Ye olde grav­el knee has been act­ing up late­ly after 23 years, and the pain is an approx­i­mate­ly exact match for what reha­bil­i­ta­tion felt like back then; using bike ped­als to slow­ly tear my knee into move­ment. The first time my leg went all the way around I yelped loud enough that the whole room shut up.

I don’t want to call it a dif­fer­ence, but what has changed in the inter­ven­ing is both a stronger appre­ci­a­tion for what my body can do and what it is will­ing to let my brain con­vince it to do; and I don’t want to call it an accep­tance, but per­haps an ease regard­ing my inevitable defeat to entropy.

Those who know me well are annoyed at how often I tell them “l’en­tropie est le seule­ment dieu”.

But almost all of the good hot dog spots are closed; it mat­ters not whether thou stanned for the chili from Hot Dog Inn or Steve’s, you can’t get either now. Peo­ple use Chat GPT to read tarot. The old flea mar­ket lot is now an Ama­zon Ware­house. It’s fine if you’re grouchy about this. I am. But I get over most things more quick­ly now. “An entropy of my abil­i­ty to care” if you’re young. But maybe aging is sim­ply a pru­dence of invest­ment in things, an ease with change, an indif­fer­ence to vicis­si­tude. Unless you die young, you’re here to play the long game whether or not you learn the rules.

Peo­ple hold their cam­eras up to record their favorite songs. Peo­ple used to hold their lighters up. Peo­ple used to hold their babies up dur­ing a roy­al progress, or to see the last bit of sun­set on the last day of sum­mer, or just to hold them up as a way of say­ing “you haven’t caught me yet, God.”