Fifty
Welcome back to the Generalyst, the newsletter that suffers from an identity crisis.
Two years ago, a tiny tick on Martha’s Vineyard gifted me an unusual new syndrome called alpha gal. As a result I’m now allergic to red meat, milk, cheese, and other mammalian products. It’s annoying, but tolerable. When friends find out I have alpha gal, they’re very sympathetic, so that’s nice.
But the truth is that I’m suffering from something much worse.
I have fifty.
Each year millions of Americans suffer from fifty. Common symptoms include sleeplessness, woe, self-doubt, insensible weight distribution, hair loss, sudden professional irrelevance and, in half the patient population, a prolonged and painful metamorphosis.
Unlike a tick-borne illness, you can see fifty coming, but you still can’t prepare.
My fear of contracting fifty began to build last summer. The warning signs were many and varied. Rapidly graying hair. Unconsciously enunciated moans when standing up from chairs. Strange cracks and pops resounding from joints while I engaged in activities such as walking, not to mention a general fear of unscripted motion. When my friend Brian had fifty, he tore his meniscus simply by leaning abruptly to one side.
There are benefits to having fifty. My body still works well enough to surf and swim and run slowly. My brain is stuffed with arcane knowledge that serves me well in my job as a writer. And sure, I know what you’re thinking, fifty one seems great, too, since it’s divisible by seventeen and three. The problem is that when you’re fifty one, you’ll spend a whole year holding that seventeen in your head, and you won’t be able to avoid thinking about what you were like at that age. I could eat pounds of pasta in a sitting, swim ten miles, play the harmonica, and read books without falling asleep. But I also carried around an invisible fifty-pound bag filled with self-doubt, in addition to the harmonica that I only pretended to know how to play, so when I think of seventeen, I become ravenous and massively insecure and inspired to achieve physical feats I cannot hope to complete. Not a great mix.
Normally I wouldn’t advise suffering jointly through an illness with your partner, because your potential for sympathy is immediately halved, but it’s nice to move through fifty with someone. My wife and I have done so together — not that she is, was, or ever will be fifty — and we didn’t even need that many cocktails.
A few college roommates and I met up to celebrate the milestone as well, and while we mostly talked about the necessity of colonoscopies, the solidarity was uplifting.
The whole colonoscopy procedure ended up being interesting, too. When my drugs wore off, I had an idea for a story in which the patient wakes up to find himself in a room filled with doctors and secret government agents in black suits and sunglasses. One of these government agents informs the patient that during the procedure, the surgeons discovered a wormhole to another dimension in his colon.
-And polyps? the patient asks.
-No polyps, one of the doctors replies.
-That’s good.
-Yes, but about the wormhole, the agent continues, you can surely understand, as a science writer, that we could not pass up this opportunity at discovery.
-Of course not, I (because the patient is obviously me) reply.
-We’re glad you understand, because this next part might be hard to grasp.
-Let me guess, you’re going to tell me that the miniaturization technology depicted in the hit film Inner Space is actually real, and that you’ve already prepped a team of scientists to travel through the wormhole in my colon?
-Close, the agent answers, impressed. The truth is that the team has already gone in. And there’s one more thing.
-What’s that?
-We’ve lost contact.
-Of course you did, but thank you for opting for wireless communications.
-You’re welcome. The catch is that now we want you to go in after them.
This is where the story gets weird, and a little complicated, so let’s get back to the essay.
There are other nice parts to fifty. It’s a great excuse to reconnect with old friends and talk about things other than AI and youth sports. Peptides, for example. People throw nice parties and sometimes make the mistake of letting you give a toast. Fifty isn’t a bad way to get through alpha-gal, either, since the elimination of red meat drives down your cholesterol. In fact, now that I’m in the last stretch, I’m starting to wish I could have this condition for at least a few more years.
So if anyone’s wondering, I’ll be fifty for a while.
If you enjoyed this, or are interested in advance tickets to Inner Space 2, please forward this to folks or click on the little heart below. And thanks, as always, for taking a few minutes to read.
