Old Man Riverside

The joke about Americans is that we don't know where any foreign country is until we start bombing it. I say ha, the joke's on you, World, because even then we don't bother. How many Americans could locate Afghanistan on a world map without Wolf Blitzer standing in front of it and little explosion graphic markers on it to show where we were smokin' terrorists out of their holes? The answer is, effectively, not a lot. And we've had boots on the ground there for 15 years, which constitutes more than a third of my life and I'm middle aged as all fuck.

America's exceptional resistance to learning notwithstanding, the basic idea behind the joke is sound: the best way to become the world's greatest expert in a thing is to have it become a problem for you. Parents of children with, say, cystic fibrosis could school experts in the field on how the condition works and the best strategies for amelioration. When I was buying my house, I could parse mortgage documents of various types, which meant I was maximally aware of when I was being screwed and exactly how hard. OK, that last one wasn't very helpful in a practical sense, but if I learned anything from my swinging, post-divorce single days, a forceful pegging is more tolerable if you're aware it's coming.

I have a co-worker who, out of the blue, had a law firm inform her of an outstanding debt in collection that would now be moving into wage garnishment. In the space of about a week, I saw an adult woman with a considerably artistic (read: non-math) bent become a world-beater in the fields of credit reports, the operation of U.S. civil courts and how to tell a competent lawyer from a palm-greasing shyster before she hit the receptionist's desk. That case was dismissed, by the way. That was an impressive transformation to watch.

If the crisis is acute and not chronic, the information you absorb (like my mortgage acumen) atrophies at a speed relative to that with which it was taken in. My 30-day escrow closed in December of that year, so by Valentine's Day, I was back to not quite remembering how amortization worked, or even really what it meant. Amor... something to do with love? Even if it's wrong, it's Latin-y enough to be pretentious, so even if it's not right, I can still sound smarter than somebody out there, which is pretty close to the same thing as being right.

Now I find myself in the position of slowly becoming an expert on something new that's affecting me: hyperlipidemia. It's Greek instead of Latin, but still... impressive, right? What it basically means is this: my cholesterol is about 30 points higher than optimal. I'm not an expert on it yet. Luckily the existing internet literature on it assumes a level of medical illiteracy all the way down to about a four-year-old level and just makes the distinction between "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol. I'm not entirely embarrassed to say this is about my speed so far.

For right now, I'm taking it slow. The fix is pretty simple: get more exercise, reduce certain foods like red or fatty meat, saturated fats and full-fat dairy and cheese. In America, of course, these are the ingredients for 95% of all food except desserts, and probably still about 60% of those. You probably think I'm joking. I am not joking.

It's a little bit of an existential crisis, in both the angsty and the literal senses, as the first pinpricks of wear begin to show in the inky black velvet backdrop of a firmament shrouding the cosmic stage-play that is my life. The more I learn about arterial plaque and atherosclerosis, the more time I spend absent-mindedly pressing a palm against my chest, just to feel the thing working like it should, knowing I have some kind of agency in how long it continues to do so. It's all a bit real. My physical was on Monday and since then I've found myself to be a bit more emotionally vulnerable and a bit fragile.

Of course that could also be the result of having had my first prostate exam. Which reminds me, I was wrong about what I said before: it's upsetting even if you know it's coming.