The Secret to a Long Life

Clean living and the right parents…

So I made it to California without further incident and the next item on my social calendar is my 50th High School Reunion which I may or may not attend because it’s actually my 51st High School Reunion, but the pandemic totally dicked that up for my class, so the Class of ’72 has been nice enough to invite us to their reunion, probably because they really miss being bullied by us Seniors.

(After I wrote that last sentence it dawned on me that everybody there is going to be a “Senior” and if there’s anything that simultaneously depresses and pisses me off it’s being asked if I want a “senior discount” the exception being that time at Taco Bell when I thought the young woman behind the counter was asking if I wanted a “Senor Discount” which I briefly and mistakenly believed was some kind of crappy club you joined to get cheap tacos. So it would appear my hearing’s going as well, but I never think about the tinnitus in my left ear unless someone mentions the word “tinnitus” which I just did, so I get to think about that for the next 20 minutes…Neat.)

Anyway…

Back in high school the age gap between Freshmen and Seniors seemed like the Grand Canyon and when I was a Freshman I was scared shitless of the Seniors because they seemed like Grown-Up Men and Women who probably drank martinis after school and had mortgages and were worried about menopause and that hacking cough that might be related to their two-pack a day smoking habit and just to reinforce the idea that the Seniors were way more mature than us Freshmen, a couple of them got married while they were still in high school.

But these days a gap of a few years seems like nothing, maybe because we’re all staring a Long Dirt Nap in the face and the difference between 65 and 69 now seems insignificant when people in their 40s and 50s are dropping dead every day and after reaching an advanced age and observing who dies and who doesn’t, I’ve reached the medically-dubious conclusion that longevity has way more to do with genetics than anything else.

My mother is 96 and when I told that to my doctor he asked if she had some kind of special diet and I asked:

“Is bacon considered a special diet?”

Two points of view: Jim Fixx vs. Paul Hornung

That last part reminds me that Jim Fixx (the runner whose Wikipedia page says he demonstrated the “health benefits of regular jogging”) died at 52…while jogging…so it turns out the health benefits weren’t all they were cracked up to be and Paul Hornung (the NFL running back whose Wikipedia page says he had a “penchant for high living”) lived until he was 84 so he demonstrated the mental health benefits of partying your ass off.

The lesson here seems to be do whatever you want because you can eat carrot sticks and jog like Forrest Gump and still die young…or…drink liquor and smoke cigarettes and party like it’s 1999 and still live long enough to develop dementia which apparently Hornung did, and if Paul Hornung got lost in the past, I hope it was the part of the past where he still looked like this and was known as the “Golden Boy.”

BTW: I can’t help thinking that athletes of the past had a lot more fun than the clean-living, heath-obsessed athletes of the present and to prove it, here’s a picture of the Kansas City Chiefs Lenny Dawson enjoying a cigarette during an NFL game:

Lenny Dawson is still alive at 87.

I can’t remember who said it, but the greatest answer I ever heard to the “If you could be anybody, who would you want to be?” question was: “Mickey Mantle, in the 1950s, on a Saturday Night in New York.”

Today’s athletes tend to go back to their hotel rooms after games and order room service and play Call of Duty or binge watch The Walking Dead because everyone’s got cellphone cameras and if someone takes a picture of an athlete sipping a beer and he has a bad game the next day, they’ll put it on social media with a snarky caption like:

“How Bobby Baseball gets ready to play the Yankees.”

Yesterday’s athletes used to do really fun stuff like drinking martinis, smoking cigarettes, dating showgirls and having fistfights at the Copacabana.

Which also reminds me that I was just talking to my son about the old talk shows where the host and guests would smoke and drink and get shitfaced right there on national TV and screw around and have fun because they hadn’t perfected the art of using talk shows as shameless promotional platforms for whatever movie, TV show or product they were trying to get the public to spend their time and money on.   

To prove my point here’s a classic bit from the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, Dean Martin and George Gobel and George talks about the difficulty of following Bob and Dean who had the audience in hysterics and don’t miss what Dean is doing to George’s drink whenever George looks away:

Now that’s entertainment.

Timeout for a different point of view

So I heard about this book called “How Not To Die” and checked it out from the library and it’s 404 pages (562 pages if you read the Acknowledgements, Appendix, Notes and Index) of stuff I really didn’t want to read, hear or think about.

But the guy who wrote it is an actual doctor and makes a good case that what we’re eating is killing us and if we’d only eat healthier we’d live longer and have less illness, but the medical profession doesn’t make money off us being healthy; they make money off us staying sick and taking costly drugs to help combat all the horrible shit we do to our bodies when we overindulge on Taco Tuesday, Chicken-Fried Wednesday and the highly popular, but much-less publicized Double Bacon Cheeseburger Saturday.

The doctor who wrote the book says we’d live longer if we just did four things:  

1. Don’t smoke.

2. Don’t get fat.

3. Exercise 30 minutes a day.

4. Eat healthy food.

Turns out I’m three for four and that’s good enough to get you into Cooperstown, but if my diet doesn’t change soon my Hall of Fame Induction might be a posthumous one and even though all I read was the introduction, the book gave me lots to think about.

For instance: If I quit eating the stuff I like will I live longer or will it just seem longer?

As Johnny Carson supposedly said:

“I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex and rich food. He was healthy right up to the day he killed himself.”

And now back to that high school reunion…

I still haven’t decided for sure if I’m going to that high school reunion, but after writing this I just might show up to see who’s still alive and who didn’t make it and that last list might include me because the reunion is a week away and I still have to survive one more Double Bacon Cheeseburger Saturday.

As always…

Wish me luck.