The other side of 70

70 years old? Really? Inconceivable.

I started this blog a few days short of three years ago, when I hit 70. In my initial post I complained how being 70 was, well, inconceivable.

... Just like Sicilian in The Princess Bride says. Inconceivable! Wasn't I thirty years old just a half hour ago? Or maybe that was forty. Or fifty. It's all flown by so fast.

And now, here I am, 70. Seventy. Sev-en-ty. Man that sounds old. But I don't feel old. I just feel like---like WTF!

Things have change in three years. It's no longer inconceivable that I'm 70 going on 74. What's inconceivable to me now is different. Like:

How the hell did I (with more than a little help from Bobbi) manage to run a business, maintain a house, raise three kids, watch the Celts and the Pats (she didn't help with that), maintain our own relationship and personal sanity, and still have time for friends, to and for this kind of foolishness? And a lot more.

Today it seems to take too much of the day to get through simple chores that I would have knocked off in a much shorter time.

I've even got the Internet to help me get stuff done. There's lots of stuff I don't have to figure out because someone on the Internet has already figured it out, and Google helps me find their answer. I don't have to write letters, stick them in envelopes and take them to the post office. I can send email. I don't have to go to the store to buy stuff, I can do it online. I've got 24x7 access to most  things. And...

Oh.

Well, maybe the Internet is a mixed blessing. If I was writing an essay like this, sans Internet, I'd be typing in my word processor and I would have been done long ago, because I wouldn't have taken time to find the original "essay" and link to it, because you can't link to a piece of paper. Or a file that's on your computer.

I wouldn't have groveled through YouTube's new, unfamiliar interface trying to find my fucking videos! To find them I had to go to my email (thanks, Google, thanks Internet) find an email in which I'd mailed a link, go to the link, reverse engineer my way to something called "YouTube Creator Studio" where some, but not all, of my videos have gotten squirreled away, then figure out how to get there on my own. That bit of yak shaving has probably doubled the time that I've spent writing this.

I wouldn't have searched for the photo of Wallace Shawn at the top of this post. Took less than a minute. But still. And yes, I know "inconceivable" is misspelled. Well, screw it. I'm not going to find one that's spelled right. Enough is enough.

So, yeah, it's a mixed blessing. But still, even not counting distractions, I'm lots slower than I was when I was thirty -- if I was ever thirty.

See that's weird. I have memories of the experiences of someone who seems to be me, but that person is so different from the 70+ year old me, that's it's hard to believe that it's me.

Not quite inconceivable, but close.