Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Aging Ungracefully

 Common to all of us as we age, regrettably, is the loss of our youthful appearance. Most of us cope, with varying degrees of success, by simply getting used to it.

Some people fight it, employing every tool known to humankind — diet, exercise, hairdye, wrinkle cream, age-defying cream, meditation, in extreme cases surgery — but nobody wins that war.

So another strategy is to simply ignore the inevitable and embrace the positive — i.e. we need not worry about this kind of thing any longer. Nature is taking care of the matter for us.

Mental decline is quite another matter. It is ironic that many of us boomers wasted at least part of our youth trying to lose our minds — or at least radically alter them — through some combination of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.

Speaking of the latter, my former boss Jann Wenner did himself and the magazine he co-founded and many us launched our careers at, Rolling Stone, a serious disservice by denying and disparaging the undeniable truth that the roots of rock music, like humanity itself, lie in Africa.

It was the various genres of the music created by black people — from rhythm and blues, soul, jazz, Motown, even slave-era chants and drumming — that eventually led straight to Elvis Presley, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and all the rest. They were cover artists, damn good ones, but not the originators. 

Anybody with a lick of sense knows that.

Except, perhaps, for an aging person who did too many drugs over time and is now exhibiting the sad signs of cognitive decline.

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