THE ECLECTIC JOYS OF AGEING

By Brother Ryle Bell

As I advance in years, I have discovered that old age is not for the weak, for the faint at heart nor for those who have great pride. You will discover that as you get older, doctors and nurses and scores of other people, will look up into, grope and poke every aperture in your body. If you are overly sensitive, it will be a great trial but If you have lost all pride, it becomes easy for you. You will even volunteer to present these orifices for distension as you really don’t care anymore who sees or what they see!

We unfortunately live on a planet where gravity rules everything. Ladies, those beautiful perky eighteen-year-old boobs aren’t going to stay that way. In spite of sleeping in bras and only freeing the girls when you are supine, you might as well let them loose because they are still going to migrate towards your knees! Don’t be embarrassed. If yours have reached the stage where the nipples point at the ground and actually reach your navel, roll them up like venetian blinds and stuff them into the bra cup! No one will know and they’ll think that you have wonderful boobs for your age! Just be sure to turn the lights off before removing your bra when engaged in loving pursuits!

You old guys, don’t sit there and grin. You know that you have those old man nuts that now swing by your knees. You can’t just drop down and sit any more. You’ve got to shift the nuts, so you don’t sit on them! Anytime you hear an old man groan when he sits too fast and tells you that “Arthur” is visiting him, it isn’t “Arthur,” he just sat on his nuts because he was careless!

Ladies, there is no greater pain known to man than that derived from sitting on his nuts. It challenges natural childbirth! Visions of my youthful exuberance in running alongside my bike and then jumping onto the saddle but not quite accounting for the space occupied by the baby batter bags and landing on them, recalls pain beyond compare. On the few times that I have been unfortunate to have misjudged, I was found sitting by the side of the road, bicycle discarded, soaked in perspiration moaning softly. Many an unwitting old lady seeing my desperation and thinking that I must have fallen and hurt myself, has offered to massage the abused area, not knowing where it was. The mere thought of being touched at that time reminds me of Richard Pryor’s description of having his skin washed after he was severely burned. “Oh no, no, don’t touch me don’t even breathe on me for if you do I am going to bite you!”

You young men who are reading this and grinning,

remember the times when you were bold enough to go commando and got your pecker caught in the zipper and had to call your mama? Alright then.

Then as if that is not bad enough, you get into bed and all is fine. You wake in the morning and try to stand and your leg is killing you. You can hardly move. You didn’t do anything, you just slept. For two days, the pain is terrible. The third morning you awaken and the pain is gone! You didn’t do anything either. It just left! Sometimes you are lying in bed and feel your muscles saying, ”He thinks that he’s young, I’m going to show him,” and you feel them flipping or rolling over while you have not moved. and you try to stay still hoping that things don’t get too bad. Then when you do try to move all hell breaks loose and pain is everywhere!

Being the scientist that I am, I realize that I am not really losing my memory, but my brain is now too full with all these years of information, so I write stuff down just in case I can’t immediately recall what I want. Problem is I forget to read the notes that I wrote because I forgot where I put them!

Then, overnight, lumps start appearing all over your body especially under your armpits and around your waist. Places that used to be smooth begin to get wrinkly, yet your weight is the same! Men begin to grow boobs and women lose the stuffing that they used to have in their boobs, and like said boobs, the nuts too, start migrating southwards!

Putting on shoes becomes a challenge as you can ruin your body trying to bend over. You’ve got to exhale and hold your breath to be able to bend over, then try to get your foot into the shoe. This operation must be done quickly as you don’t have as much breath as you used to. You bend and grab for several cycles before success. Sometimes you give up and put slippers on! By the time that you get your shoes on, you are so winded, you can’t go anywhere and by then have forgotten where you were going! If your doctor asks you if you exercise daily, tell him “Yes,” for this is certainly exercise.

Trips to the toilet are also an experience. In addition to serious concerns over proper testicular placement to avoid unintended compression, also looms the specter of aqueous immersion as some of said nuts now dangle perilously close to the water. Many a man has forgotten to elevate the testicular bodies only to find them being sucked downwards in the toilet as it flushes and ended up having to perform separate ablution on said organs.

In addition, arthritis and stiffness limit one’s ability to twist and turn to reach backwards, so cleaning oneself is now a crap shoot! This is the genesis of the vaunted nicotine stains! Thank God for those new bidets where one can flush the effluvia.

This also is the time when allegedly men can’t start and women can’t stop! Men can’t start peeing and stand for indeterminate times at urinals waiting for the first evidence that urine will come, while women pee on themselves, willy nilly, every time they sneeze!

The final insult is the graying of the pubic hair. If it is not already bad enough that nothing in that area works as it used to, we now have the additional cosmetic invasion of snarly white hair that invades the region. Some choose to shave the offending foliage to avoid this declaration of age. Men in particular like this because they say it makes the male genitalia appear larger. I am not sure what satisfaction they derive because it doesn’t work any better and moreso there is now less need of it as opportunities for use are remarkedly decreased, unless one lives in a nursing home where sprightly dowagers dwell! Viagra is often used now, not as a sexual aide, but to allow mild penile levitation to prevent one from peeing in one’s shoes!

So, as you advance in age, you learn to jettison your pride and requirement for privacy. Their loss and diminution is essential for one’s peace of mind and composure! Not only will your doctors pry repeatedly into your private parts but after a while, your caretakers, siblings and children and scores of unknown people will as well.

Other than that, old age is great!