Prone

First of all: don't panic. Let's all be like those novelty T-shirts that fuck up the "Keep Calm and Carry On" British World War II slogan by wholesale replacing the second part with a non sequitur related to the topic you actually want to talk about, usually coffee. Or beer? Maybe wine. I'm not sure which one is most likely, but that's definitely the entire list of options.

But no! My point was let's not be like those posters/shirts that fuck it up, let's do the thing that's in the non-ironic original propaganda poster designed to both extol and elicit that most British of British cultural customs, the inability and/or absolute refusal to allow oneself access to one's own inner emotional life. Remember the context of that shit was 1939 and onward, when war had been declared and, on this tiny, sullen island starved of prospects of hope and vitamin D. They had to watch one by one as their friends on the continent and France all fell to the relentless Hun, and an air-raid siren in the darkest hours of every night was more likely than not. The best they could manage as a rallying slogan wasn't about stern resistance, survival or a bright spark of even relief in a distant, yet undeniable triumphant future, but basically boiled down to "look, nobody wants to hear you whinging, you twat." Keep your head down, keep shuffling forward, it's not like any proactive steps you take will prevent you from being buried alive by burning rubble falling from the sky. The only reasonable response is the surrender of your personal human emotional agency. Your fate has been marked for you by a Protestant god with all the human character of a banking clerk assessing a loan teetering on default.

What I'm trying to say, obviously, is that everything is fine! I know I've got a small but inexplicably devoted readership who might be moved to worry by any kind of news regarding my overall health, so I wanted just to say right up front, in my usual succinct and inimitable* style, that I'm great! Everything is great. Well, except my cholesterol. And something about my prostate. But other than that, I have the body of a 46 year old. For context, two months ago I turned 45.

Yes, today my youngest child took and passed his driver's test, so I'm now a parent of three humans old enough to bear state-issued documents verifying their ability to make life-and-death decisions piloting a series of controlled explosions propelling a full ton of fiberglass and steel and regular glass at gas-station-wrecking speeds. But that's progress, right? Rites of passage are celebratory and validating of lives well lived under the grace of some luck granting continued good health, auguring a trajectory of social productivity if not success. To take an unmitigated good like that and turn it into a launching point of self-serving wallowing about the passage of time and the parasitic, vampiric thievery of my vigor and vitality would be short-sight, selfish and ultimately self-defeating.

It's a coincidence of course that this latest milestone happened in close temporal proximity with my annual physical. And I'm happy to announce that I'm fine! Mostly fine! Like I said before, totally almost completely fine! Or as mostly fine as you can be when most of the discussion in said physical is centered around your prostate.

But I guess I'm looking at it all wrong. Maybe what I'm missing is that this is proof is that, even at 45, I'm not out of milestones yet. I just need to reframe the emphases in the phrasing of "I just had my first doctor's visit centered almost entirely around my current state of and continued prospects for my prostate health" less as an elegy for the slow dying of my youth and, well, just the literal dying of all of me and more of a sign that there's still so much more for me to discover about myself as time marches forward.

Even at 45, there are still whole worlds to explore inside me, undiscovered truths to drag into the light for the betterment of my self-understanding and, sometimes a biopsy.

What I have is more to look forward to. Like in five years when I get my first colonoscopy.

But everything is great. Not perfect, but great. Nothing a few temporary courses of pills can't fix. I just have to learn to accept that "perfect" is behind me. Way behind me. Perfect is behind me just like the doctor was when she checked my prostate for me, and performing roughly--I said roughly--the same action.

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*It counts as inimitable if it's a style nobody would ever consciously choose to imitate it.