I might have headlined this post “Intimations of Mortality”.

Or “Meditations on being the Grasshopper and not the Ant”

Or “Eat Dessert First: Life is Uncertain”.

 Today, I’m staying home and prepping (read:  shitting my brains out) for my colonoscopy procedure tomorrow morning.

Soon, I’ll have my 57th birthday, another big inch toward the big 6-0.

Meanwhile, I’m floating through life like a teenager.

Sometimes, “teenager” gives me more credit than I’m due.  Sometimes, it’s “like a toddler”.

I’ve actually made the “won’t grow up” thing work for me for a remarkably long time.

Some parts of it would be impossible for me to give up — it’s not like it’s a conscious decision I’ve made to treat the world as a wonderous place full of curious things and people that are endlessly fascinating.  Most of life is to me like a shiney thing you see on the ground and have to stop and pick up and put it in your mouth to see what it tastes and feels like.

I’d be charitable if I gave myself a D- in delayed gratification.

One of the AA “gurus” at one of the meetings I go to says AA should be renamed “Grow UP”.

A lot of the suggestions and “rules” for AA are about being more adult in our relations to other people, our jobs, etc.  It’s about self discipline and a social conscience.

To the extent I am grown up, I owe a lot to AA.  I’m not as selfish and controlling and arrogant as I once was.  Neither am I cured.

Anyway, some of my Peter Pan syndrome is catching up with me these days.

I’ve never saved a dime in my life and when it comes to spending money, I’m a child.  Every gadget and sweet capitalism has to offer has captured my attention and money at one time or another.  No savings and no retirement is not a pretty picture for a man my age.

It’s the same with women.  I have no serious long term exclusive relationship going on and no prospects for same at the moment.  I’ve gone for the flashy but shallow more than once.  Being a droptop batchelor has been fun, but the prospect of a lonely old age is not an appealing one and I’m not doing a very good job of looking for a woman to share my life.

It’s also the same with my health.  Smoking two packs of cigarets a day for 40 years is not a prescription for a long and productive life, it’s a guarantee of a long period of virtual confinement to a room.

A colonoscopy is a sign of my advancing age.  It’s not something one is asked to do at age 30 or even 40.  It’s the province of those of us who are over 50.

I feel like the man in the joke that Steve McQueen tells Yul Brenner in The Magnificant Seven:  A man jumps off a tall building and the people on each floor hear him as he falls past saying “so far, so good”.