Tag Archives: aging

55 Is Just a Number, Not a Limit

October 18, 2025 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Anne sitting in front of a sign with a car on it reading "Ford $295 Order it today!" Wall is wood-paneled and has car-related mementos hanging on it.

DISCLAIMER: No surgeries or hair dyes were used in the making of this amazing lovely woman.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we’re getting old! And it happened again!

Last weekend Anne turned the big 5-5. At least it’s our understanding that 55 is “big”. She’ll now be eligible for discounts at select businesses even though she looks half my age under most lighting conditions. I’m a mere babe at 53 but sometimes have to tell cashiers that, no, I am not retired yet. Most days we don’t feel this old and have to remind each other that we are indeed this old and the actuarial math works out against us.

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53rd and 13th

May 19, 2025 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Me with jacket and gray beard, trying to smile while standing in cold winds on a platform four stories up.

This writer two days ago, buffeted by winds on the fourth floor of De Zwaan, the titular centerpiece of Windmill Island Gardens in Holland, Michigan — this year’s birthday outing!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two such occasions fall three weeks apart each year, often but not always receiving separate entries of incredulous self-congratulation. In this attention-deficit economy, though, we once again offer two for the bandwidth of one, a pretty sweet deal.

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“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”: One Last Whip-Crack for Us Gen-X Whippersnappers

July 8, 2023 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Angry Indiana Jones standing indoors and brandishing his whip.

Funny how Disney’s official movie site gallery has more pics of Imaginary Plastic Surgery Indy than of Keepin’-It-Real AARP Indy.

Like most of Generation X, I grew up with Indiana Jones as a surrogate uncle. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at the drive-in when I was 9, possibly the perfect venue for a thrill-ride throwback to the Saturday-matinee serial era that outraced every action flick ever made up to 1981 and for decades after. I’d just turned 12 when I was awed by the breakneck speed-runs of Temple of Doom at an indoor theater (the perfect age to fall for it), though my grandma walked out at the heartectomy scene and waited in the lobby for the rest of the runtime. I was 19 when our family skipped Last Crusade in theaters, but I bought it years later when one of McDonald’s bizarre ’90s merch experiments had them selling the entire trilogy on VHS alongside their Extra Value Meals. I finally got to watch Our Hero reunite with his dad as I reunited with Fun Uncle Indy.

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Milestones Behind and Millstones Ahead

May 21, 2023 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Me sitting at one end of a small table with two large slices of pizza on it, each on separate trays. One of them is closer to Anne the photographer.

Portrait of the author having brunch with his wife/photographer Anne at Pizza di Tito, an outtake from our Indiana Comic Con 2023 experience.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we have annual traditions ’round these parts! Two of them recently came up for renewal and passed without mention. Let’s kill two birds with one stone here, or at least whiz a pebble past their beaks just to get their attention.

I launched this tiny personal blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there. MCC entries are rarely shared with others in that manner; when it happens, it’s extremely noticeable in our dashboard stats and sincerely appreciated with all my heart.

Last month MCC reached its 11th birthday. As usual the WordPress software congratulated me as an auto-courtesy. Preprogrammed niceties aren’t quite the same as flesh-and-blood acknowledgment, but they help break the silence of what might otherwise have reminded me of that time Peter Brady overdosed on teenage smugness and was flabbergasted when no one attended his birthday party. I think about that episode a lot as I watch site traffic dwindle and wonder if I should bother mentioning my blog anniversaries anymore.

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Under the Colonoscope

March 19, 2023 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Me in a hospital bed, masked and hooked to an IV and doing jazz hands anyway.

Jazz hands made the I.V. hole in my arm hurt, but you understand they had to be done.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crosssover: I’m 50 now, which means it’s time to do post-youth stuff from time to time, such as throwing away AARP invitations or discussing health and/or medicine with fellow olds who coasted over the proverbial hill before you did. If you have a regular doctor, the next appointment after reaching that milestone age will inevitably lead to them recommending you have your first colonoscopy. Apparently at 50 the odds of digestive issues increase ludicrously and your colon becomes a breeding ground for monsters.

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50 Years in the Making

May 19, 2022 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments
Easter 2022!

If I could ever have a photo taken by someone taller than me, you could see my hair is still largely brown, unlike my annoying early-stage Santa beard.

So. This is 50, then. Time to ramble like an old!

(We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.)

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How Many Talented and/or Famous People Have You Unfairly Outlived?

December 18, 2020 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments
Chadwick Boseman.

The late Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, posthumously released today on Netflix.

The year 2020 is an incorporeal super-villain mastermind and everyone’s list of grievances against it is longer than a protest march and bitterer than black coffee tinged with chicory and herbicide. I’ve tried to work through several of my own fears and anxieties here throughout the course of the year, but one nagging thought has escaped articulation for months. It’s the sort of riddle that drives a thinker nuts if they dwell on it too long. Every faith and/or philosophy has a response to it, but not necessarily an answer. “All is within God’s Plan.” “Everything will make more sense in the end.” “The universe works in mysterious ways.” “Perhaps we’ll never know.” “Everything is meaningless and we’re all doomed so why worry about it.” Or put it out of mind and distill it into Kurt Vonnegut’s black-humored humanist shrug of “So it goes.”

Faith notwithstanding, it bugs me anyway. I’m 48 and counting. I am who and what I am. I have my uses, but I’m just me. Why did Chadwick Boseman only get to make it to 43?

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First One to 50 Wins

October 13, 2020 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne at 50!

Milady at her birthday dinner, with hints of the pandemic around the edges but in the moment not standing between our hearts.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, when ruminating on the origins of this very site:

This blog was set up three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process and this fallen world’s degrading standards on my impressions of, reactions against, and general experiences with various works of art, commerce, wonder, majesty, and shamelessness. It’s my way of keeping the writing part of my brain alive and active, rather than let it atrophy and die…

Now that 40 is thousands of miles behind me and 50 is ever-so-slowly approaching on my horizon in the not-too-distant future, I may need to update my mission statement to reflect whatever emotions begin to overtake me as that half-century mark draws nearer.

For my wife Anne, what little sense of foreboding may or may not have bugged her is past. She’s nineteen months older than me and just reached 50, right on time.

St. Elmo!

Our celebration venue of choice, a onetime special guest star on Parks and Recreation.

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2020 Road Trip Photos #6: Shades of Death

July 28, 2020 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne and log!

My lovely wife while she was still smiling.

One major item on our travel agenda was more exercise. Long walks are a staple of nearly all our vacations. They’re our favorite form of exercise. Lord knows we needed them now more than ever. If you compile our past several years’ road-trip photo galleries into a flipbook omnibus, you can see us growing grayer and larger over time. We’ve been trying to get outside for more neighborhood walks, but the surroundings have become routine and repetitive. All we ever see are the same houses and sidewalks over and over again out here in cookie-cutter suburbia, which at times can feel like a Hanna-Barbera background. It’s much more fun to walk around unknown places, see new sights, and change up our terrain.

Well, usually it’s much more fun.

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My Just Barely Black Friday 2019

November 29, 2019 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Kohl's Pillows!

Wheeling down the aisles at Kohl’s with my tiny cart piled high.

The one Black Friday item that Anne and I wanted more than any other this year was cheap pillows. We’re that old now.

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