(I had a baby notwithstanding my condition. Now the baby is a know-it-all Millennial who says because I'm ALBO, maybe I should stop jogging.)



Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

He had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognised the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement - one more axe or case-bottle or fowling-piece, rescued, Crusoe-fashion, from a sinking ship.

Hold on just a minute there, Dylan Thomas. Boomers do die, of course; some people die at every age. But our GENERATION isn't "at close of day." Hahahahaha. We aren't ALL going to die. And we don't have "old age." That's a pre-Boomer, Greatest Generation concept. For us, 65 is the new ageless. It's the Greatest Generation, not ours, that's at close of day. Gen Xers have a lot of work to do. Millennials shouldn't even be driving yet. WE, we Boomers, are the center of the world and we always will be. And we don't go gentle anywhere.Okay, this raises a sore point. We've had plenty of Boomers whose words have forked lightning. Currently, Elizabeth Warren. But we have yet to come up with a Boomer U.S. president whose words have forked lightning. We've had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and we should've had Al Gore. Oh, and technically Barack Obama, a great speaker but not a lightning forker, and he was born in 1961 so he's only a Boomer on a technicality. So we need more time. That's why the thinking Boomer will support pre-Boomer Bernie Sanders this time around. He'll give us the time to persuade Elizabeth or Sherrod Brown to run, or get Howard Dean back in the game, or even rehab Hillary so she can fork. And maybe that'll make up for Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Samuel Alito, Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez, John Roberts, Karl Rove, Michele Bachmann, AND Sarah Palin, who all claim to be Boomers even though they're in fact aliens birthed in the black hole Zograb out in the Delta Quadrant.(That's Dorothy Sayers talking about her protagonist, Peter Wimsey, as he realizes that he's ALBO. At, I think he's 38 or so inWhat a drama king.)

At 65, when you're called ALBO on a regular basis, there are some actual, identifiable ... Changes. Your hips and/or knees and/or back and/or feet are no longer visited by pain; pain has brought a moving van and settled in with them in an ill-advised permanent relationship. You no longer have AN ache in your left hip, a wandering ache that was afflicting the guy down the street yesterday and tomorrow will move on to the lady next door. Oh no. Your left hip has met and fallen in love with its very own ache and they live together and are talking about getting married and having a little ache.

You get to know your body really well. One day a whole bunch of synapses spark at once and after your eyes recover from the explosion of light, which takes a while because your rods and cones are also ALBO, you realize that your life has not been an inexplicable nightmare of 38,762 episodes of food poisoning. You are in fact lactose intolerant and are going to continue to be sick every time you eat ice cream. Which you will continue to do. Also, given that you haven't run a seven minute mile for 37 years, it's just barely possible that this is a permanent situation.

Other people start to say that you're stubborn and opinionated and an insufferable know-it-all. And what of it? Stubborn and opnionated and know-it-allness are no longer bugs that you banish after reading some self help book. You don't need no stinkin self help book. Stubborn and opinionated and know-it-all are features. You've ditched all the extraneous qualities imposed on you by the nuns and the advice columnists and the school and the job training, and you're back to the essential you. That's the really interesting part of being ALBO. You become more yourself all the time. With an ache in your left hip.

We were born when the guns of World War II were still smoking. We had rock n roll, the Civil Rights movement, and we stopped a war. We're forever youn-- ageless.