Yet another lesson in aging
ah christ, not this again.
My wife wants to know why I won’t go to the urgent care. She says that my shoulder is completely fucked, that I can’t raise my arm above my bellybutton without quiet screams of pain. That I’m the primary caregiver for our three-year-old. That urgent care will be a packed catastrophe on Monday. I should go tonight, she says. Right now.
She’s right, obviously, on all these points and probably on any other point she might care to raise.
And my arguments are also without nuance, even if they’re weaker in substance. Firstly, there’s the fact that I — a thirty-four-year-old man — hurt my shoulder in the local skatepark’s bowl. Now how can I walk into a hospital and admit that I hurt myself skateboarding? I can’t say that sort of thing out loud to a medical doctor. Secondly, the best they could do is run an x-ray, shake a bottle of painkillers in my face and bonk me on the head like one of the Three Stooges.
It’s too embarrassing a fate, somebody this stupid is lucky to be walking around, they might say. I’m lucky that I’m not more seriously hurt. And again, they’d be right.
The truth is that I was skating well for the first half hour, better than I thought I could. There haven’t been any waves for two weeks and thus, no surfing. So I was jonesing for a fix. I went to the skatepark to see if I could emulate whatever dopamine hit it is I get from the ocean. I felt wonderful. Then I got too bold, got stupid until the point when I blew my shoulder out (it’s probably just a torn ligament, though it might be a mild dislocation) and laid there laughing at myself. When somebody asks me what I did today, I thought, I’ll tell them I went to the skatepark and tried to see how badly I could hurt myself.
Obviously, I didn’t want to hurt myself. I was wearing pads on my knees, elbows, wrists and head. A suit of armor wouldn’t have done a better job protecting me. So why did I get hurt?
I got hurt because time comes for everybody. Mike Tyson, the best heavyweight since Ali, lost a fight to a nobody influencer. Because time comes for everybody, even Iron Mike. Even me.
I’ve written about this before, but it is fucking tough to grow old. Not the physical aspect (at least not yet). But the mental aspect. You put so much faith in your own invincibility that you begin to believe it. I’m beginning to suspect this is a problem largely isolated to hulking white men. Specifically has-been athletes. But it’s a problem nonetheless.
For instance, I just finished the memoir Barbarian Days, which is probably the second-best1 surf book I’ve encountered, but the underlying theme of this book is that the author (a surfer) is trying not to grow old. Or, more specifically, he’s trying (often stupidly) to prove that he’s not growing old. The last third of the book is about the things he won’t do anymore. And, when I got to end, I was a bit horrified.
The next day, of course, I went to the skatepark, bent on my own mission to prove some unprovable fact. And here I am, a bag of ice on my shoulder.
I am not, by the way, going to the urgent care. I’m not touching painkillers. I grew up in the opioid epidemic. In high school, I once had to fight an oxy dealer for a drugged-out friend who couldn’t pay for his high. I’ll ice my shoulder, I won’t be an idiot at the skatepark again.
But here’s the thing about evaporating youth, there are a handful of times when you say to yourself, that would have worked a few years ago. Which is an absurd thing to say. It’s terrifying on the face of it, but it’s the saying it that’s important. And I wonder if I’ve finally learned the lesson this time or if I’ll have to learn it a few more times before it sinks in.
Barbarian Days is a beautiful book. And parts of it totally connect, but the best surfing book, for my money is Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell. I’d also put David Rensin’s biography of Miki Dora high on that list and Susan Casey’s They Wave.
I have been there and respect what you're going through.
In my 20s I dislocated my right shoulder skateboarding so many times that it once just fell out in the middle of a 50/50 grind. I didn't even fall... So, I quit for about 8 years until the bug came back, and I got a good 5 years of skating bowls. Then I dislocated my left shoulder on Father's Day of all days. A couple weeks later, a sprained hip. At that point, hobbling the block to my car, I finally learned the lesson. A book like Barbarian Days at least shows us we're not alone.
My brother is a retired ironworker. He mostly served as a foreman or superintendent most of his working life, leaving the majority of the grunt work to the crews working under him. But, in his final days before retiring, he insisted on getting out their with his men and doing tasks he had not done since his youth. Did he need to prove something? Was it one final fling with youth? He survived, but what was the point?