The Funny Side of Aging

What's so funny about growing old? Not a whole lot, according to the wisest man who ever lived. Here's what Solomon said about our "Golden Years:"

Honor and enjoy your Creator while you're still young,

Before the years take their toll and your vigor wanes,

Before your vision dims and the world blurs

And the winter years keep you close to the fire.

In old age, your body no longer serves you so well.

Muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen.

The shades are pulled down on the world.

You can't come and go at will. Things grind to a halt.

The hum of the household fades away.

You are wakened now by bird-song.

Hikes to the mountains are a thing of the past.

Even a stroll down the road has its terrors.

Your hair turns apple-blossom white,

Adorning a fragile and impotent matchstick body.

Yes, you're well on your way to eternal rest,

While your friends make plans for your funeral.

Life, lovely while it lasts, is soon over.

Life as we know it, precious and beautiful, ends.

The body is put back in the same ground it came from.

The spirit returns to God, who first breathed it.


Ecclesiastes 12:1-7 (The Message)


Old King Solomon said it all, didn't he? Sure, aches and pains aren't much fun. Getting wrinkles along with a bigger belly (or butt) isn't much of a laugh either. And say, those mirrors are getting downright vicious!


Tell me, do you make a shopping list because you know you can't trust your memory, and then go off and forget the list? Yep, been there and done that. So my fellow maturing baby boomers, other than joining the vampires in avoiding mirrors and taping our grocery list to our wrist, how can we best cope with the aging dilemma?


I say quotable quotes! That's right; let's turn to the most humorous quotes we can find on aging and see if that doesn't help ease the burden of seeing way too many candles glaring at us on the birthday cake.


Here's the cream of the crop -- or at least the best I have been able to dig up:


"You can only be young once. But you can always be immature." Dave Barry (1947-) American humorist

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age." Lucille Ball (1911-1989) American actress

"If you want to recapture your youth, just cut off his allowance." Al Bernstein American writer and actor

"There's no fool like an old fool --- you can't beat experience." Jacob Morton Braude (1896-1970) American writer, author

"By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it." George Burns (1896-1996) American comedian and actor

"I can't understand why I flunked American history. When I was a kid there was so little of it." George Burns

"If you live to the age of a hundred you have it made because very few people die past the age of a hundred." George Burns

"Nice to be here? At my age it's nice to be anywhere." George Burns

"Old age is when you resent the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated because there are fewer articles to read." George Burns

"No man knows he is young while he is young." G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) English writer

"Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives." Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972) French actor and singer

"He is so old that his blood type was discontinued." Bill Dana (1924- ) American comedian, actor and screenwriter

"I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table." Rodney Dangerfield (1921-2004) American comedian and actor

"The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it." Doris Day (1924- ) American actress, singer

"One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young." Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) American author

"I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up." Harry Hershfield (1885-1974) American comic artist

"Middle age is when you still believe you'll feel better in the morning." Bob Hope (1903-2003) American comedian, actor

"Middle age is when your age starts to show around the middle." Bob Hope

"If you don't learn to laugh at trouble, you won't have anything to laugh at when you're old." Edgar Watson Howe (1853-1937) American journalist

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old." Washington Irving (1783-1859) American author

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough." Groucho Marx (1890-1977) American comedian

"Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do." Golda Meir (1898-1978) Prime Minister of Israel

"A stockbroker urged me to buy a stock that would triple its value every year. I told him, ''At my age, I don't even buy green bananas.' " Claude D. Pepper (1900-1989) Florida Senator and a Representative

"Some grow bitter with age; the more their teeth drop out, the more biting they get." George D. Prentice (1802-1870)

"The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood." Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946)

"I'm so lonesome; they are all dying; I have hardly a warm personal enemy left." James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) American painter, etcher, and wit

"I am not young enough to know everything." Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Irish author and wit

"As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied." Oscar Wilde


There, did that help? Yeah, I know. Some of the quotes aren't that funny. I just threw them in to see if you were still awake. Why don't you memorize a few of these quotations and try them out on a old friend or two. You might brighten up their day. Or they may just hold up their ear trumpet and cry, "Eh?"


If I haven't listed your favorite aging quote, put it in the comment below.
I believe you eventually become whatever you allow your mind to think about. So if you want to be happy during the "senior years," my advice is: start a collection of humorous quotes. It sure beats mulling over your aches and pains! Who knows, after a few inspiring words from George Burns or Oscar Wilde, even that old buzzard you see in the mirror might start to look more chirpy.

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Resource:
Jerry Boone, Gatlinburg, Tennessee,

Social Security And The Mystery Of The Missing Boomer FICA Payments

Hardly a day goes by that we don't hear some voice of the government bemoaning the sad and unsustainable expense of Social Security. You know the drill: How can it go on with all the baby boomers reaching retirement age?

Here's Bernake at his most daring to date, addressing the Economics Club of Washington, which, we all know, wields much more influence than AARP: ''Reform of our unsustainable entitlement programs'' should be a priority. "The imperative to undertake reform earlier rather than later is great.''


But hold it a moment. Haven't all those baby boomers watched the Federal Government neatly extract FICA payments from their paychecks for the forty or so years they've worked?
So where's the money?


If you really take into consideration that the number of retirees will always pretty much equal the number of people who were recently working and kicking in their share of taxes toward Social Security, you arrive at the conclusion that all this talk about the unsustainable expenditure on "entitlements" as fiscally irresponsible is, in fact, an unsustainable bit of chicanery.


You may ask, What about inflation? Isn't it a factor? Of course, but, hey, what's new about that?


So we arrive at this very puzzling question? Why is it that with more people retiring, there is not more money available?
Don't tell me the FEDS raided the till for other priorities?


Anyway, bottom line is, if we burned up the retirement funds of the boomers on bombs and idiotic wars, it's time to moderate those expenditures, so the money that was slipped out of Social Security to fund those various insanities can be slipped back into it.


We promise not to notice its temporary absence.

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Resource:
Tom Attea, humorist and creator of NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "good, genuine laughs" and "great humor and ebullience."

Have We Become The People We Said Never To Trust?

Anyone who has spent all or part of their teen or growing-up years in the sixties will surely remember the famous slogan delivered from under protest banners flying high or tacked up in seedy apartments and dorm rooms decorated with day-glow posters of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

Remember what it was? Come-on, sure you do. Here's a hint - it was one of the catch phrases of the hippies - the 'Love' generation. It went right along with, "Make Love Not War". And it was usually drawn with magic markers on rumpled 'used-to- be white', dorm room sheets.

Still nothing? Hey man you're not trying.

OK, last clue. What could the most ironic thing that millions of settled, responsible movers and shakers of today's society (us) could have said all those years ago to make us squirm now in our CEO chairs or heated leather Lexus seats?

No guesses? Really?

OK, well everyone who thinks they know the answer, jot it down on an old 'zigzag' joint paper and stuff it into the back pocket of those jeans, (despite the fact that they're three sizes larger than they were in 1968, and now fit a whole lot tighter) And even worse, you're not wearing them tight in the butt any more to be sexy! Then send it off to me in your old college laundry bag. Winners will be chosen completely at random by the judge (me) whose thoughts are likewise completely random (me again) and.... Oh forget it. You give up?
All right - well if everyone has guessed or is so stumped that they're about to give up and turn on the 24/7 'Bad-60's-sitcoms-all-night' cable channel's Beverly Hillbilly's re-run marathon, here is the answer. It was;
"Never trust anyone over Thirty."
Let me explain.

The whole irony thing slid insidiously into my consciousness the other day when I happen to hear a song that was pretty silly and pretentious forty years ago (and it hadn't improved with age) spilling out from the speakers of my Cadillac.

It was a little ditty called 'Signs' or some such title. To be honest I don't really re-call who did the thing back then nor would I recognize the singer nasally droning it out today, even if you picked him up by the scruff of the neck and bodily wumped me over the head with him.

But it was the words to the song - silly and naive as they were back then, that really started me thinking. The song, as I began to remember, was about how the middle class, up-tight, grown-ups (definitely not us back then!), had made up way too many rules in order to force their stodgy, middle class values on the free and uninhibited sprits (us - the 'cool' Baby Boomer kids). And even more insidious, the song reminded us Boomer kids back in the 60's, that the adults had put up all kinds of 'Signs' to infringe on the rights of all of us mellow, young Boomers, who asked for nothing more than to, 'let-it -all-hang-out.
As the still unknown pop vocalist of today sang about how the sign and the rules were encroaching on our freedoms and individualism, I started to get this unpleasant little nagging feeling at the back of my mind.

And then it hit me.

We were the ones who were now putting up the signs and making everyone conform. The signs that tell everyone what they can and can't do and what they better do if they know what's good for them.

For instance, the environmental movement which had started out as a quasi-religion of 'love mother earth' by free-spirited hippies in communes, has now been taken over by grim humorless bureaucrats who watch over things like 'Big Brother' and use a bewildering array of sometimes contradictory government laws to enforce their will.

For heaven sakes I heard only last week about someplace across our fruited plains where not only were you ordered to recycle, but you had to put your garbage in clear plastic bags so that the enviro police could make sure you were!

Whoa... Hey 'Bro' was this what the free spirits in the commune had in mind? Weren't we protesting the heavy hand of government telling us what to do?

It sort of reminds me of that great old movie from the 60's by Woody Allen. It was called Bananas and was about how a Latin/American freedom fighter (who looked suspiciously like Castro) changed when the 'outsiders' became the 'insiders' and could make all the rules.

As the farce, broadened into the ridiculous, I recall one scene where the dictator makes a law that everyone will have to wear clean underwear every day and they have to wear them on the outside of their clothes so that the 'Underwear Police' can check them daily.

Want another one we would have protested as infringement of free expression? How about a planned community that recently told a resident that they would have to take down their colored Christmas lights or risk a fine. Why? Because someone had passed a 'rule' that all Christmas lights had to be white! (I wonder if they not only require underwear to be worn on the outside, but mandate that it must be white as well !!) Hummm. Are we seeing a pattern here?

Or take the government itself. Now I know that I wasn't so stoned that I don't remember those protests. The ones where all we wanted was to get the government out of our lives and off of our back - right?

Now it seem like we've not just invited them to tell us what to do, but are demanding it ! You know the drill. "Why doesn't the government do something about this or "we need a law that says...." Ah uh.

There are underwear laws and white light rules in our futures folks.

Now don't get me wrong - I know that a lot of these laws and regulations have been put in place "for our own good". But wasn't that what an older generation told us forty years ago?
Ah well, maybe we should just shrug our collective shoulders, light some sandalwood incense, pass around the old bong pipe and just chalk it up to just another 'sign' of the times.

Peace dude.



"Shadow of Inocence" - Rick Wasley



http://www.kunati.com

http://www.kunati.com/shadow-of-innocence-hip-myster/
Ric Wasley has spent almost forty years wandering through corporate board rooms and honky-tonk bars. He now divides his time between writing mystery novels - Shadow or Innocence - A McCarthy Family Mystery - Published by Kunati, http://www.kunati.com , and observing the really 'juicy parts' of the human condition.

The Top Military Recording Artists

OMG!  This is seriously bad.
I'm gonna go ahead a apologize ahead of time...

USMC Hammer

The Captain & Ten SEALs

My Morning Flak Jacket

The Dandy Warheads

Tank Williams, Jr.

Donny & Marine

Jeep Trick

Booker T. and the MiG's

M*A*S*H Mouth

Fatigue

Boy Slim

SEALs and Crafts

The Grateful Collateral Damage

Black Hawk Sabbath, featuring Osprey Osbourne

The Omaha Beach Boys

$500 Billion for Fighting

George's Thoroughly Good Destroyers

I warned you!!


Okay, smartypants ... Can you think of any?






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