Part II—Grumpy Old Man

      By nature, I am not a grumpy or angry old man. I personally think that if you were a grumpy young person, then you will eventually turn into a grumpy old man. For many people their optic nerve and their rectal nerve have intertwined to give them a “shitty outlook” on life.   But, as my grandfather used to say, “It’s better to be pissed off than pissed on!”  I have never exactly been known as Mr. Sunshine, but I have always had a very good imagination, which when left alone, has provided me with unlimited entertainment for my entire life.  The voices and pictures in my head, generally, are happy, cheerful voices and happy, cheerful pictures. I have a wonderful imaginary remote control TV in my brain that easily switches from cartoons to sports to action adventures to adult channels. All the animals, objects, and people follow my ever-changing script, and all the women are beautiful, obliging, and willing.  My imagination is a wonderful remote control that has always entertained me, and it never needs batteries.  It is only when I am exposed to other people and their general stupidity that I become grumpy and cantankerous. My tolerance level for general stupidity is decreasing rapidly as I age!  I am not yet at the stage in my life where I am the old man on the front porch yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, but I can understand why old men do it.   The “rabbit-ear antennas” in their brains no longer get the “good” channels. Their reception is fuzzy and full of static. Poor TV reception can cause anyone to get a bit grumpy or pissed off. 

                   

      I do become a bit disgruntled and cantankerous when I see diet ads on TV or watch TV infomercials for workout equipment or fitness gadgets, such as stair climbers, stationary bicycles, and abdominal machines. I get pissed off at commercials that have a forty or fifty year old person stating that the machine, workout, or diet has gotten him into the best shape of his life.  I find the statements such as, “I am in the best shape of my life!  I am in better shape now than I was when I was eighteen-years-old!” to actually be pretty pathetic.  I don’t feel happy for or proud of anyone who says that. On the contrary, I feel sad for them.  If you are in the best shape of your life now at forty or fifty, you were a pretty miserable and pathetic eighteen-year-old!  You obviously wasted the best time of your life.  Remember when you were eighteen?  When I was eighteen, I could run 10-15 miles a day, go out chasing women and get rip-roaring drunk all night, and still wake up with a marble hard-on that would levitate me out of the bed.  I could also get up and do it all again and again.  Too much teenage testosterone poured out of every part of my body.  That was not being “in shape”; that is just what it was like to be eighteen-years-old!  No workout product or diet can make any forty or fifty-year-old do, or even want to do any one of those things.   First, running ten to fifteen miles?  I don’t want to run that far any more.  Why bother running when I can now drive?  (Now that I’m older and more mature, I don’t run with scissors anymore.  The verb in that sentence is unnecessary.) Second, staying up all night drinking and chasing women?  If a woman doesn’t give in after two drinks, I now throw in my cards and move on to the next game.  And third, yes, most men would still like to imagine having those marble hard-ons that you had when you were eighteen that a cat couldn’t scratch or you could use to drive a nail into a block of granite.  But the way I look at it, I could also get all dressed up to go out in a suit and tie or in a tuxedo.  But, why bother?  Why get all dressed up if there is no place to go or if there is no place you feel like going to?  A marble hard-on at my age just sets up unrealistic expectations for the woman for the rest of my life.  I don’t need that type of pressure!  I’ll be content with my memories. Throughout a man’s lifetime, his penis is like a tree.  In his teens, it’s like wood from the Petrified Forest. In his 20’s and 30’s, it’s solid and reliable like an oak tree.  In his 40’s and 50’s, it’s like a pine tree—flexible, easily broken, but still somewhat reliable.  In his 60’s, it’s like a Christmas tree—generally dead from the roots up and the balls are just hanging there for decoration.  Happy Holidays!

      Certain things now don’t bother me and make me grumpy, but they do puzzle me because I just don’t understand them.  I don’t mean anything like how the internet works or how someone texts on these new-fangled cellular tel-ee-o-phones; I’m not that old and senile yet. But there are certain things that do puzzle me as to why anyone would do or enjoy these activities. Maybe it is because I am too old, but I do not understand the fascination with fantasy football or any idiot who would “play” fantasy football or any other “fantasy” sport.   I’m sorry; I just don’t get it. Playing a “game” based entirely on random statistics is stupid. Fantasy football should not be based on statistics; it should be based on a player’s actual performance. Instead of being based on an individual player’s individual statistics, it should be based on the grades given to each player by his coach after watching the game film.   As far as I’m concerned, the word “fantasy” and the word “football” should never be used in the same sentence unless the word “cheerleader” is also used in that same sentence.  The only “football fantasy” that any real man should have involves cheerleaders—lots and lots of hot, sexy scantily-clad cheerleaders!  Any other use of the word “fantasy” and the word “football” in a sentence without mentioning cheerleaders is gay!  (No, I’m sorry.  I take that back.  That was a really offensive statement to make.  That can’t be called “gay” because I don’t image that gays are stupid enough to play fantasy football!)   If you really want to become involved in a real “fantasy” league, I suggest that you form a “fantasy porn league.”  It makes more sense, and, to be honest, most women would better understand your interest in a fantasy porn league over a fantasy football league!  Draft your porn team, track your players, and keep records of who has the most BJs, DPs, etc.  “Oh no, my star player is out this week with a yeast infection!”  I’ll tell you the truth, if you play fantasy football you honestly have about as much chance of your fantasy football league dream coming true as I do of having my fantasy porn league dream coming true. My dreams of banging a porn star like Jenna Jameson, Jesse Jane, Madison Ivy, or Brandi Love are about as likely to come true as your dreams are of becoming the general manager, coach, or scout for the New England Patriots—in other words, not a snowball’s chance in hell! (And I’m sure that Jenna Jameson and the New England Patriots both would be extremely disappointed if either of us “fantasy players” actually were in charge!) My version of a fantasy porn league is just as purposeful as yours.  If you play fantasy football, you are merely one step up the geek ladder from the nerds who play World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons in their parents’ basements.  And to be perfectly honest, I’m not so sure that you are one step up from them; you are probably one step below them!  At least the geeks who play Dungeons and Dragons will eventually grow up and become your boss at work.  The geeks who play fantasy football are already grown and now probably work for the geeks who used to play Dungeons and Dragons.  (However, it is a pretty safe bet to say that both sets of “fantasy” players have had limited access to a woman’s vagina!)

      Another thing that I don’t understand is what has now happened to my junk mail.  It bothers me every time I go to the mailbox and see the junk mail that I now get.  For years, I used to get advertisements and fliers for beer and whiskey, vacations, cruises, and porn.  Suddenly overnight, it seems like I started to get advertisements for life insurance, baldness treatments, retirement homes, incontinence protection, and funeral planning.  What the hell happened?  Hey, I still enjoy alcohol, trips, and naked women, and I still only piss in my pants on special occasions, just like when I was younger. However, the thing that really bothers me is all the junk mail that I now get for erectile dysfunction.  Where in the hell did that come from?  I have never asked for any material on that subject! I have never even researched it online. How the hell did I get on that mailing list?  Why is it now just assumed that I have erectile dysfunction?  Is it because of my age or is it because the condition seems to have been conveniently named after me?  I have a real problem with how the term “Erectile Dysfunction” has been shortened to the initials “ED.”  Oh, gee, thank you so very much. That’s my name, Ed.  Ed McIntyre!  I feel insulted that they have felt obligated to somehow name it after me.  “Do you have ED?  Nobody wants to have ED!  ED is terrible! ED disappoints women! ED ruins sex! ED can and should be treated and eliminated!”  Don’t I already now have enough problems with women to have named after me the one thing that is a turnoff to every woman alive?  I am still trying to figure out which one of my ex-wives they talked to before they agreed to come up with that acronym! “When I think of my ex-husband Ed, I think of Erectile Dysfunction!”  (I guess that guys named “John” feel the same way about having all toilets named after them. “Hey, I gotta go take a dump in the John!”)

      Another thing that I don’t understand and that bothers me is that whenever I now go out to a party, a nightclub, or a concert, everyone now looks at me like I’m an undercover narc.  Aged hippies and former professional partiers, like me, aren’t supposed to be viewed this way.  When I was younger, I liked my women the same way I liked my whiskey—aged for eighteen years and mixed with Coke!  (Actually, I still prefer my women that way, too…)  When I was younger, the “Three Kings of Old” religiously ruled my life.  Those sacred “Three Kings” brought great peace, harmony, and tranquility to my existence—drin-king, smo-king, and fuc-king.  Or you could say that I lived my life in 3-D—Drinking, Drugs, and Dames.  But now, when I walk into a room of strangers, people look at me and think, “Someone’s daddy is here to pick up his daughter” or “Put everything away; a poorly-disguised undercover cop is here.”  I get pissed off when a bunch of cheese-eating young people look at me like I’m a narc who is going to arrest them, or worse yet, they look at me like I’m not “cool.”  (I’ve come to realize that you’re only “cool” if the youngest person in the room thinks that you are cool!)  In my own mind, I’m still cool—it’s just that my idea of being “cool” now involves me dancing around, twitching like an anachronism having a seizure, and making younger “cool” people feel awkward and stupid.  In the eyes of my son, I will never again be “cool” to him, if I ever was.  So, since I’m now a total embarrassment to him, I’ve instead embraced the idea of really exasperating him.  I figure if I act this way now, later on, when it comes time to decide whether or not to put me into a retirement home, he won’t be able to tell if I’m senile or not.  “Gee, I don’t know, doctor.   He’s always been strange like that!”

      One thing that now irritates me is how easy young people (and others) have it nowadays because of technology.  The ease of technology makes the lazy, unappreciative young people of today feel smarter than us hard working old people. It bothers me that young people have not “paid their dues,” as us old farts have.  Am I jealous?  Hell, yes!  Take music, for instance.  When I was younger, we had to really search for and work for things like our music collections.  It took me many years of buying, borrowing, and stealing albums, tapes, CD’s, etc. to accumulate the thousands of “classic” rock songs that are now considered “oldies” and are much more common today as background music for TV commercials for tampons and hemorrhoid treatments.  The same music collection that now fills numerous rooms and closets in my house can now be reduced to an iPod or MP3 that is the size of the condom that used to bulge out of my wallet.  Also, it took me years of buying, borrowing, and stealing to accumulate a porn collection that could also fill a warehouse.  That, too, can now also be reduced in size to a memory stick or flash drive that is even smaller than that same condom in my wallet. And with both music and porn, with one click of a mouse on a computer, someone today can easily collect in less than an hour what took someone like me decades to find and collect. Young people of today don’t know the joy, thrill, and even danger (especially with the porn shops) of having to drive all over the world to “score” one small item to add to your collection.  We didn’t have computers or smart phones to supply us with all types of exotic porn from the internet.  We had to really work hard to find our depraved smut! Deviant lecherous perverts of today have it so much easier when looking for their depraved debauchery!