They tell you that in your fifties, you finally find out what’s going to kill you.
What a beautiful, gentle, and completely bullshit way of putting it. It’s not a discovery; it’s a goddamn declaration of war. Your body, that beautiful, dumb, and completely loyal animal that has been quietly absorbing your sins for half a century, finally decides to talk back. And it doesn’t whisper; it fucking screams.
You start to learn the machinery, not from a book, but from the quiet, ugly, and beautiful evidence of your own slow-motion collapse. You learn that sodium, that innocent-looking white powder, is a goddamn sponge, holding onto water like a bad memory. You learn that your liver, that old, overworked bartender in the dive bar of your soul, he has a simple rule: he serves the poison first. He’ll get to the sugar, the food, the “nutrition,” but not until he’s finished wrestling with the bottle of whiskey you poured down your throat the night before. And your kidneys, those poor, tired bastards, they just work overtime, a couple of frantic janitors, trying to piss the flood of your own bad decisions out into the gutter all night long.
You have a good, long weekend, a real old-timer, a beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary bender. And you wake up on Tuesday morning twenty, maybe thirty pounds heavier. You’re not a man anymore; you’re a goddamn water balloon with a hangover. Your face is a bloated, puffy, and completely honest reflection of your own poor choices. Your legs look like you’ve stolen them from a couple of sad, tired elephants. And it takes you a week, a full goddamn week, to get back to the man you were on Friday.
And in the middle of all that beautiful, ugly, and completely honest pain, you start to see the new game. The old game was about how much you could take, how hard you could run, how many punches you could eat and still be standing at the end of the night. The new game? It’s a quieter, stranger, and a hell of a lot more interesting.
It’s not about stopping. Christ, no. It’s about getting smarter. You start working around the obstacles. You become a goddamn guerrilla fighter in the jungle of your own decaying body. You learn the enemy’s tactics. You learn his supply lines. You learn that a bottle of water between every drink is a quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary act of treason against your own self-destruction. You start to want to live a little longer on this quiet, dusty, and completely insane little rock called Earth.
And that brings us to the final, beautiful, and completely honest punchline of it all. The perfect ending.
You look at the map of your own future, at the quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing endgame they’ve laid out for you—the 401k, the rocking chair, the quiet, slow fade into a respectable, passionless grave—and you just have to laugh. A real, ugly, gut-shot laugh.
Because you’ve learned the final, beautiful, and completely pragmatic lesson of a life lived on the edge.
You realize that the most logical, the most beautiful, and the most completely honest survival plan you have left… is to go to Vietnam and marry up a sweet, tough, and completely unsentimental little Asian momma-san who knows a thing or two about survival herself.
Not for love. Not for romance. But for the goddamn passport. For the visa. For the right to die slowly, and beautifully, and completely on your own terms, in a place where the sun is hot, the beer is cheap, and the ghosts don’t know your goddamn name.
And that, my friends, that’s not a mid-life crisis.
That’s a goddamn retirement plan. The only one that makes any fucking sense anymore.
