The Early Boomer

I was born in January of 1946. That makes me one of the very first of the baby boomers. I'm the person who will cause Social Security and Medicare to bankrupt the country. There will soon be millions of me, thin of hair, gray of skin, and vice versa; short of memory; flabby of triceps; dim of eye. It is we whom you will encounter hobbling through your intersections, oozing 45 in the fast lane, fumbling for the pennies in our change purses at the checkout line, slowing. . . . . you. . . . . . down. The zombies are us.

We are scary in many ways: We have some money. We came of age in the dreaded Sixties, so we have . . . ideas. We care about politics. We understand escrow and equity. We own stocks. We have not just children, but descendants. We still read books. Some of us even know when to use "who" and when to use "whom." We took Latin. We saw Mickey Mantle play and greeted the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. We don't understand your Facebook references, but we are still there, on Facebook. We are judging you. And we are learning to blog.

Most frightening of all: We are retired, and we . . . have . . . time.

This is my first blog post ever. In the future you will see here small essays that are meant to be funny, some resurrected from many years ago, from a different avatar of me. (We have strange ideas about funny. And we understand the true meaning of "avatar.") You will see, here, political rants ablaze with left-wing ideas. You will see screeds and diatribes and philippics and jeremiads. You will see some bad poetry.

Think of our blogs as the last, croaked words of a generation.

But we're not ready to go yet. The actuaries tell us we have two decades left, on average. By 2030, according to some predictions, the machines will have grown smart enough to have saved you from our legacies: from the flood and blood of melting glaciers, from the nightmare of no-more-tigers, from the invisible dams that keep the wealth of the rich from trickling down at all to the poor. Perhaps.

I'd like to shake hands with those machines. I think I'll stay around till then.