Okay so I doubt we will ever hear Taylor Swift write a song about feeling forty-two, but if we do all the more power to her.  One thing we just don’t hear about is men and what it feels like to begin to age.  I mean our only reference cannot just be The Hair Club of America, right?   The fact that “getting older” is only a women’s issue is antiquated.

The fact is, I hate getting older.  Wisdom, smisdom.  Lines that tell a story on my face?  The lines must be asking is he getting shorter and his nose getting bigger or have you seen his balls recently?   They are as confused as I am about aging.

Grey hair makes you look more distinguished and accomplished.  It actually makes you look like you have accomplished grey hair.  If it comes in like George Clooney, sure.  If it comes in one patch on your left side and then works itself down to your pubic area, you look like Spike from the Gremlins.  Don’t even let me start in on Just for Men hair dye.  I had one brown ear for three days.  Everyone thought I had skin cancer until I coughed up the truth to my mother because she was on the phone with Dr. Pulcheik, her dermatologist.  “It’s a brown funny color on the tip and behind his ear.” She’s telling Dr.Pulcheik.  Then she loudly shouts, “Your grey hair is really coming in thick around your discolored ear.”

When I was twenty two I would have wrote a song about being twenty two too.  You have the whole world in front of you.  I would go to the gym at twenty two to socialize and sweat off the six pack of beer and the pizza I ate every single night.  At forty two I’m at the gym for two hours to make sure the chicken breast I ate does not give me man breasts.

When I was twenty two I could drink and feel fine the next day, now I wake up after two vodka-sodas with a three day hangover and toe cramps. Young me was emotional vacant.  This me cries at a touchdown, the Iphone commercial, or any episode of The Goldbergs.  In fact, I was recently with a few college friends and these words came from my mouth “have you had a good cry lately?”

With age comes wisdom, and it is that wisdom that age has bestowed why, I can never find my keys, I forget my kids names, and I have changed my password nearly two hundred times.  At least I’m young at heart right?  Well I wish my heart would start telling that to my knees because if I bend down I have to call to one of my children to come help me up.  Sometimes nobody comes because I called them by the wrong name.

(Enter musical bridge) You don’t know about me.  You don’t know that if I’m not making 100,000 plus a year salary at 42 I consider myself a failure. You don’t know that I wish everything would be alright everyday and that my family will thrive.  You don’t know about me.  You don’t know that I still look at my wife and see a woman of twenty two and want to do things that twenty-two year olds do.  You don’t know about me.  If I keep dancing like I’m twenty two, in my mind, I have a Prince coolness. In reality, I’m probably still doing the Macarena.

So why get old?  Why go through the grey hair, the wrinkles, the toe cramps, the memory loss, and did I mention the confused balls?  The answer.  Life is good.  The world like age goes on.  If those lines on my face told a different story, that would be a much more superficial , unrewarded story.  Nobody wants to get old.  It’s never the getting there that sucks it is simply the end result of the journey.

So maybe the twenty two year old Taylor Swift summed it up best in her song Twenty-Two.  “We’re happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.  It’s miserable and magical.  Oh yeah, tonight’s the night we forget about the deadline.”