General Joseph Hooker, Sex and The Real World

The world seems to be loaded with over-sexed middle aged guys and under-sexed middle aged women. The men think with their little heads, the women think with their big heads (the only one they have or need). The

General Joseph Hooker

little head actually thinks with its eyes. The big head thinks with its ears.

And so it was with me. Divorced and single for 17 years, I lived a sex life with emphasis on hookers. Wham, bam, slam, goodbye Ma’am. For $100-$200 I could ’fall in love' for 30 minutes at a time, I didn't have to make any conversation, the burden of proof was never on me and when it was over she was gone. I could take a whiz without having to cuddle first.

From time to time I would find a straight gal and date her until the inevitable happened. My doing or saying something 'wrong', a lot, always happened and it was bye, bye Bernie. Even saying, ‘I’m sorry, it’s all my fault.’, a married man's mantra, didn't work.

A straight woman being around this old Jew didn't think that she was spending a day at the beach. (Another advantage of consorting with hookers was that we weren't around one another long enough for the hooker to get pissed off at me.)

Women have called me everything from asshole, to a no good son of a bitch and worse. Lots of door slamming by my ex-best friends on their way out. And it's certain that whether the Princess is looking up at the grass from hell or looking down from heaven (I'll go either way.) she would have a hard time saying anything nice about me. But in a very fucking self righteous way. But then it takes one to know one.

These days my sex life consists of memories and fantasies. Instead of dreaming of raw sex my time is spent thinking of fitness, incontinence and regular bowel movements. I also try to avoid people who think and tell me that I am stupid. That pretty well restricts my still alive friendships to non Jews. I don't worry, at all, about the opinions of my dead friends.

Taking care of fitness is easier than taking care of incontinence which is a drip, drip, drip problem. I consider myself very lucky that I can sometimes 'sleep' for 3 hours in a row without having to drag my ass to the loo.

My utility bill is out the roof with having to 'keep the light on' (and I’m not living in Motel 6). Better a light on and an elevated utility bill than stumbling in the fucking dark and going down on my ass, which I did recently, in raw daylight, walking to my car. I now walk as though I'm marching with hut, two, three, four ringing in my head. Pick 'em up and lay 'em down. No Back Bay Shuffle for me even if it was an Artie Shaw tune.

Snail mail today snapped me to attention with an envelope from the Mass. General Hospital playing to my biggest fear with the headline in fucking blue 'What's your risk of developing dementia?’ Worse, inside there was a piece advertising a report, 'Forgetfulness vs. Memory Loss.'

I sent in for the report. After all we live in a world where every university has a hospital which peddles life saving reports designed to scare the shit out of you to get you to subscribe. I subscribe to at least 8 of them. They make my every kvetch have some meaning.

Fallen Doves was used to describe hookers before General Joseph Hooker popularized the term. He supplied his soldiers, during the Civil War, with prostitutes.

Google, TAVR, A Borderline Hypochondriac, Giving Ulcers

The newspaper print is virtually unreadable. Shit, my eyes are going; blindness is on its way. 

That reaction, when the newspaper is unreadable, is a normal part of life for a true-blue, 90 year old borderline hypochondriac. Then comes the realization that the wrong set of glasses is perched on my nose.

Put my reading glasses on and voila, the print becomes readable. Clear as a bell; great relief. Not going blind yet. Sadly that fucking routine happens too often.

Like scouring my apartment for my keys for 5-10 minutes until finally waking up to the fact that the fucking keys are in my pant pocket with my ever present pedometer, a really important part of my fitness oriented life. If I could re-claim the time I have spent looking for my fucking keys I'd be good for an added several years to my life.

Decided that jelly beans and fitness don't work well together. Giving up the beans for homemade, butter free popcorn. Not as soul satisfying as jelly beans but the popcorn does keep my mouth in motion, a movement which is really important to me. Jelly beans would be bad for my teeth, if I had any real teeth. (The beans are sure as hell bad for my glucose level.) Putting 'stick um' on my phonies every morning ain't too swift. Really annoying. Every six in the morning my 'stick um’ routine reminds me that I’m 90 and a dummy for ending up with false teeth. But the alternative of having either my uppers or lowers drifting around in my mouth surely ain't too swift. So 'stick um' it is.

TAVR (Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement) was strongly suggested to me.This 'minimally invasive procedure' was to be my silver bullet to improve my life style. But it doesn't take a Phi Beta Kappa key candidate to know that at 88 years of age there ain't no such thing as a 'minimally invasive procedure'.

'Minimally invasive'? Compared to what?

Saying goodbye to life with a tube being shoved up from my groin into my heart with a new aortic valve at the end of the tube didn't sound very fucking minimal or appealing to me. And the lead up procedures were equally scary, particularly the one to test my kidneys, which would put me out of commission for only a week if I was 33 years old. At 88 it would be at least a month.

One outgrowth of two serious bike crashes at 88, each of which landed me in ICU at Stanford Hospital and at the Vet's, was learning to turn my hearing aids off when the 30 something newbie doctors started doing their real specialty, which is to scare the shit out of patients.

Yeah teaching hospitals, like Stanford, are more for the students than the patients. Gotta have a doctor with miles on his odometer. Newbies are for the birds. You become, as a dumbass patient, an important part of their learning process.

At the Vet's I was required, for the TAVR, to talk with a social worker named Mrs. Cottle who has a great reputation at the Vet's but was a major league pain in the ass for me. She convinced me that she was a frustrated shrink whose questions always started with 'What if...?', with the rest of the sentence referring to a disaster happening to me while doing the TAVR or otherwise.

All she did was call my attention to the strong possibility that the TAVR could result in me looking up at the grass sooner, rather than later.

An echocardiogram, which literally shows your heart pumping away, showed my aortic valve not opening fully. What I thought for 50 years was a 'heart murmur' was, according the 30 something geniuses, life threatening to me. TAVR became the focus of my life. A lesson learned, again, was that my doctors should always be gray headed or at least 40+ years old.

That's also when I learned that Googling every kvetch and reading Wikipedia for the same kvetches was moving me from being a fucking borderline hypochondriac to a full blown, fucking maniacal, hypochondriac. Googling all the bullshit had a negative effect on my life and was consuming me. So, I quit Googling any question about my kvetches and TAVR. I still use Google but never for a kvetch.

John Fox, coach of the Denver Broncos, had a TAVR. It took him a few months to recover and he's in his 50's. So much for the assurances that my recovery would take but a few weeks. But that assumed that my 'minimally invasive' TAVR wouldn't kill me first.

I'm not too fat from head to toe. Only really fat from shoulders to head. The Princess had a mantra, "Bernie doesn’t get ulcers. He gives them". Thinking that I could convince the Princess that I wasn't all bad or all that stupid was like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Dumb persistence is one of my frailties. But smart persistence is also one of my hallmarks. Easy come, easy go.

As the Queen said to Alice 'Think the Impossible'. A mantra for me and one optimistic reason that I'm still around at 90. I am really busted on my Bronx Jewish ass but very rich in friends, swagger and with full faith in my long term future.

I’m still in the race between looking down at the grass and looking up at the grass with a fuck 'em attitude...and the horses that they rode in on.

Defying Death, Being 90, So Far..So Good

Talk about age discrimination. Just because I'm 90 years old no one will sell me any fucking life insurance. Maybe I should plead my case to the ACLU.

Living to 90 and beyond seems pretty commonplace these days. I am an avid obit reader. First thing in the morning, with credits to Christina Norman's father, I check on my iPad, to see if I'm listed in the obits.

After not seeing my name listed, I move on to just feeling like a 90 year old, which is to feel like shit. But to paraphrase Dean Martin one more time, I know that when I get out of bed in the morning that it is as bad as I'm going to feel all that day. There is only upside for the rest of the day.

Everybody and I mean everybody is always telling me that it's remarkable that I'm still alive at 90. I think that it is remarkable that neither of my ex-wives killed me. The fact that what comes into my head comes out of my mouth, unfiltered, was only one small reason that neither of them really liked me.

Actually, the first Princess actively disliked me. Gives me a laugh when I think about it. Poor broad had no sense of either humor or adventure. The Princess wanted a table top smooth life. She married the wrong guy and I married the wrong woman. But is there a 'right' woman for a 'take a chance' guy like me?

And everybody tells me that I don't look 90 which is pure bullshit. While I'm very satisfied with what I look like, the mirror tells me that I look 90 particularly without my dentures, which is every night, every morning and throughout the night. With a slightly enlarged prostate gland I'm in the head, pissing my brains out, at least twice a night. I pass a mirror on the way to the head but I don't look in the mirror.

Part of being 90 is putting your teeth in a glass of water every night. Then in the morning taking them out of the glass, drying them and loading them with stick-um. Toothless, I look 110. Dangerous to try to sleep with the falsies in your mouth; the fucking stick-um quits working and I could choke if one or another drifts into my throat while I'm sleeping.

My get out of bed, stay out of jail routine is simple and designed for a ninety year old: Take a whiz, wash my hands and face and retrieve my dentures out of the glass. If I make the mistake of looking in the mirror, I feel like puking.

After my morning whiz I do what I call my ‘incidental workouts'. (I do 'incidental workouts' all through the day.) Before I shove the dentures into my willing gums I do a calisthenic that I learned in the army ('You can check out anytime but you can never leave.'~ Hotel California). I touch my toes 10 times.

Actually my dream/fantasy is that my schlong can, one more time, get as stiff as the rest of me.

Most mornings while putting the stick-um on my dentures and then getting dressed I know that I am one old son of bitch and a borderline hypochondriac. Like clockwork I start perspiring, aka sweating, while doing the stick-um. I check my constant companion, my heart rate monitor to see if I'm having a heart attack. 'So far so good' as the guy said when he passed the 40th floor, on the way down, after jumping from the roof.

Getting old is a slam dunk. Being old ain't like spending a day at the beach. Old ain't for wimps or sissies. A few weeks ago while 'walking' I fell on my ass. No broken bones but a sore back and sore shoulders. Now I march to 'left, right, left, right' in my head so that I'm sure that I'm picking my feet up. Ah, army ways again.

After going through my three newspapers which I read for news and to stimulate my cognitive brain function, I then attack my iPad. God help the people in my address book.

Twice a week my fabulous young trainer, Jen Donat, comes by for 30 minutes. 30 minutes of 'work outs' are my financial and emotional limits. Jen stretches me, works on my range of motion and I do light weight lifting. Every so often I look in the mirror. It's always the same. I look 90 and look like shit.

A major source of irritation is my age induced dripping faucet but as my friend Dale Frey says, 'It's better than the alternative'. Forgetting to put my hearing aids in my ears, which I do often, erupts my major concern that I'm getting Alzheimer's. But again, so far so good as I pass the 20th floor on the way down.

Being a 90 year old borderline hypochondriac I feel strongly that, looking down at grass is better than looking up at the grass. At least that's my bet.

Mastaurbating, Confession, Staying A Jew, My Shrinking Schlong

 

Growing hair in the palm of my hand or going blind…

My best friend, when I was around 13, was Jimmy McNiece. He went to Mt. Saint Michael, a Catholic school in the Bronx, with Priests, Nuns, the whole kit and caboodle.



Thursday nights Jimmy and I would ride our bikes to the school. I would wait while Jimmy went in to say confession and then we'd ride home.

I once asked Jimmy what he had done each week that compelled him to go to confession every week. He told me that he had to confess to the Priest what he had done all week and his thoughts as well. I decided, then and there, that being a Jew living with my unspoken guilt was better than being an Irish Catholic living with the guilt and having to confess my thoughts. Particularly, since I was only 13 and had just discovered the joy of jackin' off.

The thought of having to tell the Priest that I had become addicted to jackin' off made little sense to me. I was already checking the palm of my hand several times a day to see if I had hair growing there. Going blind was also a major concern but not major enough to make me stop. I loved it too much to tell anyone about it especially someone who might tell me to stop. It was my secret. Now at 90 I can only deal in memories.

What really amazes me is how much my schlong has shrunk from its 'original' size. I now spend almost as much time trying to find the little son of a bitch as I do to take a whiz. And it was never giant size. In the Army I always envied those guys with the big schlongs. I felt that God was punishing me for jackin' off so much. I had grown from 5'6" to 6'1/2" from the time that I was thirteen to when I was sixteen but my schlong had not grown with the rest of me. Just as it has died before the rest of me.

Thinking of Jimmy McNiece reminds me that I've always believed that the Irish and the Jews had 'a thing' for one another with mixed marriages. While the Irish guys seemed to really enjoy beating the shit out of Jewish guys we often ended up friends. Irish Catholic women often married Jews. Irish guys were mostly too fucking smart to marry a Jewish Princess.

But I had a Mormon dentist, Keith Anderson, who was determined to convert me into becoming a Mormon. Great guy but while I was stretched out, mouth open, he would tell me of the affinity of Mormons and Jews. I kept telling him, when he took the drill out of my mouth, that I was born a Jew and I was going to die a Jew. He wouldn't stop so I stopped seeing him. And yeah at 90 I'm still a Jew but with full dentures.

Veggies and sex. A Mediterranean diet to help with a sex life. Not mine but perhaps yours. The link below explains how veggies can help your sex life. Not veggies nor Viagra or even praying can bring my dead schlong back to life. It is now just a leaky faucet.

Sometimes-asparagus-is-more-than-asparagus?