Turning Middle Aged - Something to Laugh About

An anecdote from a book in progress,

TURNING MIDDLE AGED - SOMETHING TO LAUGH ABOUT

by Steven M. Bloome

Once again, I am reminded that as much as I fight him, Father Time has a quick left hook that’s far too fast for me to block and I never see it coming, so I keep getting hit and knocked down.

Having been heartlessly laid off and now unemployed at fifty-three, I still try to keep my morning routine, thinking it’s a responsible way to believe (or to fool myself) that I’m really “working hard” at trying to find a job.

As usual, I wake up around five in the morning, have my coffee in hopes that it kick-starts my heart like a shot of adrenaline plunged straight into one of the needy chambers in my heart. I take a shower and get dressed to start my day. After all, looking for a job on the computer in a robe just seems so, well, lazy and unprofessional. (Albeit quite comfortable, I must say).

After my shower, I go to my medicine chest, and like the opening act of a Broadway play, the spotlight hits the players.

Maalox? Metamucil? What the hell happened? When did I buy this stuff? I remember that there used to be cologne and condoms… Things to romance the ladies, not to soothe my stomach and entice my bowels!

Yet, there’s a sense of comfortable familiarity to it all. I’ve seen this before. Is it just déjà vu? Has my short term memory gotten so bad I don’t remember what I saw just the day before? No, that can’t be. I saw the pile of Sweet N’ Low packets on my kitchen counter, and I distinctly remember taking them from the Cracker Barrel just yesterday when the waitress went to get me another cup of coffee. No, my memory is still as sharp as ever.

Or was Cracker Barrel actually the day before yesterday?

Then it hits me like a jagged marble-sized kidney stone in the middle of the night. I do know this cabinet! My parents must have snuck into my house during the night and switched their medicine cabinet with mine. Sneaky little octogenarian! Stealthy? Yes… But their sense of humor eludes me.

Right then and there I decide to reclaim my youth, at least from the perspective of my bathroom medicine cabinet.

I get rid of the Maalox and Metamucil. I take the bottles and immediately throw them into the recycling bin. I may be fighting Father Time, but I’m still good friends with Mother Earth.

But then, like a bad horror movie, the chasm of cures for whatever ails you deepens. It’s the bottomless medicine cabinet to the road of senility. Like Dante’s six levels of Hell, I keep falling through the flames and feel the pains of the realization that at some point, I must have spent countless hours at Walgreens.

Behind the Maalox is Anbesol for toothaches… I toss that out and a bottle of Gas-X appears. When the hell was I so gassy that I thought I needed medication for it? Sounds painful, but again, short term memory hits its stride, and I just can’t seem to recall what must have been both a pretty uncomfortable and most possibly, a quite embarrassing day.

I keep trying to take down the undoing of my youthful health and throw out more.

Pepcid. Three bags of Halls cough drops. (Not even the cherry flavor… how’d I screw that up?) Centrum Silver. Fast Acting Lactaid. The faster I toss out these items of aging, the faster more seem to magically appear.

Then I come across the real alien within my cabinet. Tucks? What the hell are Tucks? I read the label. Soothing pads for hemorrhoids medicated with Witch Hazel.

Hemorrhoids? One would surely remember the need for these, wouldn’t they? Witch Hazel? Now my medicine cabinet from hell makes sense. It must have something to do with the occult. Or maybe I bought them as a gag gift for someone and like most other things, I just forgot.

I just begin to grab and throw out just about everything else I find in there as quickly as I can. Imodium AD anti-diarrheal medicine. But right next to it is a stool softener! How can these two items even coexist next to each other?

My hands become a speedy blur of just ‘grab it and toss it’. I don’t even look at what the products are, for fear of feeling the need to keep something, thus allowing Father Time to slip in another knock down punch.

But then, like a SWAT team’s laser sight planted neatly between my eyes, it appears. A bottle of ibuprofen. Not an ordinary bottle of ibuprofen, mind you, but a colossal bottle. The king of all bottles. The bottle that all other bottles aspire to become when they grow up. The dreaded and rarely seen… one-thousand count!

One thousand ibuprofen tablets? Why did I buy so many? Was I in that much pain? And for how long? Was it as good of a deal as the early bird specials at the local family restaurant? When did I buy them? When do they expire? Can I still use them? Should I share them with friends before the expiration date? The panic and confusion sets in. My mind races to answer all these questions and the panic grows even more. I can already feel the acid bubbling within my stomach like a beaker in a mad scientist’s lab.

I can’t take the pressure. Why can’t I remember these things anymore? Trying to solve the mystery of why I bought enough ibuprofen to start my own distributorship, the inside of my stomach begin churning and burning.

Heartburn sets in only slightly hidden from the panic of what to do with all these damn ibuprofens. I begin to get progressively more nauseous.

Where is it? Where did I put that damn Maalox? For the life of me, I’m sure I had some in here.

I just can’t remember where it is, but I sure could use some right now.