This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

Our cohort is few, but mighty.

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

OH MY GOD WHY WAS I NEVER THAT

I remember Howdy Doody.

and i thought i was old for remembering leaded gasoline!

madonna, michael jackson, prince and ME -- i am now 50 and 1/2.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

there is truth lurking here -- people in our sub-generation have a complicated relationship w/our older sibs, the 60s baby boomers. this usage of "gay" is uhm, anachronisitic, or something. (I entered HS in 72 FWIW.)

anachronistic! edgy, you mean!!1!

so is bimble part of this exclusive club?

I didn't expect to get shoulder and back hair this late in the game.

ha was wondering what you meant in the 40s thread

what's up y'all

had a cardiologist call me at 7am to cancel my appointment (snow)

this morning the dentist said that my teeth with metal fillings will all eventually need crowns; seems legit, the youngest of those fillings is 40+ years old

i went to the dentist for lots of work this past year, first time since forever, and it was all space aged nano whatever shit and i think the dentist and his assistant were legit smirking at my one old iron ore filling from when i was a teenager, fifty years ago, in an eastern bloc nation

oh hi, I'm 54 now

peeing takes a long time

backache is a thing

(knocks on wood)

As hinted above, I have a cardiologist now! My primary doctor, who has pretty amazing raw skills -- like hearing -- apparently, thought he heard a murmur in my heartbeat last month. GREAT!

It turns out I have an "unconcerning" prolapse which is a "2" (not a 3 or a 4), so it just has to be checked every year from now on.

Aging is a motherfucker.

all the best morbs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murmur_(album)#/media/File:R.E.M._-_Murmur.jpg

i am two years older than william hartnell in this picture :D

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1920x1080/p01hg14p.jpg

(obviously i have regenerated several times: also did not grow up in poverty etc)

He got paid five times more per ep than Anneke Wills was, to make up for the poverty stricken childhood!

what a feelin'

mainly feeling it in my lower back today

Rapidly approaching Sammy Hagar milestone.

Minutemen?

Can you hear me, Dr. Mu

Imagine my surprise

Just realized that the “ordinary guy” in Pavement’s “Stereo” is maybe a reference to “Dr. Wu.” I still got it!

Oh wait

I just went through all the tests you are supposed to do when you get to 50, only 7 years late.

Anyway, all passed 100%, so hey!

I guess that lower back pain is gonna go in the "what do you expect at yr age?" cart.

Thanks for reminding me. I just did the same with one test, the biggest of all, remaining to be done in the next few months. If the news is bad I will speed post my remaining backlog of screennames.

I was Big C diagnosed about five months after turning 50, so maybe i didn't get the other tests.

(i'm mostly OK now, just medicated)

He got paid five times more per ep than Anneke Wills was, to make up for the poverty stricken childhood!

― calzino

for two months and then he got sacked. quintessential "being in your '50s" experience tbh

Definitely another bummer about being in your 50s. If you lose your job, you can't necessarily bounce back. You might never have a salaried position again.

Definitely another bummer about being in your 50s. If you lose your job, you can't necessarily bounce back. You might never have a salaried position again.

HI DERE. Raise your hand if you have been rendered depressed, rudderless, and without direction because you've structured your life around a eight-hour, salaryman working schedule for so long that when you were inevitably disrupted out of your career you've become addicted to the anxiety and panic of not being able to focus. oops TMI

raises hand

in my case it took several years to work through the trauma of being ejected and to figure out other ways to live ... I won't trivialize the difficulties involved, but now the only thing I miss from my salaryman days is the income

i need the med coverage

As mentioned on the other thread, in January I was made redundant 7 days before I hit 50.
my skills are probably no longer in demand (manual software tester) due to an increased focus on automated testing, and to be honest, I think I have had enough of software/corporate culture.
The last few months I have been a stay at home dad, and will probably remain so while mk2 goes through his teenage trials and tribulations (3 more years).
The very idea of being the Office New Boy at the age of 50 fills me with dread, and I know it would bring on a lot of stress and anxiety.
I am in a 'fortunate' position in that due to life insurance, I have no mortgage and get a small occupational pension from BH so will not be made homeless or starve, but coming to terms with a very different financial outlook is still the big stumbling block.
That and daytime TV.
Thank goodness for 'Walter Presents .. '.

In other news : re lower back pain.
Having sat on my arse in an office for 30 years the last 2 years were very problematic re my back.
My solution : swimming.
I have started swimming 4 times a week (roughly 1km each time), and the change has been very noticeable.

Slightly overlapping with what I said on the Forties thread, but I was made redundant at 51, also due to having skills which are no longer in demand. My partner has always earned a lot more than me, so we were OK - but then he was made redundant last year, at 58. Thankfully his skills are still in demand, but he refuses to re-dose himself with the poison of corporate culture - so it's taking a while to sort things out, and we are having to be careful with money, for the first time since our twenties.

I cover my monthly outgoings with DJ-ing (a weekly gig and a monthly gig) and Discogs selling (I inherited a rare and valuable collection, and am being ruthless with my own). We also have a lodger, for the first time in nearly thirty years - a good friend, also in his fifties, going through a divorce and coming to terms with being on the gay side of bi. He hates his job and wants to change back to his old career, but it would involve a precarious salary drop, at least to begin with, which isn't great timing when you're getting divorced.

Despite this difficulties, my net life satisfaction level is still hugely in credit. I feel busy, fulfilled, and grateful for all I've got. But I can't deny the presence of a persistent low-level background hum, which says "You are uniquely unemployable. Everyone else can get jobs, but you haven't got what it takes." It's bullshit, but it's there.

Fuck those cry baby under 50s in that other thread. Here's to getting Saga Holiday ads and people ringing me to ask if I want to cash in my pension and/or release some equity from my home and to being told I can't increase my life insurance because YOU R 2 OLD.

Also I just put up a desk, not too shabby eh? I'll be paying for it tomorrow mind.

it doesn't start getting real until you can't remember your 40s

xp Incidentally my pension is not worth the paper it's printed on so who's laughing now Mr Random Cold Caller?

it gets really real when your pathetic gig income and Obamacare fast-track you to bankruptcy

what a feelin'

― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Monday, July 2, 2018 8:55 AM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Right in my knees.

oh hi, I'm 54 now
peeing takes a long time

― WilliamC, Thursday, January 4, 2018 12:24 PM

Seven weeks shy of 56, but I found the secret: constant impotent rage keeps me young.

momus is almost 50

He’ll be 60 in February.

Fuck those cry baby under 50s in that other thread.

They're just coming to grips with their ultimate mortality, poor dears. Be kind to them.

I’m 55 and having a pretty good time.

I seem to have rediscovered my mojo this year: got serious about my job, holidayed in Japan, rekindled my interests in art and photography, good clothes (lost 40lb weight which helped), and the joy of short breaks by Eurostar.

Tracer that's beautiful. Thank you. That's what it was always for.

I was walking though my oakland neighborhood a couple years back and saw where they must have cleaned out a storage unit in an apartment building, leaving boxes of old stuff on the sidewalk. One box was full of photo albums: mostly black folks in the 70's/80s, family photos, people partying in bars, having holiday dinners, rolling skating, etc. It was sad to see them left as trash on a sidewalk... I pondered bringing them home and trying to find out who they might be, but I was going somewhere and it looked a little overwhelming tbh. I hope they somehow avoided being hauled to the dump

Lovely, Tracer. I'm having sort of a prolonged version of this with my Mom, who ever since they moved down here two years ago has been slowly unpacking and sorting through boxes of her old files, which includes stuff about me and my siblings' childhoods. Every week or two she asks me if I want something before she throws it away. Most of them I don't, but some of them I do really enjoy reading or looking at. They're also good reminders to me that I was a child with her and my dad, and they were good parents or as good as they knew how. (True of most of us.) Which helps me appreciate them as we're all now in a different and sometimes stressful phase.

in the 90s i wrote enormous letters -- like 20 pages, handwritten. mostly to my best friend, who was in the peace corps in west africa. periodically to my parents, or to the woman whom i would later marry, or honestly to any number of people.

it was probably A Lot/Too Much, but i had words then, and no one in Niger, at least, would complain about having things to read.

(once i sent him the paperback of THE EIGER SANCTION by TREVANIAN -- and also the source material for perhaps clint eastwood's worst film -- but everyone in zinder still had to read it because that's all there was)

i still have most of the letters -- i xeroxed the african-bound ones before sending and certainly i have every return letter from everyone in their original forms. but i cannot remotely bear the thought of rereading them *at all*. so they sit in a filing cabinet i've toted around for decades.

Yeah, I can't throw away letters, and I have a ton from my teens and 20s. (Also xeroxed my own letters during a year when I was out of the country on a grant and wanted to keep them as a kind of second journal of that year.) I have two friends who currently have manual typewriters and send them; I haven't had my own to play ball regularly (luckily there's a bookstore near me with two available for use), but when I typed my own responses I was aware of the slowness and just deliberate brain activity that pecking out a letter involved.

A major shift for me over the past ten years or so is that I love, LOVE, getting rid of stuff. The dopamine hit I used to get from acquiring and keeping stuff I now get from decluttering. I’m no minimalist but the things around me need to be either useful of particularly awesome/meaningful.

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Wednesday, May 27, 2026 8:28 AM (two days ago)

i've pretty much always been more of a digital hoarder. i joke that if it wasn't for that, i'd probably have been crushed by a stack of newspapers by now. i have copies of emails i sent in 1994. i can't _find_ them but i _have_ them, somewhere. if my NAS failed and i lost all of it, though, i'm not sure i'd be _too_ bothered. all things must pass. i think the oldest physical object i still own is a yellowed paperback copy of "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" that i got for easter when i was in the eighth grade.

the thing i'm coming to terms with now is the likelihood that i am in fact going to live maybe another 30 or so years. i don't have much of a family history of cancer. i'm mildly obese but nothing terrible. my blood pressure is a little elevated but not terrible. i'm taking care of my health better than a lot of people. my mom's alive and well in her late '70s, my dad died in his late '70s. i gotta keep trying to figure out how to live in this world.

i threw out most of my old shit when i got divorced. i didn't want anything that reminded me of her. mostly i wanted to die. i've mostly gotten over it. nostalgia is often painful for me. yesterday i listened to an old EP by The Simple Carnival called Menlo Park and realized that I've loved it since about the time it came out, in 2005, over 20 years ago... I cried, and I wasn't sure why until I remembered that I'd spent the last two hours having some very heavy conversations with friends about a mutual who suffers from chronic SI and has been in crisis for more than a week now. So it's probably not _really_ about the EP. There was just something that hit about listening to an EP that was, when I first heard it, a take on my own difficult, fraught childhood and then realizing that the EP was now, to me, a reminder of my own difficult, fraught late 20s.

Often, thinking about the good times reminds me of the things I've lost. Thinking about the bad times reminds me of the things I deserved, but (through nobody's fault, really) didn't get. Ah, you know. I'm severely depressed, not dead.

Okay so this isn't necessarily the health thread or whatever but it seemed like a good spot to share this:

https://nedraggett.tumblr.com/post/818607627035607040/so-let-me-tell-you-about-my-meningioma

thanks for sharing that Ned... heavy stuff obv but it sounds like you're doing all you can
And it sounds like you're in good hands

Oh wow, Ned. Sending you many good thoughts! What a lot to go through. You write about it so thoughtfully, too. (And of course a very fine tribute as well.)

Sending you the most beautiful thoughts.

Thinking of you Ned. What a crazy way that music and technology is linking us all together.

In other news. Shoulder impingement comin in HOT ffs

good wishes to you, ned, sounds like it's been scary at times.

who let you in here

back in my day, quadragenarians knew that they were to be barely seen and never heard

nowadays they think they can share their kind wishes anywhere. shameful

Oh gosh Ned that's quite the deal you got going there. Honestly, to me, you are ILX. I've mates who've never been here who know who you are because of all your writing, and I've a great amount of admiration for you even if I've never said so. So best wishes on all your journey.

best wishes ned

in unrelated news

one of my favorite things about being my age is finding out that younger people are terrified when i end sentences with ellipses

i'm not doing it to sound ominous, it just means i forgot how i was going to end the sentence...

A quick note to everyone for the kind words -- all very much appreciated!