So This Is What Getting Old Is Like

I have some friends who are 21 or 22, and no doubt thinking, “Hell yes, you are old. Christ.” Most of my other close friends are around 37, because I made these close friends in the dial-up BBS era, and that’s how it all shook out. So, sure, age is relative, but tonight is the first night I’ve ever personally felt old.

I had surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in my right knee a few years ago. I can’t even pinpoint what set it off. I know that before it went completely, I tried to ski, and I had definitely — since the ski boot locks your ankles in place — jostled my knees mightily in the trying. I don’t think there’s been anything I’ve ever been worse at, than skiing. The ligament finally tore when  I was playing flag football in Fort Collins. I went down like someone shot me. I crawled off the field, in agony. I had to drive home, the 40 miles to Longmont, afterwards. It sucks that it was the right one, because it doesn’t give me an opportunity to say how every vehicle I’ve ever owned, save one old S-15, was a stick. I could have been suffering more!

I didn’t get surgery right away. It was diagnosed as a bruised meniscus, and I was told to stay off it for four weeks. I was on a crutch for the first time in my life. I wanted to play in the flag football tournament that season, so I had a goal in mind, a target, a reward for staying off it.

I played the week before the tournament. Just six or seven plays. It held up. I thought it had healed.

I lasted exactly one play the next week in the tournament. I went down, again, like someone shot me in the goddamn face with a railgun. There was no more football after the tournament, so I gave it the entire winter to heal. I then tried some roller hockey months later, made it through one game… and it fell apart the second game. I saw a specialist who instantly knew what was wrong with it.

He said that the ACL was torn, and we scheduled the surgery. I read every word about the operation on the Internet. I went for the ligament repair that involved taking a piece from a corpse, because I didn’t want them to grab from me elsewhere. I read that there was something like a 1 in 100,000 or one in a million chance of getting AIDS from the ligament. I took my chances, cos I’m a fawkin daredevil, yo. I also read that I’d definitely develop arthritis in my knee. It was a matter of when, not if. I have thought nothing of that.

Till tonight. As I was leaving work, my manager was out having a cigarette. We talked about the stuff I was working on – it wasn’t even particularly cold tonight, maybe mid-40s. Because of the fucked up and altogether worthless manner that we handle HVAC systems in this miserable country, it was almost as cold in side the office,  all day long. Pffft! But nevertheless, as I was out there, I got this dull pulse in my knee. The right knee. The one operated upon, so many days before.

I drove home and it was still there, lingering. A bit odd.

… And the pain was not quite hobbling, as I entered my abode. I shut the door and fed the cats, and grimly smiled as one shit its pants, and asked my knee in jest if this (all of this) was indeed me at my best, and my knee answered grimly: just an aching “nevermore.”

Enter dinner, which I started gobbling, with more life that I was badly bobbling, and I started up some Hugo, so that I might go code. I shut the door to shut out the cats (and the air was still sick of shitted pants) and reflected upon my decisions and the ones that I might still change. I created little fiction in a text game-riddled diction, and asked my knee if possibly there were better days ahead. It answered once again, well, you know, “nevermore.”

And I sit here just short of shallow sobbing, as my own knee performs the robbing; the stealing of my hope and soul and dreams of future lore. All alone in purgatory, with a ligament answering exclusively in the negatory, and I can’t stop myself from asking questions, more and more and more. It never answers yes, just a mirror to the mess, the aching still is making, haha, still is STILL is making of mockery of everything I ever did care for.  And no matter what I ask it, each query a bastard in a basket, the knee responds so grimly, an angry nevermo– oooooooooooookay, I think everyone gets it.