This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

Not there yet myself dude. You might have to wait a while, wait for the return of Martin Skeedmore, who can out-[Controversial Moderator Edit] them all, whatever his age.

"ilxors in the '50s" would be a fun photoshop thread

ned at the sockhop

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

huh

I got it, it wasn't hard to follow it was a simple piece of business.

i just want to see abbott as a sexy cold war scientist is all

I am a 53 year old ILXor in the Naughties. Does that count? My only time in the 50's occured when I was aged 0-5, from November, 1954 until Dec. 31, 1959.

did you see ned at the sockhop

NO

The sockhop ended some time before I entered high school in Sept. 1968. I was not inconsolable over this happenstance. I was a rotten dancer.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

u cursed by the stars aimless

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM

yep -- that's where my pops was in '68 -- sent there two weeks after i got borned! booh hooh.

--a sometime ilxor in his 40s

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM WAS NOT ME, BY ANY STRETCH OF IMAGINATION! Skinny, geeky 13 year old, I'm just sayin'.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

aimless serious q did you at least smoke a lot of pot? and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

if not you have destroyed any reason i have to respect actual early 70s HS kids

I am 10 years shy of 50 but this thread is making me feel old.

momus is almost 50

There's a Guided By Voices song about this.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

I really, really don't know how to react to this.

weve all reacted by blotting it out

Well I know that you're in love with him,
Because I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your Keds.
Oh, I dig that rhythm and Ned!

(I thought JBR's suggestion at first was an age progression of ILXors into their fifties and was thinking "oh it won't take much to imagine some of that.")

Ned, all you have to do is put on the socks. That's all. And we need a hardwood floor, and XTC's "Life Begins At The Hop". Now who will film this????

did you at least smoke a lot of pot?

I think the first time I smoked pot was roughly summer of 1970. Didn't do much for me. My friends included several 'heads', but I was just a dabbler. My older brother was into it pretty far by 1971. He still tokes up now.

I didn't really get launched as a pot smoker until college, where I spent most of 1974 stoned. Made my own bong from a glass lab beaker. I quit entirely around 1977 or so. I can't say I miss it.

and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

Hard to say, because I don't have a clue who trip fontaine is. I did know a lot of druggies and hippies in the 70s. They were as common as daisies back then.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3Pgo2kaznFU/RqsBjrRCKMI/AAAAAAAAARs/7wAJzhaYC3A/s1600/964.jpg

that link 404'ed me

(xxpost) Trip Fontaine is a character from the book/film "The Virgin Suicides"

Start at about 3:30 here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_smJP8oRnE

Btw, Frank Kogan, who posts to a couple of the rolling genre threads on ILM, is 54.

Also:
Most of the time I dwell in a state of unreality, where I have amazing superpowers. And I am 50 years old.

-- Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Monday, February 5, 2007 12:29 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

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.

Dying alone is one of my big fears too. It’s less the death part and more the thought of dying slowly and being unable to get help…. The lying in one’s own excrement for 24 hours or more in excruciating pain… and then there’s the thought of being a bloated corpse that is only found days or weeks later because of the stench .

honestly curious whether my cat will chew on my corpse

i'm guessing yes

It's the threat of not knowing what is going to happen next in the world around me that scares me about death. I want to continue watching the world go by forever.

We owe it our cats to make ourselves delicious

otm

I want to continue watching the world go by forever.

At some point in adolescence I became sort of fascinated by the understanding that people just check in and out of the world at different times. Like, an American who died in 1940 — “They didn’t even know about World War II,” that kind of thing. I think that both alerted me and somewhat reconciled me to the reality. The story doesn’t end, you just get to see a few chapters. In more recent years, it’s more concrete with all the people I know/knew who are no longer with us. Like I have one friend who died the year before Covid hit, and while we all miss him terribly, we also agree that he would have absolutely hated everything about 2020 and is in some ways probably lucky not to have endured it.

But yeah, I agree that it’s hard not to want to just … see what happens next.

My grandpa went on a hunger strike and passed Feb 2020 and I know he’s relieved to have skipped the Covid chapter. He dipped just in time!

My stepmother was the bluest Democrat in existence, and she hoped to one day see a woman as president.

When she died of pancreatic cancer in 2016, people in our orbit said it was too bad she wouldn't get to see Hillary Clinton inaugurated (which at the time seemed not only possible but likely).

In that regard it was a mercy.

Yeah conversely my parents (80 and 82) are absolutely determined to outlive Trump's term. (Both seem in good shape to do so at the moment.) At least once a week, my mom says "I just can't believe he's president."

last saturday night I saw flashes of lightning over and over in my peripheral vision - thought it was car headlights since I was outside at night. realized it was just happening every time I looked to the right. sunday morning my left eye had a giant new floater in it.

I got retinal laser surgery this year and now I know that if I see flashes and floaters I am going STRAIGHT TO AN ER. Turns out my tear had "started healing itself" so I've probably had it for quite a while without knowing. I might have skipped an annual eye exam because I thought my glasses were working out great and I still liked them? But max I went 2 years and somewhere in there my retina thought about noping out.

My dad hit his head not too long ago (fine) and said he just hoped the EMTs weren't going to test his mental status by asking him who the current president is because he didn't want to say the name.

I used to catch my previous cat prodding me in the night to see if I was a tasty corpse yet. The current cat is a little more patient but I'm sure it crosses his mind.

Also my oldest kid is working on two different self-produced albums

is this the noise fan?

My grandmother died right after Obama was elected… she too left on an optimistic note.

xp yep altho in recent years he's more of an underground hip-hop guy.

It's the threat of not knowing what is going to happen next in the world around me that scares me about death. I want to continue watching the world go by forever.

― Christine Green Leafy Dragon Indigo, Friday, October 2, 2026 12:40 AM (fifteen hours ago)

i figure that if there is a next world, whatever happens in it is no business of mine. it's this question of, like, who _am_ i, right? and i can't imagine me being me without my body. i know the nicene creed talks about "resurrection of the body and life everlasting" but i don't really believe in that and never have. whatever comes after me, i am...

well i'm hopeful for it, really. i don't have any hope personally, but i do absolutely have hope for the future. i don't believe in a "promised land", but i do i believe that things in the future will, in a lot of ways, be better than things are now.

part of me is sad that i'm going to die, because i am curious about what'll happen next. more and more, though, i'm just _grateful_. i couldn't have imagined this world could be so big, that so many things i could never have predicted could happen. i don't think i'm cursed to live in interesting times, any more than i think i'm cursed to be an interesting person.

i'm... at the end of the day i'm human. and being human means that i have limitations. i wish, sometimes, that i could have said and done more with the time and gifts i'd been given. there are a lot of words that will die with me never having been said. i guess that makes me sad more than anything. there's just too much, though. too much of everything, and i have only this one small body to live among it. humans are incredibly flexible, incredibly resilient, and at the end of the day each of us can only bear so much life.

I stayed in an AirBnB with a "swimming pond" this week and my take away was how inelegant I must have looked getting in/out. It shouldn't have been that much of a (50-something) struggle.

That's how I feel anytime I have to stand up from sitting on the ground! So much grunting.

greetings from Charing cross hospital imaging department. i am the only one here.

he's done part 1 of the scan but i started drinking late (deliberately, i had a 30 minute walk) and got here early so now it's a waiting game before he can do bladder exam.

I can still get up without assistance from sitting on the floor, thank goodness.

exam was a walk in the park. only one person on probe duty but the appointments were spread out perfectly so there was no waiting around. watched 3 other patients turn up about 20 minutes apart.

I've decided to be quite aggressive against the onslaught of late age muscle loss. I bicycle basically everywhere, including my commute. And I've decided to do something about my upper body for the first time since I kayaked regularly 25 yrs ago: I do pullups every other day (I can now complete at least five, but aim for ten) and pushups (now at thirty)

I've always been at the fringe of 'athletic' culture due to my distaste for competitive sports and gym culture, and I firmly believe the cultural mixing of all these things is harmful for so many. Staying healthy and fit does not have a welcoming cultural on-ramp.

Switch off the markers-and-signifiers radar. Switch off the gatekeepers. Do it anyway.

Yeah, i’m at that point. I managed to lose 40 pounds by eating right so exercising is a lot easier now. Less meat to lift! But I don’t have much muscle at all. My legs are ok from cycling but I’ve never done a pullup in my life. Last week I ordered a pullup bar and i’ve been working on situps and pushups. Hooray for fit old-timers!

Got some hip xrays done the other week, with the unsurprising result of "Moderate bilateral hip joint osteoarthritis."
I've had creaky/sore hips and knees for years as I've banged on about before but this is the first time I've had osteo confirmed in the hips (I knew about the knees). Dunno if theres much I can do now beyond mitigate it with the physio I never bother doing, haw.

xp The important thing is that wanting to know what's coming up next seems to be the only thing keeping me from killing myself, so there's that.

I definitely relate to the wanting to know what happens next thing. the inverse of that is I think the worst thing about losing someone you love is missing their takes on things that are happening. For me, when something happens that makes me immediately think thinking, "man, ____ would have loved this", and having that sort of gut punch of sadness with the thought is one of the worst things.

Oh for real. So many friends I want to talk to and ask about specific things. That's always sad but also it's nice to think of them.

I find that with groups of friends these days, some deliberate remembrance and invocation of the departed. It's good to share memories with other people who knew them, it keeps them more present for all of us. I know people who died 20 years ago who lots of us still talk about. Kind of a tribal memory, at a social level.

Yeah there's something to that. There are some friendships and connections that were very close and specific for me and I often feel like I'm the sole person remembering -- may not actually be the case. But then there's someone like stirmonster on here, or Kaleb Horton, and I know there's a lot of people who will carry their memories forward and it's good to be among them.

Certainly nice to see someone who I don't always see who knew someone deceased well and the shared memory comes up.

One place where it is painful is with neighbors whose family or others close to them I didn't know. Walking by the former houses of people who I'd wave at every day...their spouse is also gone and I don't know anyone who they knew...

An older friend and I were talking and of course a lot of the conversation revolved around our aches and pains and what’s wrong with our bodies. My buddy refers to these conversations as an “organ recital.”

so um where's the 60's thread? I forgot I'm too old for this one now

very sexagenarian of you to be unable to search for it

(these threads are hard to find what with not knowing whether it's 50s or 50's or fifties, the mass of threads about 50s music and the way ilx search treats apostrophes)

How did I get here?? (Thread for ILXors in their 60s and beyond)

Re invocating dearly departed, I often do this just to myself. My friend Cahl died some years back from cancer and I still think of him every time I pick up and use one of my good knives and remember him rousing on me and taking over my kitchen one birthday party of mine, saying I didn't look after my knives properly and "get out of the way let me do this". Whereupon he whipped up a japanese storm foodwise.
I think of everyone here as well, esp bimble.

Also my oldest kid is working on two different self-produced albums and this week successfully sold a beat to a rapper for $25.

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Thursday, October 1, 2026 9:42 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

with these gas prices?! that's some shameful beat haggling.

My buddy refers to these conversations as an “organ recital.”

"One place where it is painful is with neighbors whose family or others close to them I didn't know. Walking by the former houses of people who I'd wave at every day...their spouse is also gone and I don't know anyone who they knew..."

Recently my dad switched mobile phones, which isn't earth-shattering news, but we suddenly realised that without the old phone he'd have no way to contact so many of his (and my) family, because we just have their numbers stored in the phone.

In particular he's gone for one of those old person big-number retro-style phones, so all of the contacts are stored on the SIM card rather than in The Cloud. The thought of losing contact with someone just because you didn't write their number down on a piece of paper feels like the setup to a romance novel from the 1930s, but it can actually happen in the actual real world today.

Luckily he had my uncle's address, so I wrote him a letter! Which means that I have now written letters to people in three different decades. Once in the 1990s, once in the 2000s... and once in the 2020s. I don't think I ever wrote a letter in the 2010s.

When I say "letter" I mean the physical kind, on paper. Obviously I didn't write it, I typed it. I deliberately didn't justify the text because that's not the kind of thing you do with a personal letter.

I got retinal laser surgery this year and now I know that if I see flashes and floaters I am going STRAIGHT TO AN ER.

When I actually went to the eye doctor I asked him a bit more about the best thing to do, because he admitted that unless the ER had an eye specialist there wasn't really much they could do there. He said now that I was registered as a patient with his practice if it happens again I should call them so they can see me immediately.

As for the rest, well... I made it to my 50s. My mother didn't. Like Christine, whatever may come I just want to see what happens in the world tomorrow.

This also belongs in "things I was shocking old before I learned", but yesterday I learned that Wilford Brimley was only fifty years old when he appeared in Cocoon. In fact he was only 49 when filming commenced.

So, I am officially the same age as Wilford Brimley, when he appeared in Cocoon, which is a sobering thought. And by extension this means that I'm actually older than Brimley was when he was in The Thing, two years earlier. I have less diabetes than Wilford Brimley.

This raises a horrible thought. When I make hilarious, flirtatious comments to the schoolgirls at the local bus stop, am I actually a fat pervert instead of a debonair man about town? Surely not.

To this day I haven't seen Cocoon: The Return. It's an oddity. It has the form of a direct-to-video film, but it has the entire original cast, including Oscar-winner Dom Ameche. The music was by James Horner and it was screened for Ronald Reagan, who presumably sat there thinking "fuck you, Don Ameche, fuck you". I haven't seen it.

Reagan looked great for man in the '80s in his seventiesw.

yeah that was a big revelation a couple years back: that Paul Rudd is currently quite a bit older than Wilford Brimley was in Cocoon

When I actually went to the eye doctor I asked him a bit more about the best thing to do, because he admitted that unless the ER had an eye specialist there wasn't really much they could do there. He said now that I was registered as a patient with his practice if it happens again I should call them so they can see me immediately.

Good to know and more reason for me to take the time to get admitted to an alternate practice. The place I got it done is a racket and I took all my records and got out of there but now I have to be a new patient somewhere else.

yesterday I learned that Wilford Brimley was only fifty years old when he appeared in Cocoon

the 'brimley-cocoon line' social media account just noted that all the spice girls are now older than he was in cocoon

I have realized I need an age appropriate mattress

I can recommend the Helix brand

Last time I was in NYC, I got to see a really special friend from high school. It was the first time I had seen him in person in years, even though we had kept in touch on Instagram. I was looking forward to visiting with him especially since I would now have someone to share some grief with.

Another special friend of mine died in 2017. And then another in 2021. There weren't any funerals, no big congregations of the old gang coming together to share some stories. Just these "Can't believe it" type text messages. Some real stunted expressions of grief.

I didn't exactly need a shoulder to cry on, but I did want to talk about some recurring dreams I had been having. The dreams were strange enough in the fact that I usually didn't have recurring dreams.

So we're walking up Ninth Street so he could pick up some cymbals (lol @ nyc), and I start talking about our mutual friend who went first. How I'll be at a party or a show, and I'll run into him. How he'll offer me a smoke, and when I tell him I don't smoke anymore, he'll say that It's ok. You can smoke here.

And when I wake up, I realize that "here" wasn't the party.

My still-alive friend walked beside me in silence before just going, Huuuhhh, yeah that's weird. "Wanna hear about my recurring dream? It's more of a recurring nightmare."

"Yeah," I say. "Of course. What happens in them?"

"Well, I'm usually running down the sidewalk, being chased by the members of Kiss from the Destroyer album cover. And right when I can feel Gene's hand on my shoulder is when I wake up."

Sometimes, you just gotta take the gut punch, I guess.

love it

what with all the talk of detached retinas, i went and got my floaters checked out and apparently it's nothing more serious.

(i found some specsavers spam on the floor, it had a link to booking site, local branch had empty slots that lunchtime, i went and had the usual tests and then told the optician the score and she had a better look. had the dilating drops that made everything fuzzy and all. was in there for over an hour and was charged £15 which i think must've been a mistake.)

((prescription has gotten better and worse in the last 3 years in that as you age, and the lenses flatten, your life-long shortsightedness improves for distance viewing and worsens for near vision))