yankees

Things Learned In Old Age, Accidentally

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The faster drivers in my area are females. Since I committed to a 1.4 Litre engine to prevent NASCARRING (sic)*, most of the cars passing my new, used car as we putter along 10 miles over the speed limit are being driven by females. Is it sexist to think they were always careful, law-abiding drivers? Or did I only know careful, law-abiding females in my youth? Back then, this phrase was a constant mantra when driving with a female passenger: “Why are you in such a hurry?” Hm. Maybe my ascension to the heights of safe driving simply made me more aware. Or maybe there is less tint on windows these days, and the driver can actually be seen and not assumed. Don’t know and it suddenly became unimportant. I’m a safe driver, now, and anyone of any sex, color, religion, altered state of existence, or sexual preference can pass me without comment or digital salute.

At the first stop light on the four-lane out of Turning Stone resort this morning, there was a Dodge Charger with a rumbling motor in the front right lane and a quiet, but deadly looking Tesla in the front left. The light changed and both took off. I caught them at the next red light, the Dodge still rumbling and the Tesla still had nothing to add. The light changed and off they went, again. Since there wasn’t another light—or a random speed trap—for the next 20 miles, they were soon out of sight and forgotten. My small-block 1.4 liter never saw them again. Are you wondering who won? Also, no idea who or what was driving either. Damn tint. Think either might have been driver-less? Ai is a street racer? Or maybe two girls/women? All that is certain is neither was over 70 years old. There is an inverse relationship between the ability to properly handle horsepower and age, as noted in the first paragraph.

It’s the perfect season for Sports Nuts (SNs). If you are an SN you know what the problem is, and if you aren’t an SN you aren’t going to care but it’s tough to get a good night’s sleep. At an advanced age, proper rest and strategic breaks are important just to get through the daily 12-14 hours of watching sports without doing permanent damage to retinas, corneas, sclera, and pupils, as well as gray matter. The accidental calisthenics are okay unless there is a lot to cheer about in a short time. Again, a break is needed. Add to the mix sodium-laden snacks and the perfect reclining chair, and you may never hear from me again. Note: This is my last year rooting for the Yankees. The Mets have no expectations. Please, Yankees, just win one championship in my Medicare Years? **

My fitness center group is, uh, dwindling. One is out with a broken hip, another is out for spousal reasons, others are absent and I was nearly alone during this morning’s workout. It is similar to every time I made a new best friend in the past who then either moved away or died. It’s taken years to “therapy out” it’s not my fault, but if it walks like a duck.

*NASCARRING is when a young or foolish man gets behind the wheel of his car, is in no particular hurry, but still accepts the challenge of getting to the front of traffic. Yes, it gets confusing on major interstates with so much traffic, but that is/was the fun of it. It is also uniquely challenging in urban settings, unless there a lot of school buses.

** Upstate NY and the Buffalo Bills Football Team have a unique, doomed relationship. If you aren’t aware of Upstate NYers fervent support of this professional tease of a team, google it. The saying up here—which is tattooed on several Western New York bodies—is “Win One In My Lifetime.” Sad note, the baseball Yankees won a championship in every decade of their existence until the last one, 2010 to 2020. Approximately my years in the senior insurance program mentioned.

Three Sentences…Again

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A  new, worst traffic enemy plagued me three times this past week. It is the car (removing all personality from this complaint) whose brake lights come on before the turn signal. New curse words were invented each time.

Streaming services have lost their collective minds as each time I look for a better one, their advertisements tout their “over 100 channel” line up. If someone watches two channels at a time (one for each eye), for one hour at a time, for 10 hours a day, in five days they will have viewed all the channels for which they paid over $100. If either of those two sentences make any sense to you…

My Late-life discovery of ear buds and “you tube” music videos continues to amaze. Every day in July I listened to parts of the April 2025 Madison Square Garden concert of The Brothers, an Allman Brothers legacy spinoff which includes two original members from 1975. Google “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed”, insert buds, recline, and enjoy.

My recent—and last—hip replacement surgery went as planned thanks to the brilliant Dr. Wickline and the exceptionally enjoyable Apex Surgery Center in Westmoreland, NY. The June 18 surgery was more than enjoyable, and almost fun. Makes me wonder what joint to replace in the future.

Local Trump supporters are getting a little antsy. Their “letters to the editor” have increased in volume but not in fact or relevance, and they are using the Trump trick of throwing stuff out to see what sticks. The saddest part of our entire political scene is neither party can see that with the current polarity, strict party affiliation means EVERYTHING “the other party” does is bad, even if it isn’t.

Trump recently posted angry words about a Gayle King. I’ve no idea who she is but I can’t help but wonder why he bashed her. One of the questions I ask Trump supporters is “Would you like Donald Trump to be a member of your own family?

Turning Stone Resort is a 24-hour casino/resort so last Sunday–after my 6 am fitness group–I went to the 24-hour restaurant for a hearty, healthy breakfast. Not much else was open and there were very few people (one of the reasons for going early) until I passed the Smoke Shop. Over 20 people were waiting in line for tobacco products.

The New York Yankees suck. The Yankees suck. The Yankees suck…this year.

It’s hard to know what to eat, these days. As I recover from cancer treatments the best way to build back one part of the body causes havoc with another part. How vitamins, minerals, proteins, iron, water, cherry juice, potassium, and pizza all work together is very confusing.

I purchased glasses on line for a lot less money than my local eye center wanted and the on-line company promised 24-hour customer service. When my order got lost by USPS, however, I was dropped into automated hell dealing with bots and phone trees leading to bots. The Ai future is here.

When will it all end?

What? Football season is here? Thank, God.

Expectations? Don’t Bother.

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In thinking about happiness and well-being, and after years of observation and self-testing, my conclusion is we are our own worst enemies. We get in the way of happiness by not seeing it when it’s there and by not pursuing it when it isn’t. The sentence sounds odd so take a moment to think about it…

I’ve been a New York Yankee fan since 1960. Sixty-two years. When you are a sports fan, you get to live the highs and lows of the teams’ results. Championship years and cellar-dwelling years, it’s all a package. Happy when the World Series ends in victory, banners raised, and sad in years they don’t make the Series, and the season is over with a whimper. It’s easy to see when happiness comes and when it doesn’t. They win, we’re happy. They lose, we’re not. Is there anything we can do about it? No, especially when we are a small child listening to every play on the radio. You actually experience happiness and despair, clearly defined and unavoidable. Damn Yankees.

So what does that have to do with anything? It’s easy to live with the happiness thrust upon you by your team winning, but what about the unhappiness of losing? Ah, there’s always next year. In baseball, the following spring brings hope for a better year, a hope for seasonal happiness, a hope for the World Series Ring. For a sports fan hope becomes an expectation. Before any new games are played, we do not hope the Yankees will be better, we assume to know the Yankees will be better, we expect it. And when the Yankees lose, we are unhappy because an expectation not realized makes us unhappy.

And there it is in black and white: expectations are the cause of unhappiness. The measured and regulated nature of sports makes it obvious, including the annual renewal of “expectation” no matter what happened last year. A common fan’s announcement after an unhappy, expectation-denying season is “never again will I root for them”, a vow only kept until next season begins with a new hope/expectation.

But the damage expectations do to our lives is harder to see in real life. Why are some of us unhappy? Something in life didn’t go as planned, didn’t happen as we expected it to happen, and there is no choice but to feel unhappy about it. Marriage doesn’t meet our expectations, we divorce. Friends don’t meet our expectations, we dump them. Even in our dining habits, if a restaurant doesn’t meet our expectations we unhappily decide not to dine there again. We expect a diet to work? Potential unhappiness. We expect to get a job? Meet the girl of our dreams? Become an influencer? Be like Taylor?

But it is not the action or inaction making us unhappy. Unhappiness comes from the destruction of expectation and how we process that destruction.

You want to be happy? Don’t expect anything. Ever. At all. Enjoy the terrible meal. Enjoy the Yankees losing. Enjoy your girlfriend dumping you. At least be ambivalent, but don’t be unhappy. And you can expand the process into your philosophy of life: don’t expect happiness and you won’t be unhappy when you’re not happy…?

A little hyperbole helps make a point until it veers off into absurdity. Hm. If you expect to understand what makes you happy and you never do, you’ll always be unhappy? Or happy you understand you’ll never be happy?

That’s it. You got it. Want to be happy? Just be happy. Let things be what they are. Do your best, but don’t expect it to be better than anyone else’s expectation, especially if it really is better.

Final example and possible escape from this mess: A young female student sits behind a young male in class. She constantly complains to him about not meeting the “right” guy. It takes her the entire school year to see her expectation of the right guy is wrong and the guy in front of her is The Right Guy. They fall in love and marry, something neither of them expected, though the guy did hope. (Don’t think too hard about this one. It’s a true story but a poor example.)

I took a shot of tart cherry juice to clear my head for the final, really final thought. Hope is one thing, but expectation is another, different thing. Find the hope all around you and you’ll find happiness anytime you want it. Let hope fester into an expectation, you lose control.

Keep hope alive. You can do it.

PS Hope this sloppiness helped someone…I expect to hear about it, too.

Random Ramblings of No Regard***

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Bad news followed by good news on the medical front these past 30 days. Went from possible colon cancer after failed Cologuard test and subsequent “polypy”(sic) colonoscopy, to happy, clear pathology report 30 days after the whole mess started. I’ll never get those days back.

Then a routine dentist appointment yielded a “bump” in the sinus area above the teeth. Referral to a specialist had me waiting a week, but then 3d-imaging and sinus x-rays had the specialist wondering “Why are you here?”, a saying much more evocative than the “di rigor” (It’s Italian. Google it. Expand your linguistic horizon.) “you’re okay”, especially if you’ve already googled “sinus lump” and its strange, dangerous possibilities. Oh, it was the root end of my tooth. Normal bump. I mean, it should have been, but I’m not a dentist, so…Both false alarms had threatened the June 18th removal of the last defective hip. The final removal of the last of arthritis is on schedule. Until some more of the Big A visits. So the Big C and the Big A will only need watching after June. Discussions with like-wise afflicted cohorts have helped make the decision if anything else happens, no more treatments. Let it be.

The Trump-Musk feud is fun to watch until you consider how serious the issues are for all of us. Commenting on either is unnecessary but I will make this statement: Watch out for Big Tech. Specifically, our data in the hands of Big Tech. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. never delete records. There is a current conspiracy buzzing around a company called Palantir and what it plans to do with all the data “collected by DOGE” when DOGE went into the IRS, Social Security, and other government agency’s data banks, and “handed” the data to third parties like Palantir. They will know everything, so says the conspiracy.

And Ai WILL end the world as we know it. You can see Ai and its devil offspring, algorithms, being used already to torment us in Customer Service and Financial Services. When was the last time you called your credit union, bank, or credit card company’s “customer service” number and got a live, human being, even after the phone tree?** As an Aging Man, I’ve noticed the algorithms are even better at aggravation than real people, and getting an apartment, car loan, home, loan at age 73, by myself, is nearly impossible. Ai even makes it impossible to get a person to explain why. So get ready,

And if Ai puts a lot of people out of work, what will they do?  So glad I’ve aged out of that particular worry.

Reason has revealed I am the cause of the unusually terrible weather upstate NY has suffered since my return. Unprecented weather with tornadoes and a once-in-a-50-year snowfall winter “seemed” to have followed me here. My bad. But I will not assume any contribution to how bad NY sports teams are. We’re talking Championships, now, not regular season. The Bill’s fan motto is now “win one in my lifetime” which is really a question, not a hope. The Yankees had won at least one World Series in every decade of their existence. My moving probably coast them the 2010s, but the 2020  failures are their own. Jets. Ha. Orangemen? Eh. Giants? Nooooo. Knicks? Ugh and ughier(sic). Nothing really is expected of the Nets, but the Rangers last Cup win was over 30 years ago with the last appearance in the Cup finals 10 years and counting. This can’t be all my fault. The Bill’s were good but not good enough when I lived here and have resumed being The Big Tease in NY sports.. For my son-in-law’s sake the Bills better answer that motto question…and soon. And not in the negative…again…

Mets were purposely omitted: they stole Soto, so…

This post went the way of life these days. Medical questions being dismissed or answered and treated allows the mind to randomly ramble and wonder about…

S%*$. I missed Nap time.

** And when you do, do they do anything but repeat what the algorithm says?

*** Selected this title because Ai says it is “terribly clunky and redundant.” It made my day.

Early Morning Something or Other

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It’s 1:30 am, EST, and I’m not only awake, but rested. The Yankees won, so, that helps. And Aaron judge finally homered. Yay.

My days, lately, have inverted themselves. I sleep/nap a lot in the day and spend the night wide awake, rested and wondering about all the things a 20-year-old never had a clue he would be wondering about 52 years later. As a possible misanthrope, (don’t know where to go to get a fair and accurate diagnosis) it’s a pleasure having fewer people awake and milling about, doing nothing but making noise. In this area of upstate NY there are no 24 hour stores, or fitness centers, or any other place to wander around, so here I am. I’ll be at one or the other my fitness centers when they open at 6, and be back to my apartment, toned and refreshed, by the time most everyone else arises and starts to ruin the world.

This early morning post is obviously going nowhere, more like therapy. The daily dose of news has been consumed. The times for the day’s sporting events have been entered into my crowded schedule. I’ve checked my credit union to make sure my identity has not been stolen and money siphoned from accounts. Finished my Kia Warranty paperwork for Limpy, the car that shut down on me while driving. Getting it repaired was a thoroughly enjoyable venture into the world of corporations who communicate poorly and care little for 72 year-old health-challenged humans who need their car. Nuts, to them. They won’t have me to not call back much longer.

As a slower burner of calories, it’s time to plan the days food festivities. Being disabled has reduced my step rate from a healthy 8-10,000 a day, pre-Calamities, to the current dis-respectable average of 2,500 steps. I allow myself the luxury of not worrying about it, anymore, since swimming doesn’t translate into steps, so…I’m good.

I should probably go the bathroom. Maybe a piece of toast. Too early for 120 calories of carbos?

Huh. I’m tired. Just now. Just like that. 2am and back to bed. Not bad. Wonder how many calories I burned typing…