Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines & Muddled Memories
Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines & Muddled Memories
Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines & Muddled Memories
Ebook301 pages3 hours

Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines & Muddled Memories

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Howard Baldwin isn't really a cranky guy; he just plays one in his blog. In this compilation of his first 100 columns, he wends his way with both humor and harrumph through the aggravations of 21st century life, but also touches on nostalgia, accumulated wisdom, and appreciation both for the way things are and the way they used to be.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 1, 2012
ISBN9781476031439
Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines & Muddled Memories
Author

Howard Baldwin

Howard Baldwin has worked as a writer and editor since 1977. His work has appeared in Stanford, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, PC World, PC Computing, the Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury-News, and several inflight magazines and daily newspapers. He lives with his wife, a physician, and their two cats in the Silicon Valley.

Related to Middle Age Cranky at 100

Related ebooks

Composition & Creative Writing For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Middle Age Cranky at 100

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Middle Age Cranky at 100 - Howard Baldwin

    Middle Age Cranky at 100:

    Fine Whines and Muddled Memories

    By Howard Baldwin

    Illustrations by Kathryn Rathke

    Copyright © 2012 by Howard Baldwin

    Published by Howard Baldwin at Smashwords

    See the latest Middle Age Cranky at http://middleagecranky.wordpress.com/

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Table of Contents

    Chapter 1: Growing Up and Growing Old

    Cycling

    Random Thoughts on Turning 55

    Why My Undergraduate Self Would Never Recognize Me

    Becoming An Adult

    Seven Things That Really Frost Me About MiddleAge

    Seven More Things That Really Frost Me About Middle Age

    Seven Things That I Should Have Expected – But Didn't

    Looking For The Change Machine

    The Switch Flips at Fifty

    The Principle of TiVo Gone Awry

    Battle of the Bulge

    Funny How Things Turn Out

    A Parade of Changing Tastes

    A Parade of Changing Tastes, Part II

    A Hair-Raising Experience (With Any Luck)

    Chapter 2: Careers

    When Should Boomers Euthanize Their Dreams?

    When The Brass Ring Slips From Your Fingers

    When The Girls Outperform The Boys

    On The Firing Line

    The Road Not Taken

    Fantasizing About Retirement

    Chapter 3: Pets

    To Praise a Thief

    Help Save Coco and Cookie From Their Irresponsible Parents

    When Foreclosure Comes, Blame The Cats

    Lawyers, Used Car Dealers .. and Veterinarians?

    Chapter 4: Memories & Nostalgia

    Slinking Through Time

    Los Angeles, 1962

    It’s a Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost World

    Lost in the Fog

    Driver’s Education and Other Nostalgic Sentiments

    Summer, 1972

    A Drive Across Time

    October Memories

    Forgotten But Not Gone

    Missing: Impossible?

    What Was This Blog Entry Supposed To Be About?

    When Memories Collide

    Still Confused After All These Years

    Stumbling Down Memory Lane

    Chapter 5: Pop Culture

    Friday Nights at 8:30, 1963

    Lullaby and Good Night

    Stuck With the Wrong Lyrics

    Pleading Guilty to and Taking Pleasure from Project Runway

    Showing Our Age

    Why I Love Facebook

    With A Little Help from Friends

    The Rich Are Different Than You And Me — Sometimes They’re Stupider

    Wonderful Life, Wonderful Wizard: Accidental Classics

    Tribute to an Imprisoned Lawyer

    Talkin' About My Generation … Dying

    The Unmitigated Arrogance of Some People

    Why Don't They Remake These Movies?

    Boomer Oscar Quiz

    Chapter 6: Aggravations

    Addressing An Aggravating Issue

    Are Boomers’ Bad Habits Spreading To Their Parents?

    Questions I’m Having Trouble Answering

    Bully Button Lint

    Cambridge Blues

    Taking Aim At An Easy Target

    Chapter 7: Stuff

    Shreds of My Existence

    Time For A Younger Model

    Death of a Skillet

    Sensors Gone Wild

    Razed in the U.S.A.

    Watch Out!

    Chapter 8: Death

    Little Boy Lost

    Expectations, Interrupted

    Regrets Only

    A Holiday With A Big Hole in the Middle

    When Complacence and Physics Collide

    As I Lay Thinking About Death

    Chapter 9: Seasons

    Time For A Different Kind of Holiday

    Frustrated With February

    Happy Holidays!

    Yes, Virginia, There Is A Downside

    Whatever Happened To Halloween?

    2010 Gift-Giving Suggestions

    Call Me Scrooge

    Chapter 10: Politics

    Bad Friday

    Living With the Gray

    Unanswered Political Questions

    A Bad Case of Déjà vu

    Can’t We All Just Get Along?

    The Liberal’s Dilemma

    Economies of Scale: Sweet Music or Sour Notes?

    A Better Name: The Useless Tax

    Caution: Caution Ahead

    Chapter 11: Corporate Idiocy

    The Fees, the Rule of Three, and Me

    I'll Take Stupid Corporate Decisions for $1000, Alex

    Doctor’s Disorders

    Divorce, (Bank of) America Style

    You Never Forget Your First

    Chapter 12: Travel

    Embracing My Inner Fuddy-Duddy

    Suite and Sour

    Weekend in New Orleans: A Different Kind of Katrina

    On The Outskirts of Unconventional Lives

    Chapter 13: The Man Behind the Curtain

    Blank Slate

    Celebrating A Cranky Anniversary

    Chapter 14: Potpourri

    Theories of Relativity, or Can I Have Sex With That Girl?

    The Proceedings Will Be Conducted In English

    Crankcase

    Author’s Note

    I’m not really a cranky guy; I just play one in my blog. Granted, it’s really easy for a Baby Boomer like me to get aggravated, but I still see a lot of wonderful things in the world. Middle Age Cranky may have begun in aggravation and grumpiness, but it frequently wends its way through nostalgia, accumulated wisdom, and appreciation both for the way things once were and the way they have become.

    Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines and Muddled Memories is a compilation of my first hundred blog posts: the first year’s at http://middleagecranky.blogspot.com/ and the rest at http://middleagecranky.wordpress.com/ (where it’s much easier for readers to leave comments).

    A few thanks are in order: to everyone who reads Middle Age Cranky regularly; to my frequent editorial consultant, Tam Harbert; to all those who encouraged me to compile these columns; to my beloved wife, who’s patiently lived through it all; to Sylvia Chevrier, who brought her considerable design expertise to this effort; and to Kathryn Rathke, whose illustrations herein I love.

    If you like Middle Age Cranky at 100: Fine Whines and Muddled Memories, stay tuned for Middle Age Cranky at 200: Forgetting What Happened, Remembering What Didn’t.

    Chapter 1 – Growing Up & Growing Old

    Cycling

    (originally published April 19, 2010; #52)

    Yesterday I rode my bicycle to the library.

    In the abstract, it sounds silly for a man in his 50s to be riding a bicycle. But in the moment, I am astounded by how much I love it.

    Part of it is just plain old common sense. It isn't far to the library, but that's a smidgen less gasoline used, and I hadn't done any other exercising over the weekend. But there's something more than that.

    Mine is not a fancy bicycle. It's got 15 speeds, five more than the last bicycle I had, but I really only use the middle five. It takes me back. I was very independent for a seven-year-old. My working parents would let me cycle to the swim club, a couple of miles away. (I wonder if parents let their kids ride their bicycle that far anymore.) I used to ride my bicycle to the nearest Baskin-Robbins, when a single scoop cone cost 12 cents. That Baskin-Robbins is still there, but of course, the cones are more expensive now.

    I remember my friend Jim Scott and I used to take a circuitous route up into the same hills, just to find ourselves at the top of a long and winding road. Sometimes we'd have to walk our bikes for part of the trip, but oh, that wonderful feeling of navigating those rolling curves on the way down. The downhill made the uphill all worth it.

    These days, I sometimes cycle up to a nearby county park to go hiking, and it's a bit of a climb to get there. But oh, baby, that ride back down. The breeze, the ability to stop pedaling and be motionless, almost to be flying through the air, like a dream but wide awake.

    There aren’t too many ways to feel like a kid again, but being on a bicycle sure is one of them.

    Random Thoughts on Turning 55

    (originally published October 18, 2010; #78)

    This coming Sunday is my 55th birthday. It is an occasion for some truly random thoughts to tumble through my head.

    Given that I came of age during a couple of Arab oil embargos, I always thought of 55 as a speed limit, not an age.

    Rod Serling is one of my favorite writers. When he was my age, he had been dead for five years (with a tip of the hat to Tom Lehrer, who first told that joke about Mozart).

    What a difference five years make. I spent my 50th birthday swimming in a Tahitian lagoon. Today I’m still swimming in the debts I racked up during the downturn; in fact, I think I’m still paying off the trip to Tahiti.

    My paternal grandmother died at 101. That meant that for me, turning 50 really was middle age. Calling myself middle-aged today means I would have to live to 110.

    I Googled the term dead at 55. What an eye-opener. I knew that Robert Urich and Johnny Ramone had died that young, but not David Dukes, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Frann.

    On the cover story of Life magazine the day I was born was a picture of Cecil B. DeMille directing the exodus scene from The Ten Commandments. Inside was a story about Pan American Airlines giving Boeing a $269-million order for its first jet aircrafts, a group of Boeing 707s. Reading the ads I learned that Campbell’s once made frozen soups, Pillsbury once made pie crust sticks, and there was once an artificial sweetener named Sucaryl. I liked reading about the jets. The ads made my stomach queasy.

    When my father was 55, I was in college. I cannot imagine having a college-age child today. Sometimes I dream that I’m still in college.

    I wonder if there’s something numerological about turning 55, given that I was born in 1955. I am the same age as Disneyland, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Ditto Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis, and Howie Mandel. I will never have as much money as any of them.

    James Dean died three weeks before I was born. I am not his reincarnation.

    I don’t feel 55 – most days, anyway. Some days, I feel 85. Some days, I feel 25. I guess I average out.

    I am already starting to feel the aches and pains associated with age. Friends who are older assure me it is only going to get worse. I can already see incipient leatheriness in my skin. When I am old, I shall look like I grew up in California.

    Why My Undergraduate Self Would Never Recognize Me

    (originally published September 13, 2010; #73)

    The increasing parade of friends’ children heading off to college has sent me down memory lane to my own undergraduate days. I realized with a jolt that, while college is usually the cauldron where we begin cooking our adult, independent selves, my undergraduate self would never recognize me now. Thanks to many years of therapy, I often think of that earlier time (which extends to my mid-30s, when I got married) as another life. But in addition to my gaining some emotional stability, there are other changes that were highly unexpected. They range from the trivial to the spiritual.

    Coffee. I never drank coffee in college. It wasn’t until I had a job that required me to commute to San Francisco via a 5:35 a.m. train that I needed caffeine in order to function. Though the downturn has tempered my visits to Starbucks, the house is never without New Orleans’ French Market coffee.

    Movies. The first newspaper article I ever wrote was a review of the Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force, in January 1974, for my college newspaper. It was the first of hundreds. Even when studying for finals coincided with new movie releases, you’d be more likely to find me in the screening room than the library. I reviewed movies for one publication or another through 1981, until the movie industry seemingly started targeting its movies primarily to 12-year-old boys. For a long time, I still enjoyed going to the movies, but as home video players took hold, people got used to chattering during movies, whether they were in their living room or a movie theatre. That drove me bonkers.

    Today, of course, movies themselves have grown increasingly noisy, so I have grown accustomed to watching them on DVDs with subtitles. I can’t remember the last movie I saw in a theatre.

    Drinking. There was a time when a bottle of champagne had no chance of surviving the night in my apartment. Today (with thanks again to the therapy for lessening my need for anesthesia), I’m done at two glasses of wine (and sometimes one).

    Money. Let’s face it, what I knew about money management in college was less than I knew about physics, a class I flunked. Imagine my surprise today at having a home with equity and an actual retirement fund. Age — and being married to a practical German — will do that to you.

    Religion. I never went to church, except for a year or so when my father took me to a Unitarian-Universalist church when I was about ten. I hated Sunday school, and never had much use for the concept of divinity. But about ten years ago, I started looking for more spirituality and found it in the local Unitarian-Universalist fellowship. We believe in Jesus more as a role model than a divine figure, and cadge elements of other religions at will. Just as Will Rogers once said, I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat, I’m not a member of any organized religion. I’m a Unitarian-Universalist.

    If my 50s self is nothing like my 20s self, I wonder who I’ll be in my 80s.

    Becoming An Adult

    (originally published September 20, 2010; #74)

    I have to admit that when I wrote last week’s blog about how differently I saw myself as an adult than I had as an undergraduate, I didn’t think even more issues would come up, but they did.

    I cared not a whit for football — or any sports — when I was young. Marrying a die-hard football fan whose father took her to Oakland Raiders’ games at age 8 changed all that. Now I can even talk about the societal import of the December 28, 1958, game at Yankee Stadium between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.

    I realized that while I was once a devoted fraternity member — both as an undergraduate and as a volunteer alumnus — I have left that phase of my life beyond. Being a member of a western chapter of a southern-focused fraternity is kind of like being a PhD at a blue-collar family reunion. They’ll acknowledge that you’re part of the group, but they won’t ask you to join in too many conversations.

    But the change that astonishes me the most relates to work. I never worked hard in school. When I talked about being a movie reviewer last week, I neglected to mention that the big movie-release seasons (summer and Christmas) coincided with finals. Hightailing it up to the screening room in San Francisco always took precedence over studying, and yet I still managed to wrest a degree out of the deal.

    When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who labeled me a blithe spirit. She accused me of skating merrily along with nary a worry nor a proclivity toward work. I was smart enough to get by. When I graduated from Stanford, my immediate goal was to write a screenplay. It was only by sheer coincidence that I ended up working at a start-up travel magazine, which sent me on my career path.

    Yet today, I am a self-employed writer. Diligent. Dedicated to serving my clients. Fully aware that if I don’t sit down at the computer every morning, my half of the mortgage doesn’t get paid and the cats don’t get fed. I sometimes wonder where in the heck this diligence came from.

    Sometimes I walk around the house and marvel at its very existence. The toys. The artwork. The books in the library. I often wonder how it all happened. How did a blithe spirit like me end up a responsible, contributing member of society? Was it my wife, my parents, my therapist — or was it me?

    There must have been a day when I finally got fed up with the drinking and the gambling and the emotional anguish and realized that I wanted a different life. Becoming more interested in football and less interested in the fraternity, those are just frivolous hobbies that came and went. The diligence, on the other hand — that’s something I have a harder time explaining.

    Are most people taught by their parents how to embark on their life, how to be spouses, and parents, and employees? Or do they innately figure it out as they go along? Was I just a late bloomer? I guess it doesn’t matter, because I eventually started realizing that my life as it was playing out wasn’t working, and the only one who could fix it was me.

    Then I remember that my father, too, was self-employed. For all the ways in which he tolerated my goofing off, he also wordlessly taught me about how an adult takes care of his family. Even if it means working late, or working odd hours to suit your client rather than yourself.

    I guess it just took me a little longer than everyone else for my life to shift from frivolity to fortitude, to turn from a child into an adult. But, much to my surprise, I finally did.

    Seven Things That Really Frost Me About Middle Age

    (originally published July 20, 2009; #13)

    When I think back on some of the things I did to my body when I was younger — alcoholic binges, all-night poker games — I probably shouldn't be surprised that it's taking its revenge on me now when I'm most defenseless. Here are seven problems with my body that really make middle age a challenge.

    After The Laughter Is Gone. There’s nothing more delightful than finding something so hilarious that you just descend into an uncontrollable paroxysm of laughter. Every so often, my wife and I will start dishing on someone or something and just fall into a state of uproariousness that won’t stop. The problem now is that, instead of laughing uncontrollably, I always end up coughing uncontrollably. That just hacks.

    Back When My Back Was Young. I am astonished at how the slightest twist in the wrong direction can make my back not only twinge, but turn into some sort of spasm-inducing fiend bent on crumbling my evolutionary right to walk erect. When I was a teen-ager, there was a movie called Hot Rods To Hell. In it, Dana Andrews (on the downside of his career) played a man on a driving vacation with his family who

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1