Life recently provided a stark reminder of my geriatric station. One can cradle a 16-year-old mindset till the bitter end, but the fact remains — if the Predator were to choose Little Rock as its next hunting ground, that “killer” tech of his would identify me as elderly and quite possibly infirmed and move on to another target.
Despite the decades-long stasis in which my tastes for music and bathroom-related humor have loitered, it is time for me to officially acknowledge my membership in the Grumpy Old Man Club. After all, I just used the word killer and assumed a male identity for said Predator. (See what I did there? That Predator tech is killer, and it is also killer.)
In my defense, the Predator movies I have seen have yet to reveal a female version of the apex alien hunter, and back in the day, “killer” — as adjective and noun, in a nonliteral sense, of course — was a good thing.
As in, “Dude, those brownies your older brother made were killer,” or “You got a date with the head cheerleader? Go get ‘em, Killer.”
The guys who gave us “Mr. Brightside” a couple of decades ago did not name themselves for perpetrators of death, after all. (I think they didn’t, anyway. On a side note, you know you’re old when you can stop and ponder where the last “couple of decades” have gone.)
So, the grumpy old man thing. It seems to influence every form of media I absorb; everything I take in is impacted by it. The other night while walking Gertie, our sweet black Lab, who resides firmly in our hearts and on the canine spectrum, I wondered to myself when Halloween changed its colors from traditional orange and black to neon purple and green.
Why, after all, should I care that Coke or Reese’s can’t be satisfied with producing the world’s two greatest refreshments and insist on making flavors such as orange vanilla or peanut butter cups with pretzels. Orange vanilla? Pretzels? We should be getting down on our knees every day and thanking the good Lord for Coke and Reese’s. Good ol’ regular Coke and Reese’s. (Whatever you do, don’t try to tell me it’s not pronounced Rees-ies.)
And is it too much to ask our sporting teams to pick a uniform and stick with it for an entire season at least? Seems like Nike could feed west Africa for what it must cost to outfit Oregon and its slough of uni wanna-be’s. It would be nice to flip on a random game and know immediately who’s playing without having to look at the scorebug.
(OK, I had to google what the graphic overlay is called that provides the score and other relevant information. Turns out, it’s a scorebug. I’ll concede one to progress here. I often tell my sons they should be grateful they’re not forced to wait until one team scores to actually know the score.)
Some of the NFL throwback unis are fantastic, by the way (and should be made permanent), and I’m not against alternates if they’re used sparingly, but the Bengals’ all-whites, for example — if they wore those against the Dolphins in their own all-whites, one could be forgiven for thinking the Siegfried & Roy backup dancers were playing a troupe of ballerinas. There was a time when that would not have been considered optimal.
And don’t get me started on the in-game sideline interviews of coaches. Holly Rowe’s professional excellence aside, 99 percent of the time, all we get is an annoyed coach and useless to no info.
Of course, the tradeoff for losing one’s vitality, if not mind, is allegedly wisdom. If only. My wisdom fell between the cracks of the delivery driver’s seat a la Clark Griswold’s bonus. It most likely resides there still, waiting to be discovered by the next driver and dropped off late one Christmas Eve for the family who buys the house after I croak.
May it serve them well.
