Nurse the Hate: Retirement Projects

When most people hit retirement age, they often decide to pursue long held ambitions that they just couldn’t do before because of time or circumstance.  For example, my father started to get more involved in bicycling long distances and did a trip through Tuscany on one of those hard compact racing bike seats.  Having been though Tuscany before, I can say with great certainty that a rental car seat is much more comfortable than a bike seat when going from Florence to Siena.  The only seat that is comparable to discomfort for a long haul are the seats on Spirit Airlines, though I have heard Spirit is considering replacing those seats with Schwinn 10 Speed bike seats on poles.  Regardless of the seat, my father had some time and was finally able to pursue that goal.

I was reading an article about a man that decided to chuck some sort of middle management career in something horribly boring like insurance to open his own brewery.  I am of the opinion that all middle aged men want to open breweries or bar-b-que joints and all middle aged women want to open cupcake shops or yoga studios.  He was in his late 50s and said something like “If I don’t do it now, I never will.”.  I am glad he is following his dream, though if we all followed our dreams we would live in a world of strip plazas full of yoga studios, cupcake shops and microbreweries with somebody grilling out back. 

You got to hand it to Putin.  He’s 69 years old, and must be thinking “if I don’t start World War III now, when am I going to get the chance?’.  You know the way it is.  He’s stuck alone in the pandemic, a little tired of the rut he’s in running an authoritarian country with his various sycophants, and he has to be thinking “what’s next for Vlad?”.  Re-assembling the old USSR is his microbrewery.  Sure, you singlehandedly upset the world order and escalated tensions with almost the entire planet, but isn’t that part of the fun?

I am going to go on record as saying the 2020s have not been my favorite decade.  This is the “what now?” decade, where whatever bad thing you thought could happen gets replaced by something much worse you hadn’t even dreamt of.  If this isn’t the decade for some sort of alien invasion, I don’t know what is.  I will tell you this.  If you ever thought about opening a cupcake shop, I’d get cracking now.