did. He was 60, for crying out loud!" Now I hear about 60-year-olds passing away and I think, "That's terrible! He was so young."

I've not quite reached the point where I regularly read the obituaries (the "Irish sports page," as I've heard them called), but I admit that I will sneak a glance now and then. Usually it's just to see if I recognize someone's parents or grandparents. It won't be too many decades before I'll be adding "classmates" and "contemporaries" to my search list.

Having a daughter going to college and a niece giving birth in the same year doesn't help, nor does the white hair that rings my head (though my standards have shifted such that just keeping some portion of my hair, whatever color it wants to be, is the main goal).

The funny thing is, 10 years from now I'll be saying how great it would be to be this age again. After a certain point, unless you're unusually well adjusted, you're never quite satisfied with your current age. So you complain. It's what we do, especially in this youth-crazed society.

Really, though, a urologist shouldn't look like he just came back from a school field trip.

We bought our house after seeing a classified ad in the newspaper, and I realize how quaint that is

We have been in our house for 21 years. That feels like a long time to me, but I know many people who have lived in their homes for 30 or 40 or more years.

In some cases I think these folks simply found their perfect houses and have stayed ever since. In other cases, I think it's reverse inertia at work: It's such a hassle to move that many simply choose never to do it again.

For us, it was a matter of finding a big enough home to hold our young family while staying within the comfortable confines of Wickliffe, Ohio, the city where my wife and I have lived our whole lives.

I was thinking back recently to when we were looking to move out of our first home on East 300th Street.  I remembered that Terry found our current house not on the Internet (though she could have), but rather through a classified ad in The News-Herald, our local daily newspaper.

An ad in a print newspaper. Talk about a different era.

This memory is timely because it was 36 years ago tomorrow (August 22, 1988) that I started working at The News-Herald as an 18-year-old sports agate clerk. I took game scores and stats over the phone and soon began writing articles with my byline on them, which was always a thrill.

More importantly, it was a time when The News-Herald and community newspapers in general played a much more prominent role in society than they do now. Most households had a subscription to at least one paper in the late 1980s, so I could always be sure that whatever I wrote would attract plenty of eyeballs.

Newspapers retained their position of influence for several years after that, at least as long as 2003 when the previous owners of our house, John & Lisa, saw fit to advertise in the classified ads.

Nowadays, of course, that simply wouldn't happen. Classified ads aren't really much of a thing anymore, and even if they were, no one would think to look there for a house anyway.

The comedian John Mulaney said, "I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video, which is a very old sentence."

I feel you, John. I can say in all honesty, "One time I bought a house that was advertised in a newspaper, which is a very, VERY old sentence."

♪ ♫ Everything hurts! Everything hurts! ♫ ♪

My wife is both an active person and someone in her mid-50s. Sometimes these two realities clash, particularly when she engages in high-intensity yardwork or certain home projects.

The result is soreness felt across her entire body. She even made up a song to describe this feeling, the complete lyrics to which are contained in the headline of today's post.

"Everything hurts! Everything hurts!"

It's just those two words sung over and over to an incongruently happy little tune. I used to laugh when she sang it, in a way that only someone not suffering from full-body discomfort can laugh.

That is, until I started strength training. Suddenly, I understood the deep meaning of the "Everything Hurts!" song in ways I didn't fully anticipate.

As I mentioned last week, I have (finally) begun to lift weights, something I should have started doing years ago. I do it under the tutelage of my trainer, Kirk. Well, sometimes I do it under Kirk's guidance, and sometimes I do it on my own.

Either way, I'm currently in the stage where I go the gym and work out, and anywhere from 12-24 hours later, my muscles hurt.

Part of this comes from being an older Gen Xer like my wife, and part of it is apparently the unavoidable consequence of activating muscle fibers that have lain dormant for many years.

My daughter Melanie, an avid gym-goer and someone in excellent shape, warned me this would happen.

"For about two months, it's going to be bad," she told me at the outset of my strength training journey. "Then you'll get to the point where it's way more enjoyable and sometimes you can't wait to get to the gym and lift."

I'm going to take her word for it on that last bit.

Actually, I already like the workouts themselves just fine. I love breaking a sweat, and I appreciate the work Kirk and I do on achieving proper form for each exercise.

It's the aftermath that gets me.

Hours after my first leg day last month, for example, Jack and I drove to Toronto for a weekend getaway. What started as intense leg weakness following the workout that morning soon developed into considerable leg soreness.

I walked around Downtown Toronto the next day kind of bowlegged. Every time Jack and I would get into the car, I had to turn around and essentially fall into the driver's seat, rather than bend down and slip easily into the vehicle as I normally might.

It's June 12th as I type this, so I'm not necessarily yet enjoying any of the fun results of strength training. That's coming, and there may even be signs of it by the time you read this.

But in the meantime?

Come on, sing it with me...

"Everything hurts! Everything hurts!"

10 older-person things I never thought I would do, yet here I am doing them

 

It's just a Snapchat filter, but this may as well be how I look these days.

1. Paying close attention to the identity of birds that land on our back deck
   
   
2. Finding myself suddenly and randomly thinking about insurance coverage
   
   
3. Making a little noise every time I rise from a seated position (Note: A noise from my mouth, I mean, not from...other places on my body.)
   
   
4. Watering my grass every day (Another note: I only water the two spots in the backyard where we planted grass seed this spring. Give me another 10 years and I'll likely be doing the whole lawn.)
   
   
5. Making a full and protracted stop at a stop sign as an act of defiance to the guy who is tailgating me even though I should be the bigger person and ignore him BUT IT'S 25MPH ON THESE STREETS, SIR, NOT 40 AND YOU NEED TO SLOW DOWN
   
   
6. Related to that, saying (loudly, even when I'm the only one in the car) "Nice stop!" to someone who rolls through a stop sign. On occasion, I've also been known to throw in a "Nice turn signal!" to anyone who fails to use theirs.
   
   
7. Being unable to keep myself from saying things like, "Yes, but at least back in my day, popular music had MELODY and INTELLIGIBLE LYRICS."
   
   
8. Getting visibly angry at the weeds growing through the cracks in our driveway
   
   
9. Earnestly wondering whether I should take up the bassoon (this thought has occurred to me way more often than I care to admit)
   
   
10. Telling the same stories and jokes to the same people over and over, having reached the bottom of what I had assumed was an endless well of charming anecdotes in my brain

Talking to yourself is either a sign of intelligence or mental instability

A few minutes ago I walked past a co-worker who was mumbling under his breath. I asked, "Are you talking to yourself?" And he replied, "Well, I'm the only one who will listen!"

On the spectrum of Corny Office Small Talk, this ranks right up there with "Working hard? Hardly working!" and "Thank God it's Friday, huh?"

But there is also some truth to it.

I talk to myself a lot.

A. Lot.

To the point that I'm fairly certain I say more words out loud to myself each day than I do to Terry or anyone else in the world.

People will walk past my closed office door, peek in and see my mouth moving, and assume I'm in a Teams meeting or on a call. They will make that thumb-and-pinky-extended-near-the-ear gesture, which is of course the universal request to "Call me!"

This will momentarily confuse me until I realize what's going on, and usually I wave for them to come into my office. When they do, I explain, "Sorry, I was just telling myself I need to remember to write that organizational announcement email today!"

They will then look at me uneasily with an expression that suggests, "Wow, I had no idea Scott was insane."

I talk through virtually everything with myself. And rarely are these conversations silent and internal. They are almost always broadcast loudly to anyone who happens to be nearby.

This is OK when I'm driving and loudly saying to myself, "I think I need to turn left up here, right? Or do I keep going straight? Maybe I should have used Google Maps!" No one hears my crazed rantings then.

But when it happens in the grocery store, I notice other shoppers give me a wide berth. I'll be standing near the canned fish products and saying (in a voice that can clearly be heard two aisles over) "WHY DO THEY ONLY HAVE THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE? I DON'T WANT THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE, I WANT THE SARDINES IN WATER. WHO BUYS THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE? NO ONE, THAT'S WHO."

I take consolation in the fact that, the older you get, the more acceptable this behavior seems to become. It goes from "scary" and "potentially threatening" to "cute" and "eccentric."

Right now I'm somewhere in between.

Over and over I tell myself – loudly and proudly, even when no one else is in the room – that it's OK and I'm not at all crazy.

Which of course is exactly what a crazy person would say to himself.

Holy cow, I'm the oldest person in this meeting

I don't know exactly when it started, but these days I regularly experience work meetings in which I am the oldest person in the room.

I find myself surrounded by young professionals – smart, talented professionals, mind you, but undeniably young – who never worked in an office without email. Who never had to fax press releases to journalists. Who never typed something on a green monochrome computer screen and sent it to a gigantic dot matrix printer shared by 60 people.

I really like my co-workers, but yikes, some are younger than the pair of gray sweatpants I have kept in my closet through six presidential administrations.

I knew this would eventually happen, of course, but I thought it would be more of a gradual thing. And maybe it has been gradual and I've simply not been paying close attention since 2003.

I remember being the young guy in the office back in the 90s. I was the one with the fresh ideas, I was the one explaining technology to the old folks, and I was the one experiencing all the young guy milestones (marriage, first house, first baby, etc.)

There's no reason I still can't be the one supplying fresh ideas and teaching technology to anyone who needs to learn it, but the young guy milestone days are without question well behind me.

Apart from the specter of ageism, there's nothing wrong with being among the most seasoned people in the office, either. You bring a perspective others lack. You have "been there, done that" experience that can help others avoid nasty pitfalls. And you apply lessons of history your team members simply haven't had the opportunity to learn quite yet.

Still, the first time you realize most people sitting at the desks around you are half your age, it's disconcerting. No one can explain why your company is suddenly hiring 12-year-olds. You lack common cultural touch points with them. You have kids who are almost as old as (and in some cases decidedly older than) them.

That's when you have to step back and say those inspiring words to yourself:

"I may be older, but I am just as creative, just as innovative, and just as valuable as anyone at this company. And man, my back hurts..."

Apparently we age in fits and starts

Six months ago, I thought I was doing pretty well in the aging department. I had just lost some weight, I only needed reading glasses very occasionally, I was free from any sort of chronic pain, and I was even starting to add strength training to my normal walking/running regimen.

Then some things happened, some of which were beyond my control:

• Suddenly, a lot of books and documents became awfully hard to see. Things I could read unaided at Christmastime are now, shall we say, a little out of focus. I have reading glasses stashed everywhere.
• That weight I lost? Gained it all back. And then some.
• A couple of weeks ago I fell. More on that below.
• I haven't lifted a weight in a few months.
• My hair, which has been a mix of gray and white for some time now, suddenly seems a lot whiter.

Thankfully – blessedly – I am still free from chronic pain. But the way things are going, I'm not counting on that lasting much longer.

As for my fall, that was admittedly my own fault. I was watching the Cleveland Guardians baseball game on my phone and not paying attention as I attempted to walk down the three steps that lead from the kitchen to our mud room.

I missed the first step, which meant I was going to miss every step. Down I went, landing hard on my backside and right elbow.

My butt is fine, if I do say so. But I STILL can't put much weight on the elbow (i.e., like when you rest your chin in your hand).

Even worse, as Terry points out, when the doctor asks if I've fallen in the last six months, I'm going to have to respond "yes."

That hurts.

I'm only 53, so it's not like I'm a senior citizen. But what I've noticed so far about the aging process is that you can be going along just fine for months and years at a stretch, confident in the thought that you're doing a good job holding back the tides of time.

Then a whole bunch of things happen in succession, reminding you what they mean when they say Father Time is undefeated.

Of course, 15 years from now I will long to feel 53 again, since this aging thing only tends to go in one direction (and it's not the direction you're hoping for).

The good news is this: So much of how we're going to feel as older adults is under our control now. Proper diet, exercise (including flexibility and balance work), stress management and maintaining social connections can overcome a whole lot of genetic baggage.

Even better is that you can still indulge in the "bad for you" things you love, but it has to be occasional and it has to be controlled.

Those are my only two problems when it comes to, say, eating sweets: "occasional" and "controlled."

Other than that, along with maybe the occasional tumble and an alarming reliance on cheap CVS reading glasses, I think I've got this aging thing under control...mostly.

Born to run. Or at least I used to be.

I have long thought of myself as a runner. Some people don't think they're runners because they don't do marathons, or they "only" run two or three days a week.

Rule of thumb: If you get outside and run, or you hop onto a treadmill and run, you're a runner. If you cover even 10 feet more ground than a couch potato does, and even if you do it at a snail's pace but it's a running pace for you, then you're a runner.

Trust me, it's not some elite club you can't join.

Anyway, I run. For the past couple of years, the cadence of my running has been four days a week. Usually Saturday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Most of my runs are 3 miles in length, over a fairly hilly course in my neighborhood. On Saturdays I'll often do a 5-miler over that same hilly course.

But lately there have been no 3-mile runs. There have been mostly 0-mile runs. Because I'm hurt.

99.99% of runners, at one point or another, get hurt. For some it's the joints. They tweak a knee or an ankle and have to sit out for a period of time. Then, once they're healed, they run again.

For me it's muscles. And specifically the muscles of my calves.

Over the past year, I've strained various muscles in both calves a total of nine times. That's according to my daily running log, which I've been keeping assiduously since 2001.

(NOTE: I thought of the word "assiduously" the other day for no reason at all, and now I get to use it in a blog post. Score.)

Actually, those calf strains have all happened over the past eight months. The problem being that I hurt one, I rest for a little while but not long enough, I go back out and try to run, and I hurt it again. Then I repeat that cycle.

Then that calf finally heals, and somehow the other one decides to tear. And I go back out, and I hurt it again, etc.

I'm in the middle of this insanity right now with my left calf, and I've been sticking to brisk walks, rather than runs, in an attempt to let it mend itself. This works for a while, but then I'll be out walking and think to myself, "The calf feels fine. I should run a mile or so to test it."

So I do. And for most of that mile it feels fine.

Then it suddenly doesn't. Because my calves hate me, and they delight in nothing more than letting me think I'm OK and then tearing themselves out of sheer spite.

This leads to a love-hate relationship with my calves. On the one hand, they're clearly trying to kill me, or at least drive me crazy, which makes me hate them. But on the other hand – and I'm going to be perfectly honest with you here – I have great calves.

No, really, it's one part of my body I actually like. My calves are genetically awesome. One time I remember walking back to the locker room after a football practice, and Vic Peroni was behind me and said, "Tennant, give me your calves!"

This is Vic Peroni, who was pretty ripped. The guy had muscle upon muscle, but my calves were the one area where I had him beat.

So as vain as it is to say, I have nice calves, and I tell them how nice they are all the time, yet they still choose to hate me. I feel like the parent of a criminal: I want to love them, but they continually disappoint me.

Anyway, I am, as I type this, once again sidelined by a left calf strain. I'm walking four days a week, and I've created what I hope is a sensible, patient recovery schedule that involves walking for the next few weeks, then a couple of weeks' worth of combined walking and light running, and eventually stepping up to a full running schedule again.

In the meantime, I can't run. And I hate that. I HATE that. I run for health and weight management and all, yes. But do you know the #1 reason I run?

Because I love running. I love the physical act of running. I love that, at the age of 47, when my calves cooperate, the rest of me is in sufficient condition to run several miles a week. The feeling of putting one foot in front of the other is my high. I don't really drink. I definitely don't do drugs. But I do run.

And right now I can't.

It's a terrible sort of withdrawal that manifests itself in the form of general fatigue and blah-ness. I'm addicted to the act of running, and right now I can't do it.

My advice to you: Do not become a middle-aged person if you can help it.

Wait, why does my shoulder hurt? And my leg? And my hip? And my ankle?

This is the year in which I turn 46 years old. It doesn't happen for another six months, but I'm well aware it's coming.

Do you know what's interesting about turning 46? It's that you've moved inexorably and undeniably into the second half of your 40s.

It's like you spend the years from 40 through 45 going up a roller coaster hill, and when you turn 46 you crest the hill and start barreling down the other side. The idea of being 50 suddenly looms large.

All of which is fine, in some sense. I mean, time marches on without any help or hindrance from us. You either try and fight it (and ultimately lose) or you go with it.

I try to put myself into the "go with it" school, but there's one thing I can't help but noticing: Something on me is always a little bit painful. Not hugely painful. Certainly not debilitatingly painful. But there's almost always a little soreness somewhere on my body.

Right now it's in my right shoulder. And the frustrating part is that I have no idea why. I don't recall having used that shoulder any more than normal in the last few days. Yet if I lift my right arm over my head, I feel it in the shoulder.

Once that starts feeling OK, it will be the pesky left calf that flares up during my morning walks. Or a twinge in my right hip. Again, nothing that would seem to require medical attention, just a series of constant annoyances.

As I understand it, this isn't going away, either. It will just get worse. Little by little, the pains will be more annoying and more frequent. It will start being two things that are sore at any given time rather than just one. And they'll start affecting the way I go about performing certain daily tasks.

This is something that will be years in the making, but eventually it asserts its dominance over all of us, no matter what we do.

It doesn't help that I don't strength train. I walk. My heart is healthy and so, I think, are my bones. But I need to lift weights to help my muscles and tendons remain strong and pain-resistant. I'll start that at some point before I turn 50, I promise.

But if I were smart, I would start now. Joints respond well to resistance exercise and I could hold that soreness back a bit better if I would just carve out a few mornings a week for some dumbbell work.

So will I? Again, yes, eventually. When things aren't so busy. (I'll give you a moment to laugh ironically at that statement.)

Of course, by the time I'm able to free up a couple of hours of gym time a week, my memory will be shot and I'll forget to do it anyway. So maybe aspirin and Ben Gay are my only hope at this point.

I'm an old guy in training

I am 42 years old, which puts me pretty solidly into the category of "middle age," I suppose. It's early middle age, but middle age nonetheless.

There are actually some advantages to this. For example, the only people who think of you as a dumb kid anymore are the ones in their 80's, and there are fewer and fewer of them left to worry about anyway. You also command a little respect from your co-workers, who are forced to acknowledge that while you are clearly a dope, you are a dope who has managed to survive for four decades, so you must have at least a few smarts in that head of yours.

Of course, the early 40's are also when most of us start to experience the physical signs of aging. There are crow's feet, some graying at the temples (and more than just the temples in my case), flab around the middle...that sort of thing. My favorite moments, though, are the memory lapses. Yes, they're frustrating, but they're also hilarious.

I regularly do that thing where I walk into a room and then have no idea what I'm doing there. I'll be strolling through the house thinking about the 1979 Cleveland Indians (I often think about the 1979 Cleveland Indians...in some future blog post I'll explain why) when suddenly one part of my brain will ask another part why we're in the basement. And the brain section being tasked to formulate an answer will instead freeze up.
"The basement? I'm in the basement? Why am I in the basement? Was it something to do with laundry? No, no, that's not it. How about the treadmill? Was I coming downstairs to run on the treadmill? Well, no, I've never once run on the treadmill, so that can't be it. Did I come to get extra rolls of toilet paper? Maybe to get something out of the freezer? How about the kids' old McDonald's  playset? Did I come to spend a few minutes pretending to be a minimum-wage fast food worker? No, no, probably not."

And so it goes, sometimes for a solid two or three minutes, during which I'll stand helplessly in the middle of the front room of the basement trying to figure out the purpose of my existence for that particular moment. Most of the time it will eventually to come me, but other times I have to admit defeat and trudge back upstairs, troubled that my short-term memory is rapidly fading.

Then there's the fact that I'm no longer The Fast Kid. For many years -- from about 6th grade through college -- my main athletic attribute was that I had foot speed. I could run, and I could run fast. These days I'll try picking up the pace when I'm out for a jog, just to regain the awesome feeling that only the competitive sprinter knows. But the gear I used to shift into just isn't there anymore. I search and search for it, but I rarely get past Chunky Suburban Dad on the velocity scale.

Not to be missed for many guys is the joy that is male pattern baldness. Ever since my early 20's, I've been steadily losing hair in a patch on top of my head. I don't think about it often because I don't usually look at the crown of my own head. But when I do, or when I see a picture of myself from the back, I'm momentarily stunned as I think, "Good Lord! Is that Bruce Willis?" And then I realize it's actually me, and I'm a little depressed for just a few seconds before I decide it's not worth worrying about and I move on.

I've never been one to look at other women much, but nowadays I do it even less. This isn't so much because I can't appreciate an attractive women anymore than the fact that I'm just too darned tired to care. "Oh look, is that Scarlett Johansson naked? Yeah, OK, fine. More importantly, do I have time for a nap?"

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm on death's door or anything. If the average life expectancy for men continues to rise, there's a good chance I'm not even halfway through my allotted span of years. Which is good, considering all of the great memories I have yet to make with my wife, my kids, my future grandkids, etc. The only thing that really scares me is that I'll die without ever having celebrated a major Cleveland sports championship, something that's truly frightening and a very real possibility.

This is the point when I generally come to some sort of conclusion and wrap up the blog post, but for the life of me, I can't remember what I was typing about in the first place...