I Feel Just Like a Cog in Something Turning

Maybe it's the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man...

Up until a few years ago I was a young man. At least, in my head, I was still that guy I was in college. I was able to exert myself physically or consume excessive food and drink and still get up in the morning with minimal resistance from my muscles and internal organs.

Now, those problems don’t just follow the nights of excess, I get the same complaints when I get up in the morning every day, and each and every time I get up in the night to go to the bathroom. “No, honey, no one’s breaking in, that’s just my (choose one or more: hip, knee, back, kidneys, colon, excess phlegm) creating that racket.”

Up until recently, I could travel back from Ohio to my old SoCal beach home and feel like I still belonged. Now, even though I don’t sport the plaid shorts, dress shoes and black socks that marked them, I have become the pale, flabby, aged Midwesterner we used to make fun of. I still get in and body surf, but I tend to look more like I stumbled helplessly into the wave than like I know how to ride it. The young women approaching me are not attracted by my style, they are lifeguards checking to see if I am hurt or lost. Since when have they allowed such little girls to be lifeguards?

Somewhere over the past very few years, I got old – I mean, I started feeling old and I don’t like it. And THIS is not helping:

WOODSTOCK: A FLASHBACK
Steven Reineke conductor
Jeans ‘n Classics, guests
featuring guitarist Rik Emmett from Triumph

Cincinnati. Pops. Orchestra. Doing the music of Woodstock. God, take me now.
I get melancholy enough, seeing the original artists from Woodstock (those that are still upright and breathing) doing their own hits.

My god, that picture just makes you think of a PBS tribute to the Big Band Era, does it not?

“We’ll get back to our Prehistoric Rock Revival right after this pledge break. Buzz your assisted living attendant and ask them call our number and make a pledge for you. WE SAID, BUZZ YOUR ATTENDANT AND … Oh, nevermind, you probably dozed off anyway.”

So, I don't need to see the Pops turn them soft and bland.

A pops orchestra tribute to Woodstock. SIGH. But, by golly, they made it hip, what with it being called “Woodstock: A Flashback”. Flashback … like in LSD flashback. See, because, if you remember the 70s, you weren’t really there. Well, um, yeah, when I was young, some people used drugs … but only for the purpose of ending the war. The Viet Nam War. Yes, the one you just studied in history class. SIGH.

I don’t want to see sad old men performing their hits badly. I sure don’t want to see the Pops playing those songs with orchestra instruments. I would much rather go home and listen to the original songs on my vinyl albums. Vinyl albums – the big round flat discs – look like licorice pizza and you put them on a turntable. Part of a stereo. SIGH