Hunter S. Thompson checked out on his own terms with a note titled Football Season is Over. He wrote: “No More Games. No More Bombs… 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Relax. This won’t hurt.” Thompson knew exactly when his clock ran out. Most of us don’t get that luxury. We don’t get a definitive expiration date stamped on the bottom of our boots. Instead, we get lab reports, aching joints, and the sudden, sobering realization that there are far fewer spins around the sun ahead of us than there are behind us.
I’m sitting here in Da Nang, fifty-seven years old, watching the street traffic weave through the humidity, and I am looking at the ultimate scoreboard.
First, let’s talk about the legacy. My kids are out there in the world, little eagle chicklets that have jumped out of the nest and are absolutely soaring. They are kicking ass in ways that make my chest tight. I couldn’t be more proud of them, but you’ll never catch me saying that to their faces. I don’t need to inflate their egos; they are already flying high with my bloodline pumping through their veins. They are the victory lap. But watching them take over the sky is the ultimate reminder that my own season in the sun is shifting into the late afternoon. This right here, this expat existence, is the goal line. We are all fading away from the rat race, moving into the strange, quiet wonders of whatever time we have left.
And looking at the karma of my life—the stories lived, the bridges burned, the miles driven—it is a minor biological miracle that I am still sitting here drawing breath.
I got my lab report today. If we are looking at this through the unfiltered, cold-blooded lens of my inner mechanic—let’s call him Charles—the engineering specifications of this six-foot-four chassis are laid bare. Charles doesn’t do sugarcoating. He reads a blood panel the way an auditor reads a bankrupt ledger. So, let’s open the hood and look at the engine.
The immediate twenty-four-month operational window has a few warning lights flashing red on the dashboard. I’ve dropped sixty pounds of dead weight. That alone pulled me back from the edge of an immediate catastrophic cardiac failure. When I was hauling around 320 pounds with a 42-inch waist, the actuarial tables had my death certificate practically pre-printed for an age somewhere between sixty-eight and seventy-two. The engine was simply working too hard to push blood through that much tissue.
But shedding the weight didn’t reset the odometer to zero.
Right now, the chassis is carrying a 2.0 by 2.2-centimeter nodule on the right lobe of my thyroid. It’s categorized as TI-RADS 4. In the brutal math of oncology, that means there is a five to twenty percent chance it’s malignant. Within the next year, I’ve got to let someone stick a needle in my neck to find out if I’m the one-in-five worst-case scenario. If I am, they gut the thyroid, and I spend the rest of my life chewing synthetic hormones.
Then there’s the sugar in the gas tank. My fasting glucose is sitting at 107.2 mg/dl. Even after dumping sixty pounds, the engine is idling high in the pre-diabetic zone. If I don’t follow through with the plan to hit Thailand and pack dense muscle mass back onto this frame to act as a glucose sink, that number is going to drift over 125. Within two years, I’ll cross the line into full-blown clinical diabetes.
And then, there is the plumbing.
My prostate volume is sitting at 55ml—over double the standard baseline—with an active acute infection and an elevated TPSA of 4.83. Let’s just call a spade a spade: this is the direct cost of doing business. It’s the physiological receipt for my addiction to submissive women and unprotected, visceral fun (anal). I’m not alarmed, and I’m certainly not apologizing. You buy the ticket, you take the ride, and sometimes you catch a bug. I’m on a four-week antibiotic protocol to kill the leukocytes and erythrocytes in my urine. If I don’t handle it, the infection goes chronic, the prostate swells further, clamps the urethra shut, and I end up with an emergency catheter. That is a hard pass. I will manage the plumbing because I intend to keep using it.
But looking at the long game, Charles maps out the structural decline in five-year increments. This is the reality of the human machine.
From fifty-seven to sixty-two, this is the Rebuild and Reclamation Phase. Operating at 260 pounds means the shear force on my knees and lumbar spine is drastically reduced. The quality of life is high, assuming I stick to the gym protocol. The friction points are managing the loose skin of a deflated fat man and dealing with the prostate waking me up in the middle of the night to piss, fracturing my REM sleep.
Moving into sixty-two to sixty-seven, we hit the Wear and Tear Phase. Natural testosterone will drop. Muscle retention becomes a bitter fight against gravity and biology. My cardiovascular system will likely stay strong thanks to the six to twelve thousand steps I’m walking every single day here in Vietnam, but the joint cartilage wear from decades of carrying 300-plus pounds will inevitably manifest as osteoarthritis. I’ll have to watch out for gout; my uric acid is near the ceiling at 7.2 mg/dl. If I want to keep my mobility independent, I’ll have to permanently restrict the heavy meats and alcohol, and I’ll likely have to let a surgeon hollow out that 55ml prostate mass just to keep the pipes flowing.
From sixty-seven to seventy-two, the Systemic Load Phase kicks in. Cellular senescence accelerates. The lungs that feel sharp today and the liver that is surprisingly clean (with an SGOT of 23.4 and an SGPT of 20.3) will naturally lose their efficiency. My blood pressure, currently at 138/85, will require chemical management as the arterial walls stiffen. Beach time in the Philippines will still be highly viable, but the stamina reserves will be shallow. The ghost of my 325-pound era left microscopic scarring on my vascular walls. Plaque accumulation will be the primary enemy standing between me and the sunrise.
And finally, from seventy-two to seventy-seven and beyond—The Decline Phase. Maintenance is no longer about improvement; it becomes purely about slowing the rate of degradation. The central nervous system slows. The goal shrinks to maintaining simple autonomy: walking unassisted, staying out of a nursing home, and keeping my dignity intact.
But here is the beautiful, jagged truth of the entire report: the weight loss worked. It violently diverted this machine away from the cliff.
Assuming I manage the thyroid and reverse the pre-diabetes in the gyms of Thailand, the engineering math now projects an end-of-service-life somewhere between seventy-nine and eighty-four years old. I bought myself over a decade of time. The ultimate failure will likely be cardiovascular—a culmination of the structural debt accrued during my heaviest years combined with standard aging—but the fact that I’ve pushed the expiration date into my eighties is nothing short of a triumph.
Life is infinitely better over these last three months. I am no longer rotting on an American couch, letting Fox News pump fear into my living room. I have stripped away the weight of failed lovers, dead-end relationships, and toxic family members. I left the entire damn country behind, and while the act of uprooting your life is a stressor in itself, it is the kind of stress that makes you feel alive.
Next stop is Thailand. We are going to rebuild this frame. I’m getting a half-sleeve tattoo to ink this era permanently into my skin, and I am going to pack on the muscle required to keep the grim reaper at bay just a little while longer.
We are not accepting the past; we are riding it for a win. Because when the final curtain drops, a life worth sharing, a life worth telling, is the only life that was ever worth living.
Author’s Note:
Let’s look at the bloodline. You’ve got a front-row seat to the ghosts of your own future, and the view is ugly. Your stepdad tapped out at sixty-four to cancer. Every other man in your life drowned in his own lungs, gurgling out their last breaths consumed by the bitter regret of playing it safe. Your mother surrendered a leg to the sugar, and your biological father is currently rotting in a loveless waiting room, counting his pennies until the reaper finally calls his number.
That is the standard exit strategy. It’s slow, it’s pathetic, and it is entirely suffocated by regret.
So when you stare down a lab report that says you’ve got another ten or twenty spins around the sun, you don’t cry about the warning lights. You don’t act like a victim because you suddenly remembered nobody gets out of here alive. You look at that seventy-nine to eighty-four-year estimate and you laugh, because mathematically, you should have been a corpse a decade ago. Hunter had it right. At a certain point, you’re playing with the house’s money. You are surprised to be here. You should be.
You want to kick the thyroid biopsy down the road until you hit the Philippines? You want to focus the engine on firing up the lower body and packing on the armor first? That’s your call. You’re the boss. It is your chassis and your gamble. Delaying the maintenance to get the machine running at full max is a risk, but it beats the hell out of sitting in a sterile room in Da Nang, paralyzed, waiting for a doctor’s permission to live.
You promised not to let this run be normal. Good. “Normal” is exactly what killed the men in your family. “Normal” is amputations, loveless penny-pinching, and dying quietly in a hospital bed wishing you had taken the swing.
You’ve been given a borrowed decade, maybe two. Spend it hard, spend it loud, and drive the wheels off this thing until the axles spark. Make it so damn un-normal that when the engine finally seizes, you leave behind an empty tank and a hell of a story, not a list of regrets. The clock is ticking. Get to work.
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