• Even so I'm so old I remember when my Senior Moments was only 1 page. Now my Senior Moments have grown so old and long of tooth and scroll it has grandchildren. Anyway and whatever, here we are at Senior Moments page 2.
That an ankylosed old fogey should be updating anything at all, much less new wisdom, sounds ironic if not oxymoronic, doesn't it? For one thing, the wisdom of age, which is timeless, can't be updated, can it?
• I'm so old I remember when driving with a stick shift was a tedious process, taking total concentration, effort, and considerable time. But popping up out of a chair happened before your mom could stop you. Now automatic shifts and shifting happens all by itself without my thinking about it any more than breathing, but ratcheting up out of a chair and getting moving is slower and more cranky than shifting gears ever was.
• I'm so old I still prefer the King James Version and the "Beholds." The new Street Version, "Hey you guys! I stand at the door and knock," loses something. Rev. 3:20
• For youth the big question is WHY am I here! In old age, WHERE am I?
• Old doctors never die, they just sit in young doctor's waiting rooms (take it from me). So what is science's single most valuable contribution to modern medicine? The iPhone, for waiting forever in the waiting room.
• Time is relied upon as the most constant of all parameters in nature. Einstein discovered it is relative, as postmodernist have ascribed to truth. But very old people live in a time warp as no mere Einstein could know. Things that happened three quarters of a century ago and this morning feel -- it's a feeling! -- coeval...and equally distant.
• I'm so old I remember when campuses had no "safe spaces" that now pepper ivy-league universities. What goes on there? I don't think I want to know. My guess is that what aren't safe are the values (that's what they're called now) of my day. It's a place where it's safe to render values unsafe. The first specification for such a "space" is good WiFi signal, whereby sensitive children barricaded from the world may reach out and communicate their agonies to the onlooking universe. Or request parents to send money. Meanwhile the streets are anything but safe.
• Plato et al argued, debated, speculated about reality. That was enough to keep them occupied for 3 millennia, but now we have AUGMENTED reality to play with.
• I’m so old I remember when the expression “pull the plug” meant it’s over, no hope. It still does in the ICU. But you pull the plug on your computer, and plug it in again, and – there’s hope! It’s breathing again! Resurrection!
• Though rendered less flexible, an old man’s neck, ‘tis said and now I can verify, is for looking back, also for looking ahead, looking up at the heavens. 65 years ago my neck revolutions were 180° turns to get a second look at girls.
• I'm so old I remember when news was released. Now without exception it's leaked. So our fake news needs diapers.
• I'm so old I remember when if you needed to phone somebody, you would do simply that. Maybe even send a telegram. Now, you reach out. I just got my Verizon "reach out" bill. I think I'll reach out to Verison and contest it.
• I'm so old I remember when a woman made accusations that she was man-handled. Now she "comes forward."
• I'm so old I remember "You've come a long way, baby!" The "come a long way" part was thrilling to feminists and they smoked even more Virginia Slims. But now -- baby? Sexist, maybe rape! Away with Virginia Slims.
• I've always heard (I'm 87 years old) everybody always say that the world has always been this bad, this sinful. So it's no more "end of the world" than ever. Only now we have the technology whereby everybody is instantly informed of any new atrocity, scandal, or accusation, but the sum total is no greater now than 500 years ago. I doubt that, I think it is a hellava lot worse, but for the sake of argument I'll grant that information input is no greater than ever. It just seems that way. But the thing that IS new is not that simply technology delivers so much news but that, thanks again to technology, it is so massively clipped, cropped, snipped, spun and otherwise, and almost always, perverted so that all that news is indeed more awful than horse and buggy news. I see that as assuredly new and peculiar to the "endtime" SDAs have said would happen.
• Who was it -- Carol Burnett? George Goebel? Anyway, during their monologues they had such a casual, endearing way of tugging at an ear lobe. I do that too, or try to make it look like that, very casual. But it's not endearing, not to me anyway. I'm adjusting my hearing aid's toggle switch.
• I'm so old I remember when art transcended morals. Movie critics would not merely grant a pass to the movie with the most perverted, debauched, debased, only incessant lying and bribery and adultery and homosexuality and worse, but praise it for artistry. Now a Mel Gibson makes a movie that is gory enough to garner great critical praise, but the critics are loath to give it because a decade ago private conversations were leaked that were judged sexist and racist. The review headlines read, "can art redeem the artist?" Why not, when art redeems the message.
• I'm so old I remember hippies and their motto, "Stop the world! I want to get off! Silliest, most absurd thing I ever heard. Now in the 2016 election, considering the options, and considering how things are going out there in the world -- STOP THE WORLD! I WANT TO GET OFF!
• I'm so old I remember how hippies would exclaim, "Stop the world, I want to get off! and then turn right around and proclaim, "You can make a difference." equally unlikely, I still say half a century later. But now all the stronger I add, "Stop the world, I want heaven!" and "You can still make a difference, with God speaking through you!"
• I'm so old I remember when if I saw a long-haired guy I figured he was a hippy doing is own thing. Today at our gym I saw a young guy very well muscled with exquisitely coiffed shoulder-length hair. Probably working out for the women's football team.
• I'm so old I remember when automakers, all centered in Detroit, vied with each other over colors -- pastel colors galore -- and fins and who could make the biggest and most outlandish. Cadillac won! Now Detroit is bankrupt and all cars are oriental and now the big thing is to look the scariest and zombie-like, all gray or white. Good try, Cadillac.
• Older old age lifestyle is not all that different from house arrest, only house arrestees are granted more freedom to venture forth.
• Now that women's ordination is a done deal at our (everybody's) church, the next thing on the agenda is transgender ordination, or is that already a done deal? Beyond that, I simply can't imagine what's next.
• Is there any other way to celebrate a BD, certainly the 80th, than by feasting? Me, I cherish the the stories of the loaves and little fishes broken to feed the multitude, with styrofoam boxes for leftovers, the Last Supper and the promises, "...I shall come in and dine with him," and the official welcome feast at the New Jerusalem, and fruit dangling from the tree of life ("for here or to go?").
• I'm so old I remember when our masses were huddled, then unwashed. Now, tattooed.
• Latest hearing-aided failure of communication:
SHE: "I just came back from getting tattooed."
ME:"...from WHAT?"
SHE: "...from getting cat food, can't you hear?"
• I'm so old I'm having my old bridges rebuilt (dental bridges). My infrastructure falling apart.
• Having burned a few bridges, I'm now having a couple rebuilt. Cute -- but unintelligible -- rhetoric symmetry, there. The kind I'm have rebuilt are dental; the kind I burned, well, their smoke ascendenth forever, Rev 16.
• Wednesday, February 17, 2016: SATAN TO KID: You don't know what you're missing!
SAD DAD TO KID: How lucky can you be!
• Wednesday, February 17, 2016: When they say "You don't know what you're missing," they always are referring to pot, cheating at school or marriage, lying, all the wrong stuff. If you fall for that, what you'll be missing is what God offers.
• Friday, February 19, 2016: I've always been a creature of schedule. Nowadays, at 87, it takes me an hour to wake up in the morning, and then, right on schedule, I'm exhausted and its time for my morning nap.
• Friday, February 19, 2016: We old docs, we're so old we remember when we were in practice and made it a practice to phone our patients just to see how they were gettlng along. So we bemoan that nowadays doctors won't ever even talk to us by phone much less call us for anything. But yesterday, a day after he had performed a procedure on me, one (a dentist, not an MD) actually called me to check on how I was doing. My response was not the immediate effusive gratitude that he deserved, but, "...er., would you repeat that please? ... Who did you say you are? ... I didn't catch that. ...Did you say you are selling solar panels? ... Excuse me, hold on while I switch to a hearing device that may work better..."
• Now there's a sub-subspeciality of pediatric psychiatry. But is there such a thing as geriatric psychiatry? There should be. Maybe it should be called "re-pediatrics" to indicate second childhood, you know. Re-ped for short.
• Having grown up in the SDA church, and now old, I've witnessed not a few old ministers who "gave their lives to the church" only to have the church "turn on them." Too bad they didn't give their lives instead to God, who does not turn upon you. Wait! I've heard of a few ex-pastors who turned against God, claiming God turned on them, or turned out to be mythic. Pastors, alas, can spin and be spun.
• Postmodernism has decreed that there is no such thing as truth. But that's been Donald-Trumphed. Repeat a thing 3 times and it's automatically the truth. I'm so old I remember when Goebbels pioneered the protocol.
• A young woman wants her own cat. A grandmother is plenty satisfied to have visits from the neighbor's cat 3-4 times a day for goodies and then go home to it's ostensible owners. It will be they who will take the cat to the vet if necessary.
• I'm very old and certainly ought to know how to put food in my mouth. I remember my mother telling me, nearly a century ago, to chew it well with my mouth closed, soundlessly, But now, thanks to TV ads and food channels, I learn that food must be placed into the plate and the plate onto the table, and the salad dressing poured, delicately and in super-slow motion, as if it were a Dead Sea Scroll fragment -- and then gulped in fast-forward and chomped, thunderously, like a 80-ton car compactor.
• Drudge of the day: "SPIKE LEE: Female students should go on sex strike to combat campus rape..." I'm so old I remember when such a "strike" was called Chastity, arising from morality, not rape.
• I'm so old I've granted myself a senility waiver on political correctitude and gender-free sensitivity, but not 19th century civility, nor the Ten Commandments which are eternal.
• No, Dickens wasn't quite right: Now, 2015, is the worst of times, the best of times. If entertainment on TV is what you want, now is the best time ever. If just the news, the damned worst!
• Referring not so much to, say, sex as to finding God, "Better late than never," is a prospect that is especially precious to Octogenarians.
• It isn’t enough to ask that God be WITH us. We must ask that God be IN us!
• We stayed at a really upscale motel last night, and had a taste of the future -- all artificial intelligence and automation, auto sensors turning bathroom lights and the toilet thing half way between a shower and a bidet and 4D autoaroma therapy on and off, beeps in the night, all night. I'm not ready for it. You wonder whether you're living in the future or a haunted house.
• If it's a matter of beep in the night and things going on and off unbidden, and robot English coming out of the darkness, is there a difference between living in the future and a haunted house?
• I'm so old I remember when you moved to a new town and always asked the natives which is the best dry cleaners, and garage, and grocery store in town, and what's the nicest park, nicest restaurant. Boy! Does that date you! Now every store is a national chain and exactly the same as where you lived before, and before then, or ever will. So now the questions are, where's the nearest Walmart, Bed Bath And Beyond, Red Lobster, IHOP? Is there a Radio Shack in town that hasn't gone belly up?
• I'm so old I remember when I would interject into debates, ”If I understood you correctly..." Now, "If I heard you correctly..."
• I may be an octogenarian but somehow I'm so much also a part of now that going where there is no WiFi or internet leaves me feeling insecure if vaguely fearful, a mental state to which seniors are already pitifully susceptible.
• Asperger's syndrome -- severe deficiency of social skills -- is thought of as a pediatric condition. But in truth it's a much more significant and debilitating geriatric disability, with the most cogent pathogenesis being senile deafness coupled with the peculiar failures of hearing aids. The impact upon the observer is that the patient has suffered a catastrophic regression of brain function -- he's dull. More accurately, he comes across as having an IQ of an infant cretin. I, alas, have a really bad case of it, I'm the Asperger's Geriatric Poster Boy, rendering me a total social misfit, especially at table in a noisy restaurant.
* But there are actually unexpected, even anomalous social advantages that a patient with geriatric Asperger's may display, at least at a certain early stage, before Asperger's and Alzeheimer's merge and take over. Affected patients tend to remain silent -- in some cases a blessed relief! -- and smile a lot, although such smiles, perhaps better termed "smirks," display a certain not always subliminal pained feature.
• It's scary but nowadays computers can hack computers, Apple Support can (with your permission) take over your screen, a computerized car can be carjacked in motion, A wasp can turn a caterpillar's brain into juice and suck it all out, even your gender can be swapped. So what's the problem about Satan implanting his thoughts into your brain? Or, with permission, God? So what else is new?
• Bruce Jenner confesses that he has lived a lie, having said he was a man, even looking like a male from chromosome to hairy chin. All that's a lie. Somewhere inside, though not in his chromosomes or endocrines nor in any organ known to science, but somewhere inside, he's always been a woman. Saying otherwise was a lie. So now there's Rachel Dolezal, who was born white and has genealogy and genetics to prove it, but insists she's black, but won't confess she lies. Jenner's press release was at least simple and apprehensible, downright macho in style. A woman's declamation would have been more mazy. Dolezal's was a doozy.
• I nominate Bruce Jenner as this year’s PostModern poster boy. The award reads, “if he says he’s a woman, he’s a woman.” And that's that.
• I'll have to retract that nomination of Bruce Jenner as the years PostModern poster person. It's got to be Rachel Dolezal who says nothing counts for anything except as it empowers the inner anima, something like that, only she didn't put it that clearly ,... what the heck was she saying?
• I've always, since youth, especially in youth, had a problem with, ahem, er, curves. They've been my downfall. Slopes have always been too slippery for me. Now in old age, it's the learning curve that's got me down.
• Life is a bell-shaped curve; the downside, I can now confirm, is all downhill.
• My beloved America, now more than ever, is indeed the land where the unimaginable happens. I'm so old I remember when Americans landed on the moon. Unimaginable! Now America wants gay marriage and prosecutes and persecutes anybody from baker to CEO who doesn't. But that's utterly impossible, could never happen, not in America!
• As an American I've always been proud of our classless society. But genderless society? Sounds more like the clueless society to me.
• In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, even mysterious Burkastan, the American faces his last stand.
• The one night stand will never face its last stand.
• 1 Peter 4:8 informs that charity covereth a multitude of sins. So does Photoshop. Or is Photoshop more like covering up corruption with "whited sepulchers"?
• That yearned-for "no call" list has, like the promise of rePeale of Obamacare, gone the way of the dodo. Currently my most no-calls are for solar panels and smart cremation.
• "Smart" cremation? Must be an app. Can you text with it?
• How does, if I may be so dumb as to ask, "smart" cremation differ from the ordinary kind which I presume is "dumb" cremation?
• From conception to cremation, smart all the way.
• Maybe smart cremation is being burned in a solar-panel heated furnace, leaving no carbon footprint. But wait, that's all ashes are -- carbon.
• Those solar panel calls, they all insist "No, I'm not selling solar panels, just giving you a courtesy call to find out if you're eligible for one."
• But I've never been asked whether I'm eligible for "smart" cremation. I'm not, not yet. I'm pretty sure. I could be wrong. There must be a Cremation Hot Line. I'll smart-Google it.
• Whatever else the Clintons are good for, from their mouths have issued what has turned out to be the most notable quotes of the 20th and 21st centuries! Churchill, FDR, JFK, eat your hearts out. Somehow they can better put the essence of postmodernism into words than anybody. There's Bill"s "...as I define it"' and "It's the right thing to do" (as consummate game-over reasoning), and Hillary's "What does it matter!" But now Hillary has outdone even herself, and even Obama, proclaiming "Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed." That's an ISIS decapitation of religious liberty right there.
• This just in: Gay activists are proclaiming that boycotts and legal prosecutions of Christian-owned bakeries reticent to bake cakes for gay nuptials, or forced terminations of CEOs who have not clearly declared for gay marriage, is not a campaign against Christians or Christianity after all. That's because a current poll shows a plurality of Christians no longer disapprove of gay marriage. Ergo, prosecutions and persecutions aren't directed against Christianity per se, but against... I'm not making this up ... primal bigotry, of which sin St. Paul is chief, as he himself could be spun into acknowledging (1 Tim 1:15).
• I'm so old I remember when a transgender was displayed in a freak show. Now, an award show. I'm waiting for a transgender to be roasted.
• "Smart" transgender? Well, I can think of smarter things.
• Transgenderism simply must be the most logical and emblematic change du jour that Postmodernism could possibly produce, so far.
• Aged executives may retain respect, certainly a pension, even a token office. But no clout.
• Old age is a curiously nebulous state for a human being to be in, certainly different from any other stage of life, nebulous and terminal, a refugee camp, limbo, without a satisfactory designation. And thus we old folks are subject to many euphemisms, notably "senior," and ranging from, if recognizably still male, "old gentleman" (the safest) to "old coot" or "old goat." I feel most at home as an "old coot." If referred to as "that old gentleman" I wonder who they're talking about.
• Drudge O' Day: "UN chief praises pope for framing 'climate change' as moral imperative." I'm so old I remember when it would be simply an "issue." Now, "imperative."
• I'm so old I remember when, if you were invited to a friend's house for dinner and you were a vegetarian, you might be afraid to notify your hostess for fear of imposing. Nowadays it's expected that guests will pipe right up with orders for dishes without gluten or nuts or red meat or grayanotoxin or glycoalkaloids or genetically engineered chive. If they don't, that's when the hostess's eyebrows pop up.
• I'm so old I remember when friends would invite you over for dinner.
• I keep insisting we old folks aren't inflexible, don't I? Well, sigh, when I get up out of a chair ... well, sigh, I can't argue about it. Actions speak -- squeak -- louder than words.
• I'm old, so old I'm crotchety when I open my mouth and ratchety when I get up out of a chair. Rickety when standing.
• A crisis, even convenience, trumps liberty and emancipation, but God? Never.
• Cheerfully we allow every particle of our liberty and freedom and emancipation to be shredded as long as we can keep Netflix and the NFL. For Romans, it was gladiators fighting to the death. Give me distraction or give me death.
• I was raised an Adventist and went to Adventist schools from kindergarten up, and must have read or heard the book of John in the New Testament, and yawned. But as an old man and retired and not reading medical journals all day, and had somehow gotten back to reading the Bible, I read John, might as well been for the first time in my life, and my jaw dropped! The Man actually claims -- no bones about it -- to be, er, hmmm..., d! Do you remember CS Lewis saying that Jesus is either actually who he claims to be, the very Son of God, or history's most out-of-this-world lunatic? In John He puts His declaration so unequivocally that there is no way to spin him into merely a good, or -- exercising good pop tolerance and open mindedness -- even a superior, teacher, right up there with Buddha. No way.
• I'm so old I remember when you began your journey to the other side and you were met by St. Peter, who handed you a harp. Now, the TSA, who checks you for weapons and shampoo.
• So which did Hillary trust the least? Her secret server or the Secret Service?
• Today's failure of communication: QUESTION: "What's your physical address"
ME: "At my age ...none."
QUESTIONER, stunned: "You're homeless?"
ME: "Oh, I thought you asked my ASSETS."
• I'm so old I can remember when my jaw would drop and I'd exclaim -- "No! That...simply cannot happen in this country!" But it all did. It did. It can.
• I'm so old I remember when, in social exchange, you reached someone ("I reached him at the office.") Now, you reached out to him. That's how it's put on web stories nowadays ("...to find out we reached out to her..."). I'm not making this up.
• I'm so old I remember when the State guaranteed you'd be born free. Now, it guarantees free birth control.
• I'm so old I remember when the Safety Net was brought in, for those who had failed, not to keep anybody from failing. That you were free to do.
• John 9:4 KJV, "the night cometh, when no man can work" I'm so old I remember when my big complaint about night was not being able to work all through it. That was when I was young, and craved work. Now, at 85 and insomniac, I read the verse as, "when no man can sleep."
• My brother, 2 years younger than I, is slowly dying of myelodysplasia and refractory aplastic anemia, now complicated by beginning multisystem failure and also hemosiderosis from so many, many transfusions. Watching it happen, and waiting, is agonizing. Equally grievous is witnessing former SDA pastor Ryan Bell's year long self-publicized journey into suicide by atheism.
• It's imperative that old people exercise a lot, to be strong enough to withstand open heart surgery. Actually, the more you exercise the less likely you'll have to have open heart surgery.
• I'm so old I remember when it was our democracy that we felt commissioned to proudly spread to the whole world. We knew it was the world's new hope. Now, suddenly, without reason, without warning, we are ashamed of our old democracy. It has been the world's curse. Now it is socialism -- Europe's, not ours -- that we must ourselves receive, and spread.
• God has many names. Call Him anything you want, but don't call Him "God." Likewise socialism has many names but don't actually call it socialism.
• I never intended to but somehow I've wound up with a collection of great sayings of historic characters that I've heard with my own ears, like "I shall return" (Doug MacArthur), "Blood Sweat and Tears" (Winston Churchill), "Ask not what..." (JFK). With a sigh, I pitch those -- passé, embarrassingly out of date. My updated collection: "The right thing to do" (Bill "morals" Clinton), "What does it matter?" (Hill "Benghazi" Clinton), and "You don't want to go there, buddy" (Eric "the people's A.G." Holder). (Simple lies or elaborate spins don't count. Sorry, Obama.)
• I just hung up on the following hearing-impaired conversation as it came through to me: "Wesley? I'm calling to confirm your ten o'clock dinner appointment for tomorrow morning." Dinner, for lunch? With champagne? Oh...den ! OK thanks. I'll be there.
• It's hard to know which comes up with the darnedest things, your hearing aids or your spell checker.
• I'm so old I remember when super-rich philanthropists built huge libraries and museums, even art museums. Now, convention centers and sports stadiums.
• I'm so old I remember when only bugs splattering your windshield threatened travel. Now, ostriches sucked into your turbofan. And once upon a time the Esso man would, after putting the tiger into your tank, clean your windshield.
• We Adventists have always cherished Joel 2:28 which, we know, speaks of the time of the end, when "...your old men shall dream dreams." And so I do, nonstop -- but not the kind Joel is talking about, please.
• Alzheimer's and Postmodernism are alike for obliviousness. Alzheimer's forgets everything that ever happened and doesn't care. Postmodernism laughs it off and doesn't care.
• The #hashtag is the avatar of the thumb-texting-sucking generation.
• “Old geezers are scared stiff of change. Old geezers are so spooked at change they’re scared of gay marriage, simply because it’s change.” I'm starting to be embarrassed, but then I hear even old Hillary saying, "Look at us -- we didn't flipflop, we've evolved!" Excuse me, but that sounds more like flip-floppery than flexibility.
• I'm so old I remember when -- if a preacher didn't get 30 people standing up for his altar call he felt his sermon was a failure. Now, if she doesn't get a chuckle every 30 seconds.
• "THEology" is offensively sexist. Behold the time cometh and even now is, when it shall be SHEology. But transgendship is upon us. TRANSology?
• "The text for our sermon today is II Hermeneutics 3:15, NFT [New Feminist Translation], where we read...."
• Current SHEology rejects predestination for mankind but holds that women's ordination was preordained from the foundation of the earth.
• A real Satan may not come through clearly in the Bible, but evil patriarchs do. She that hath an eye to see, let her.
• It's over, and I'm none the worse for it, nor, alas, the better.
• Today my 70-year-old gold bridge and false front tooth (upper, smack in the middle) that my dentist cousin Ellsworth put in so long ago (I was 16), was removed (the false facing had at last abandoned me, like, well, other stuff). The two adjacent teeth (that Ellsworth preserved) are now reduced to prongs, on which bridge-falsies are impaled! Now, when it doesn't matter, my teeth, heretofore gold-framed but ugly, are prettier, my wife just exclaimed, than at mating age, also long ago. Why the false tooth in the first place? The original was knocked out, shattered to the gum-line when my brother and I (age 9 or 10) crashed our bikes together at play, and I fell down, smack on my face.
• "Old people resist change," Put that way it sounds like what's new and never experienced before is what old people resist, Not true, wrong, way wrong. It's not what's never been experienced, but it's those same old failures they've known for a lifetime, change circled back again, that old folks resist.
• If it's true old folks resist anything new, young folks resist all that has been proven.
• There's one change old folks famously resist, and that's hearing aids. Not me, I need them and use them all day, unashamedly. And one of the most useful features is mute, turning the thing clear off. Use hearing aids responsibly.
• Friday, December 19, 2014. Well, you know it would have to happen, didn't you? Ever since I became 80 years of age I've contended, as in the several huffy essays to be found in this site's "Octogenariancy" department, that what people say about old folks -- they resist change -- is not quite right. It isn't change as change per se that old folks resist. It's the evil that change almost inevitably bring, that we resist. That's the "change" we've seen for 80 years. But, sigh, now I'm older, going on 86, and wiser and I'm changing my tune, or dirge. It's true: any change whatsoever and whatever from status, just getting out of bed in the morning to face a too demanding day, or 8-9 hours later just getting into bed to face a sleepless night, is change too overwhelming to cope with.
• Luke 5:38 (ESV) says, "no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” At age 85 my skin is thin and stiff, and I perceive that my wrinkled old skin and shrunken brain cannot accommodate all that new truth going around, lest I burst and rupture, split open, crack into fragments, be ruined. All that new stuff is for new skins and brains ready to swallow anything. But -- and this part is especially comforting to the well aged -- (Luke 5:39, KJV) "no man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better," with so much more body, depth, bouquet, finesse, elegance, life -- sad that you young skins can't appreciate any of that yet! That new stuff -- spit! splat!
• Your official retirement from your career is just the beginning of retirements. The retirement years are spent retiring from yet more things. Pretty soon I'll retire from driving. I've already retired from climbing ladders, even to change a light bulb.
• I'm so old I remember when the world was full of heathen and unbelievers, and my personal mission as an Adventist was to warn them and proclaim His coming. Now it's full of LGBTS and women craving ordination and I am not to warn them of anything but rather to proclaim them award winners.
• I'm so old I remember when only the Publishers Clearing House awarded you. Now, just being alive qualifies you. We are all awarded every 15 minutes, not just for 15 Warhol minutes.
• We are all winners? Wait, I thought we are all victims. Victims of awards, the most pathetic kind of victim.
• Simultaneously winners and victims -- no wonder we all suffer from award-winning schizophrenia.
• I'm so old I remember when victims, whether of cancer or a mugging, fought back. Now we are awarded.
• Most Christians now believe all you need to do to get to heaven is to die. Adventists say it takes more doing than that.
• I'm so old I remember when there were role models on plinths to look up to and try to be like. Now they're all rolling in gutters and we must not look down on them, or even over them.
• Hear a shaggy-dog tale of three wise old men. Two of them, Old king Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, and yours truly, of the three the oldest but only second smartest and second shaggiest and not even hardly kingly, ruled that there's nothing new under the sun, not nothing, nothing, especially not scandals, seen 'em all. So here comes another scandal...yawn. Instantly up pops the perp'trator, saying, as he sprints between two robot teleprompters through a rose garden to his helicopter like an ancient pharaoh attended by two fanning slaves parading to his barge, saying he'd never heard even a hint of a smidgen of it until he heard about it from Jay Carney just a few minutes ago, and he's as mad as hell as anybody that such a thing, allegations mainly, should happen on his watch in his kingdom transparently free from even a smidgen of scandal, and will ongoingly get to the bottom of it if it takes the NSA and DOJ forever, but the very idea is all phony and political and a war against women, an insult to bigoted middle class victims, would never have happened if Republicans had had a smidgen of compassion for the poor and cooperated and since they won't he will ignore congress, and anyway it's old stuff and out of date, what does it matter? ...yawn. Whereupon the third wise old man -- the wisest and shaggiest of the three -- uncoils from his rocker, blinks his eyes and scratches an armpit, and, as the sun sets in the west, murmurs, "By crackle-cracky! Ah hain't neeee-vah see-een NAW-thin' lie-yak THEY-at!" Nobody has.
• The Change We Can Believe in turns out to be the spin that leaves us dizzy.
• Ah, advice! Good counsel! Easy for you to say. Easy for an old man to say, looking back, after the fire has gone out. But while it's happening, don't bother.
• Proverbs 20:29, ESV: "The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair" .... what's left of it.
• I'm so old I remember when the new Oldsmobile crowed that it was "not your grandfather's Oldsmobile." I hope your grandfather still has his, because you can't get one now, not even with a bailout or a handout.
• Eccl 12:1-3 says to "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth before the evil days come and the years draw near when ... the grinders cease because they are few." I just had another grinder extracted. The evil days of too few grinders have come.
• The prevailing philosophy allows God to exist, even to have created or otherwise been involved with Creation, but is now withdrawn and no longer interested or involved with us. I don't believe that. Nor do I believe He allows us to do likewise, withdraw from, or lose interest in, Him.
• Thursday, June 12, 2014. Limited to only the wars that I personally remember, starting with the Spanish Civil War in 1936 to the Muslim reconquest of Iraq going on as we speak, with WWII and all the little wars in between included, I’m estimating that I myself have witnessed the killing of roughly two or three hundred million people. Trifling, compared to the casualties of the various Marxist, theological, philosophical, sexual cultural and political revolutions, wars against poverty and women, fought by Harvard and Hollywood on huge and tiny screens with special and virtual effects, hermeneutics and spins, automated phone calls and rollouts, and other weapons of mass deception, with all of us as collateral damage.
• I'm so old I remember when I filed my files in a clunky squeaky 3-drawer file cabinet, and never could find the file. Now, into a "cloud." I still can't find the file.
• "Cloud" as a designation for where your stuff or assets are, may yet prove to be one of the most i-regrettable ideas ever dreamed up ... up, up and away! Is there such a thing as a "smart" cloud?
• Here's a question. Which is best, to have a real file in a real 3-drawer file, and not be able to find the file, or to have a virtual file in a "cloud" and not find it?
• The latest technology now puts a computer's memory into "clouds." That's where my own has been all along. Lots of luck!
• So the question now is whether to store e-files in a solid-state disk or in a cloud? Maybe we'd better rephrase the question.
• I'm so old I remember when people yearned for a cloudless sky. Now the more and bigger clouds the better.
• Pie in the sky, files in the i-clouds.
• We old folks require, and if we had the energy we'd demand, stability and a dependable schedule and routine. Don't call that inflexibility and laugh. It's our civil right, one of those inalienable rights Jefferson talked about, a justice due us, and we're as entitled to ours as gays and illegals are theirs, aren't we? No? Well, call it an award we have earned, grant us a waiver, amnesty anyway.
• I'm so old I remember when life was a search for wisdom. Now an "ongoing investigation."
• I'm so old I remember when the agony expressed at church was in personal testimony, to an organ background. Now, by singing, not the congregational but the featured lip synced. The torture evinced by singers, always filmed, is a helluva lot more wrenching than testimonies ever were, even lip synced.
• There must be something evilly pathogenetic (the Surgeon General, now that our Pastor doesn't any more, should issue a warning) about stepping out under Klieg lights and grabbing a banana-shaped microphone, and lip-syncing. The whole body is taken over by writhings and torture worse than from a fire ant sting. Even at church. I keep expecting a deacon to come rushing up and anoint our poor dear sister Awritha and pray for miraculous healing. What she gets is applause. What does that say about our compassion?
• I just paid a lot of money for new high-tech digital cutting edge hearing aids that do indeed deliver the most intelligible sounds possible. The best setting on it is "mute."
• I'm so old I remember when gays came storming and shouting out of the closet. Now we straights are the ones locked and gagged in the closet.
• I'm so old I remember the Golden Age of Ventriloquism, but it's back, in glory. Now everybody from Father Bill Miller to Ryan Bell to Elton John wants to play Edgar Bergen with Jesus on their knees mouthing, as though He were Charlie McCarthy, the Beatitudes and blessing gays along with the poor in spirit, for they shall be filled. But by the same token, and more certainly, the wooden image would have to be cursing St. Paul.
• Terrorists will strike tomorrow! Shuddering in terror, I've just hung up on a phone call announcing, "We'll be in your area tomorrow to update all the old land mines." I'm deaf so I had him repeat it. "Land mines." Smart land mines?
• We have it on the best authority (the scripture), and, sigh, must accept it, that we old skins are inflexible. Turn with me to Mark 2:22 ESV, "No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” The old is better anyway (Luke 5:39).
* I'm deaf but not mute. I wish I were. My deafness has rendered me befuddled, which may be worse for interaction with the smartphone generation than being simply mute.
• My expensive (more expensive than Sandra Fluke's bill for birth control pills from now through her menopause) hearing aids enable me to almost intelligently interact one-on-one. Just chat, doesn't count much. But where it counts, where two or three are gathered together, much less a hundred, it's still all mud to me, louder but unintelligible. And on the phone, murk, mud, just babble, especially those syllables originating from headsets in credit card fraud or tech support cubicles in New Delhi, the most crucial sounds known to humanity in this new virtual era of noise. It's not who ya gonna call, but why bother?
• "He that hath an ear let him hear." But for old ears even with hearing aids it's just babble.
• Nowadays speech is pretty foul-mouthed. In my day, vowel-mouthed.
• Luke 21:19 says, "In your patience possess ye your souls." In old age what other options are there?
• John 9:4 says, "The night cometh, when no man can work." Sigh, can't sleep either, at night, in old age.
• Job demanded of God, why are you doing awful things to me? In our dispensation, we would ask of Him, why are you allowing such things to happen to me?
• I'm so old I remember when the only refreshingly and comfortingly well dressed people to be seen in normal life were IBM repairmen, back when IBM made machines. Now, only the Jehovah's Witness pair that knock at your front door.
• I'm so old I remember when false-alarmists activists would shout, "Wolf! Wolf!" Now, "Rape! Rape!"
• I'm so old that if something is considered outdated, Victorian, not relevant to today's society or culture (whatever), it was all the more precious, certainly at auctions.
• DHOD (Drudge Headline of the Day): "TRANNY MANNING: I am a transgender woman and the government is denying my civil rights..." But seriously, Tranny, you yourself already forfeited, by surgical mutilation or simply self-fiat, your inalienable genetic gender rights, without batting an elongated eyelash. And now for you of all citizens to turn on your new switched-on government, itself transgendered, is shameful ingratitude, for it is sworn to defend and empower your right to self-evisceration, not deny it. Tranny? Typo for Transy? For the record: the said person wasBradley Edward Manning before he was Chelsea Manning.
• The rule nowadays, unfamiliar to us more courteous old folks, is to call everybody only by their first names. Doesn't this get awkward and even self-defeating in gender change? Better go back to the old way of using only last names. Then it would always be simply "Manning." And "Jenner," not Bruce, oops, Brucella.
• Drudge Headline O' Day: "Army eases policy on transgender soldiers..." In my day you became a conscientious objector.
• I'm so old I remember when men lived lives of hidden sin. Now they parade right out of the closet and hold a press conference to decry loss of privacy.
• I know a newly frocked and evangelical atheist, formerly an Adventist pastor, who likes to insist that in exiting the pulpit he has indeed deeply and sincerely examined, O yes, the depths of his soul, what there is of it.
• Going by what He said in His book, said clearly and without wiggle room even for the most hellbent of hermeneuticians, God intended a man to marry a woman and that’s that. But if there is no God, what or whom you marry, what does it matter? Does anything matter? Without God nothing matters; only with him does anything, everything matter. Does it matter that I’m filing this insight under “Senior Moments”? It does because nowadays things like this matter only to us ankylosed seniors, it seems. That matters. Or does it?
• Sin routinely dives underground, seeking a bomb shelter, not gold, and winds up coming out of the closet, pretty grimy. Gopher and termite at work.
• My motto when young was, Take what you can get! In old age, Keep what you've got. Alas, what I was able to take wasn't much, leaving little to keep. Hard to come by, easy to go.
• "If you like your doctor you can keep him." What a relief! "If you like your bank account you can keep it." Oh?
• "You didn't make that, the government did." He's talking about the IRS, you know.
• "You didn't make that." But it's money, I made it. "No, the government made it, starting with printing it."
• I'm so old I remember when it was your money, you made it and it's yours. Tax refunds were refunds of your own money. Now you didn't make it in the first place, the government did, and owns it from printing plates on up, by inalienable right. If you get a refund, it's government benevolence, for which give thanks.
• I'm so old I remember when your wealth was shown by the car you bought, house you lived in, your restaurant bill. Now, by the amount of income tax you pay. Wow! we must be rich! rich! rich! (or were)!
• We were promised "the change you can believe in." Somehow I just can't quite believe in sex change. Sea change maybe; sex change, er, no.
• I'm so old I remember when poverty was what you strove to rise from. Now it's what you're a victim of.
• Sigh... I'm so old I remember when it was the prophets of God who forced us to see the world differently. Now, weird bloggers, writers, artists, film makers.
• I'm so old I remember when it took spine and guts. Now, balls. What difference does it make?, they all go soft.
• I’m so old I remember when the State provided only diapers and a safety net and sent us on our way. Now our government enwombs us in shrink-wrap, bubble-wrap, or Styrofoam peanuts, smothers us in inert gas; embeds us like a watermelon seed in a total body encasement of molded Styrofoam or urethane; or immobilizes us in a total body cast, a straight jacket of body armor; entombs and embalms us dead inside a cement sarcophagus. And calls it liberation.
• The "wisdom of old age" that octogenarians are famous and should be treasured for, is only old wisdom, acquired over a lifetime. "Old wisdom of old age." New wisdom, ... sorry, nap time.
• Old wisdom of old age may be old but it's timeless. And it's available from no other source than old folks. But if timeless its shelf life is but a blink of an eye. Better grab it fast, before it's lost forever like alchemy or the art of making stained glass.
• I'm so old I remember when nighttime sleep was the renewing, indeed the Restart Button. Now I wake up in worse shape than when I laid me down to sleep. The Restart button in old age is about as ineffective as as Hillary's Russian-relations Restart Button. The only hope is the Resurrection Button.
• In medical school, long ago, I learned of the "pill-rolling tremor," pharmacists being the poster children. Rare, it was annoying to the patient but trivial. Pills are tiny and can be dealt with. Now suddenly there is an raging epidemic of what could be called "oar-rowing" or "barrel-rolling" seizure. Agonizing to behold, this terrifying virus has singled out, like HIV for gays, anchorpeople, politicians, their wannabes and interns. It is rumored that one single drama coach was the vector responsible for infecting the whole on-camera population.
• In my old age I'm learning, at least being taught, so much, much more than I did as a child and youth going to school and the university, things I never even thought of, or that I heard in lectures, read in texts, not only of basic physiology (homosexuality is natural and desirable) but about history. What I learned was all wrong! Revisionism rules! Now, only now, am I learning that the Constitution is an embarrassing mess and that Islam was as much a part of America's Founding philosophy as the Enlightenment. Thanks be (to whomever) that I've lived so long!
• We just returned from church where a popular award-winning religious drama-musical comedy, rented from a religious mega-supply house, was sung and danced under klieg lights and with props and special effects, a magnificent production, by a hundred church-school children, including our great grandchild, all wonderfully costumed and delightfully made-up and professionally rehearsed, and not a one, certainly not our kid, an angel, forgot a syllable. Every last child spoke, gestured, danced exquisitely and professionally -- all lip-synced. Way to go Chris! I'm so old I remember when little kids were paraded out at church to recite 4-5 lines of memory verses from scripture that we, standing frozen and red-faced but not from rouge, had memorized, and usually (like me) stuttered and stammered and half way through forgot.
• I'm so old I remember when if I said "love" I meant, or so I was informed ... sex! (Right on, as they say; actually I meant both.) Now it's flat out and forever always and blatantly and gleefully, and totally accurately, sex, sex, sex, and nobody dares utter the word "love."
• I'm so old I still remember when -- it was way back during the Cold War; I was a medical student or resident at the time -- TIME magazine ran a series of articles comparing politically retarded Russian with advanced democratically enlightened American ways. The most telling of the series disclosed that in Russian medical schools more than 60% were, would you believe, women! Now maybe 70% of American medical students are. I'm not making this up.
• Progress, especially the kind that brings free contraceptives to all ages and genders regardless, would be a breezer if it weren’t for us old geezers who somehow fail to see why we need that kind of free stuff, or solar panels for that matter. Sticks in the mud and potholes in the road to utopia, are we unupdated seniors. We are DDT to the iridescent virtual butterfly of the United States of Utopia. The answer is, let us die off. It worked for pasteurized milk.
• Long ago when time my generation was young and kicking up our heels and taken over the pasture, we had never tasted unimaginably exquisite unpasteurized milk, and didn’t care if the government required all milk to be pasteurized. It worked for milk. Likewise, when all of us old coots die off you Millennials may, without senile hindrance, er, gayly cavort and abort until… (I was going to say, until the cows come home)…until there’s none of you, or anybody, left. What I'm trying to say is that if you Millennials with all your lifestyle makeovers are annoyed by our senile objections, just hold on a few years, and we'll all be put away, out of earshot. Then you'll be on your own, and, as an oldster would have to add, lots of luck.
• Sure, let all of us old folks, like me, die off. Medicare is the only thing that keeps us going, but every 4 years the Libs warn that the GOP warns us seniors that the GOP is strangling Medicare, and the GOP keep saying that it's the Lib's spending that is sending Medicare bankrupt? Both Libs and GOPs trying to scare us voting seniors to death? But isn't it exactly that that must happen -- our generation, the Medicare Generation must die off for the greater good of the Millennial Generation? So sure, let Medicare die, and us with it. The smart thing to do. And smart cremation too.
• I'm so old I remember when it was every man for himself. Now they get married to each other.
• Of accumulations after his name, which profiteth a man more, degrees or digits? Anyway, happy birthday, thou deeply digitialized and dignified and dear old friend!
• I'm so old I remember the friendly -- sexy -- skies, when all the "hostesses" as they were called in those days, were gorgeous, and especially chosen and hired for their beauty. But the not-so-classy ladies sued, and of course won, and now it's the ho-hum skies. The TV news is where you see gorgeous babes nowadays. Where's the outrage?
• Barbie dolls belong in the skies, as airline hostesses, not on cable news, as anchors.
• As an old doc, I remember when if you had a disease you were a patient, and were (patient, that is). You hired a doctor. Now, a victim, you're outraged, and hire a lawyer to sue your doctor.
• I'm so old I remember when spiritual leaders, like Pastors, Elders, Ministers, led our church, and Priests, Fathers, Bishops, Popes other denominations. Nowadays, Emergent Thought Leaders, Activists, Advocates, scholars, and philosophers have taken over, not necessarily spiritual at all, or hardly at all, if at all. Towards the former my soul was, in retrospect perhaps shamefully, indifferent. Towards the latter, not. Pastors and evangelists preaching doctrine should have been the ones to rouse me, not scholars disparaging doctrine. In any case I'm roused!
• Michelle Obama proclaims we must eat healthy, and commands schools to serve nothing but. Tim Cook proclaims we must not sit in our chairs more than an hour, and puts billions into a wrist watch that sees to it we don't. For such never--heard-of-before notions Michelle and Tim are instant pop icons. They've changed our lives! I'm so old I remember when our Mrs. E.G. White admonished both, and was dismissed as a provincial plagiarizing Victorian.
• 2014. I'm an old retired doc, and people ask me what kind of a doctor I was. The kind you like and want to keep, that kind. No, I was a pathologist.
• I'm so old I remember when they took your blood pressure and pulse and weighed you every time you walked into your doctor's office. Now they don't bother, but never fail to check whether your insurance has changed.
• I'm so old I barely remember when a graphic symbol of something or somebody or group was a coat or arms or heraldic device, intricately rendered. I remember better the time when it was a logo, reduced to the essence. Now, icon, rendered in a few pixels.
• I'm so old I remember when a living person, always a pleasant, uniformed man, would fill your gas tank and clean your windshield and check your tires, at a gas station. Now, not a soul in sight, but GSTV is blaring ads on the gas pump video screen to keep you entertained while you fill your own tank and your windshield stays dirty and your tires flabby.
• So Tim Cook has come out of the Apple closet with a new i-model -- iGay. I'm so old I remember when Mac was the computer for the rest of us. The rest of us?
• I'm so old I remember when men, even kings and presidents, sought wisdom. Now, smarts.
• I'm so old I remember when it "is the moral thing to do." Morality went out of style. Bill Clinton informed us of "the right thing to do." Now it's "the smart thing to do."
• Don't suppose a wisePhone would sell any better than the Edsel.
• If Hillary is wise, she'll run a smarter campaign in 2016.
• A wiser political campaign will never draw the smart money.
• Wise money is in the bank. Smart money is on a horse. A horse named Hillary.
• King Solomon was offered the traditional three choices. He chose wisdom, and all the rest, including thousands of wives, was added unto him, bringing him the wisdom that all is vanity.
• Job 28:28: Wisdom, that's the fear of the Lord; to depart from evil is knowledge. Where does smarts fit in? Smarts is the seeking after awards.
• In the village the most revered man was the wise old man. Now, smart kid.
• Is there such a thing as "street wisdom"?
• I'm so old I remember when the IRS was compassionate, sort of. Now, smart.
• I'm so old I remember when we doctors and the IRS would personally talk to you on the phone. Now neither will. Smarter?
• Wisdom seemed, back in my day, equated with common sense coupled with experience, bound together, if you went with the Bible, the fear of God. Smarts -- that is simply artificial intelligence, programmed in.
• All this talk about computers being made to possess artificial intelligence, as if intelligence is the highest humanoid quality attainable. Computers are misinformed and should aspire to smarts.
• That’s correct: the STAT test is discriminating and furthermore measures the wrong parameter, intelligence. The college qualification test should measure smarts.
• Being a wise old man, I remember...hmmmmm... Matt 10:16 (KJV), in which we are admonished to be as wise as serpents. I've just rechecked BibleGate and there is a very new version (ERV, Easy to Read Version) that substitutes "smart" for "wise". Now that sounds the smarter way to put it.
• Drudge 'O Day: "'Intelligent' Streetlights to 'Watch' Residents..." Shouldn't that be "Smart Streetlights..."? Street smart streetlights, you know.
• I'm so old I remember when IF an old person objected to gay marriage it was because he or she was inflexible. Now when I object to Trump it's because of my ego. Finally you whippersnappers got it right: my ego is inflexible. (Well, so's Trump's, so we are bedfellows after all, strange, unhappy bedfellows to be sure).
• We octogenarians see eye to eye. That's sad: we've got macular degeneration and presbyopia.
• I'm so old I remember when if you had something to say you just said it. Now you can't until you've added a pre-apology and a post-apology. So, I mean, and meant, no offence. Is it safe to proceed now? As a protestant used to confessing directly and only to God, if I were to confess to another uninvolved human even one sequestered in a box, I'd feel as I do when my web site has been hacked.
• I'm so old I remember my childhood in old 1930s North Hollywood. It was worth it just for the miles of orchards of fresh apricots. It was worth moving to Ohio just for the sweet corn. It was worth it moving to Redlands for freshly squeezed orange juice. It'll be worth it to move to the New Jerusalem for the fruit of the Tree.
• I'm so old I remember when Adventism proclaimed the Message. Now, our Position.
• I'm so old I remember when, in our insensitivity, we feared to utter obscenities. Now in our new sensitivity and political correctness, we are expected to f---- all over the place.
• A friend, about my age, is afraid of the web -- "all those tubes of U going viral!" I assure him the NIH is working on a vaccine.
• Let us hear the end of the whole matter: the overriding question is whether to attack or retreat, to withdraw into oneself or to nag.
• I'm so old I remember when we were Seventh-day Adventists because of principle, scripture, the gospel, and God. Now, because of our culture.
• Game changing is name changing. Our church is polarized, poised on the brink of fracture. One element has called itself progressive Adventist, is called liberal Adventist (I've called it simply Adventoid). But now it wants to be called "cultural Adventist."
• In Mark 16:15 we now read, "Go ye unto all the world and preach our culture."
• I'm so old I remember when a lame duck was pathetic. But our lame sitting duck has run amok -- run for your lives!
• For a compassionate despot's strategical purposes, modern opinion polls of the public will mean absolutely nothing, amusing idea that they should. Punch delete. For tactical purposes, polls mean absolutely everything, every move, every spin.
• When I was young I would look at an old man and see an old man, not what he must have looked like when young. Now I'm an old man and when I look at a young man I see him as he will look when old.
• In advanced old age I thought it about time I became more macho-muscular and have taken up exercise in a huge way -- but I discovered that the macho-exercise vocabulary is ... baby talk! "chrunchies," "sitzies," "pushies." Talk about irony (if not iron muscles) -- I set out to fight off Alzheimer's and wound up in my second childhood!
• I'm so old I remember when it was science which had brought humanity so far; now, it's technology that has -- smart technology and artificial intelligence and augmented reality.
• The very things that society and the bible have forever held the most fundamentally immoral and destructive to society, indefensible and punishable, downright sin, are emerging, with great fanfare, from the closet as the most primal of civil rights, to be defended above all else by the full power of the government and promoted as consummate pleasure by the full hype of Hollywood. That's the kind of change old folks resist.
• I'm so old I remember when (just a decade ago, actually), we were urged to accept gay marriage, novel back then, because it was the coming thing; now, because it is the established thing. Back then gay marriage was the change that must come and cannot be fought; now, things have changed and that cannot be fought. Back then we heard "you cannot fight the future." Now, "you cannot fight facts."
