Naked Women and Getting Old

An aging man shakes his fist at the clouds.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve liked me some naked women. Or even pictures of naked women. With apologies to Dickens, this must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.  

My earliest memories of female nakedness go back to the copy of Playboy that my older brother kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. Nearly every time he left the house, I’d open the drawer and rifle through the other magazines – mere camouflage – until I found her, and by her I mean the centerfold. She was my first love, or more accurately, my first lust.

A few years later, when I found the courage to start buying my own copies of the magazine (some Tic Tacs, Visine, a copy of National Geographic, and oh yeah, that magazine there behind the counter, please), I found that first centerfold’s lascivious cousins and each month I fell in lust all over again.

For those first few years, each centerfold was the mysterious, unobtainable, impossibly sexy older woman, even though she was probably only 19 or thereabouts. Then, a few years later, she and I became contemporaries, but that didn’t make her any less obtainable because, well, I was a gangly, pimply-faced college student who donated plasma so he could afford to buy Kraft Macaroni and Cheese dinners -- the “sauce” of which I made with Cremora because milk was too expensive -- and the centerfold was some sparkle-titted angel who probably resided at the Playboy mansion and bathed every evening in the milk (llama or alpaca, no doubt) I couldn’t afford before plopping naked into bed underneath macaroni and cheese colored silk sheets, just to mock my dietary staple and all-round pariah-ness.

A few years passed and one day it dawned on me that the centerfold had become, holy shit, youngerthan me -- not entirely age inappropriate yet, but still no less obtainable.

You can see where this is going. With each passing year, I grew slowly baggier, whereas the centerfold remained eternally blessed with what Tom Wolfe called the terrific confirmations, sweet cupcakes, and loamy loins of youth.

She was, in a manner of thinking, my picture of Dorian Gray, only the devil I sold my soul to got his signals crossed and instead of me staying eternally young, the centerfold did, all while my visage aged and recorded all of her sins instead of mine, and her sins were many, living in the Playboy mansion and its revolving door of celebrity horn dogs.

So while TC once stood for “Terribly Cute,” it now increasingly stands for (just a) Tad Crusty.

You may think it odd, but this observance of the youthful permanence of the Playboy centerfolds (at least until their demise in 2016) made me more aware of my own aging than perhaps any other occurrence, observation, or look in the mirror.

Part of the reason for this is that I’m one of those longevity nuts who practices a whole bunch of exercise and dietary stuff that would be deemed wretched excess by most people. At the very least, it’s made me possibly more “well preserved” than some of my contemporaries, so physical aging hasn’t hit me as hard as it might otherwise have.

Some people still say I look like “Robert Redford raised by wolves,” or the blonde guy that gets his ass kicked at the end of the old James Bond movies. Maybe Tom Petty, only with adequate caloric intake. Or the kid on the Dutch Boy paint can. Pretty much any fop with a blond mop, really.

Even so, the curse is this: My appetite for those naked women hasn’t much lessened. My member, almost mockingly, remains turgid and elastic enough that I can, in an emergency, use it as an ersatz Chuckit! tennis ball launcher to keep my three Labrador retrievers entertained at the park.

But alas, that’s mostly what it gets used for nowadays because I’m invisible to most women. Sure, I’m married and all that entails, but it’d be nice to tell myself that I’d at least have a chance at some of that celestial tail if I weren’t married.

The second curse, although you might not think of it as such, is that my mind hasn’t aged as quickly as my body. In fact, in some ways, it’s Benjamin Buttoned on me. I say that because I seem to be able to think clearer than I used to and I haven’t noticed any decline in memory.

Likewise, I’m just as interested in the new as I am the old, as in new music, new movies, new books, and even new fashions. I’d dye my hair purple if I could pull it off.

Take my office for instance. It’s decorated with 1:2 scale T-Rex head made by a taxidermist. I have a female mannequin, frozen in a coquettish pose. There are anime figures and comic book covers and racy photographs, taken by yours truly, throughout the room. Except for the numerous novels and textbooks, it looks like an unsupervised but fairly well-to-do 12-year-old decorated it.

The lyrics to an old Dylan song come to mind:

I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.

This is a curse because many of the minds of older people I meet, my would-be contemporaries, didget old. They didn’t evolve. For the most part, they appear to have remained in the cozy past and as such, I feel somewhat distant from them and am reluctant to establish friendships with them; they would never fulfill my emotional needs, my intellectual needs, or my need for less old-fucker stodginess.

Plus, most guys in my demographic (white guys over 50) skew about 3 billion light years to my right, politically.

And while I might often relate more closely to the younger people I meet, they take one look at me and they pigeonhole me as someone who’s still listening to 70’s music, who reads and watches military history, who’s frightened of technology, who has, if he’s lucky, missionary position, roll on, roll off sex every other Tuesday.

Poor old grubber. Poor, wretched old grubber. Not that they’d put it in that Dickensian way, of course.

So I live on in my mental cocoon, isolated from the old, isolated from the young.

I’m a modern-day Tiresias, only instead of being turned into a woman for seven years by Zeus’ wife for cockblocking a pair of copulating snakes with a stick, my mind got turned into a young person’s for perpetuity. Why, I don’t know. I never messed with snakes getting it on, but I did once walk in on a roommate who was getting busy with a cashier from the Piggly Wiggly, so maybe it had something to do with that.

I need to make clear that what I’m experiencing isn’t just what neuroscientists call “subjective aging” where a lot of people in Western Society feel themselves to be physically younger than what the mirror reveals. This is instead a downer that’s a much deeper-downer. It’s actually a curse, as I wrote.

But enough about me. What do you think of me? Kidding. I wouldn’t be sharing all this PG-rated David Copperfield autobiographical stuff if I didn’t think a bunch of you aren’t in the same antique boat I’m in, bailing water as we struggle to get to a sane and happy shore.

The question you probably have of me, though, is “Have you found the solution to your curse, TC/Tiresias, or are you/we doomed to a life isolated from both the young and the old?

The answer is, “Kind of,” but I had to go pretty far back in history to find it. Seneca (the Younger) was a Roman philosopher, a Stoic, and not a stoic as it’s defined today, as in someone who doesn’t flinch when you run over their dog or hit their big toe with a hammer. I’m talking about classic Stoicism which is a philosophy based on its devotees recognizing their emotions, both “good” and “bad,” and using them to live their best possible lives.

Anyhow, Seneca said something that rang my emotional bell but good:

“While you wait for life, life passes.”

I take it to mean that in my case, waiting for the perfect, or ideal friendships, associations, or circumstances is the death of joy.

In the words of the author and student of philosophy, Luc Ferry, “Stoicism encourages us to reconcile ourselves to what is, to the present as it occurs, without hopes and regrets.” Buddha said pretty much the same thing, no doubt while munching on some figs from the tree of enlightenment:

“There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment.”

Again from author Luc Ferry: “…according to a Buddhist proverb, you must learn to live as if this present moment were the most vital of your whole life, and as if those people in whose company you find yourself were the most important in your life. For nothing else exists, in truth: the past is no longer and the future is not yet.”

Are you grokking what this has to do with my Tiresian problem? I can’t continue to look askance at my encounters with the young or the old. If I were to instead consider whomever I meet to be the most important people in my life at that moment, to share what I have and accept what they offer, I might stop this endless kvetching about being pigeonholed because of my age, about failing to find enough people who I can relate to in an emotionally and intellectually satisfying way.

And, who knows? I’ve met people to whom I relate to quite well and it’s likely I’ll find more, some old and simpatico with my interests and some young and simpatico with my interests.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to nurture the relationships I have and seek to find “soulmates” in books, in poems, movies, and songs, both old and new. The conversation will be decidedly one-sided, but at least the people who write them will never ask me to donate a kidney.

Similarly, there are new naked women, new naked pictures of Dorian Grays, to titillate me, now digitized instead of cellulose, whose images will continue to incite lust in my heart. After all, it is better to have lusted and lost than to never have lusted at all.

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