A Portrait of the Dumbass as an Old Man

Too Much

-- as in the Dave Matthews song. I think I am suffering from some existential / consumerism indigestion.

So, as background, I have recently replaced:

• My 24 year old 27" console TV with a 52" Sharp Aquos LC52D64U. Under 3" thick, it worked out great, my son was in for his birthday 2 weeks ago and he and his buds hung it for me.
• My 15 year old Sony tuner for a Sony 5300 tuner with 5 HDMI inputs, plus old stuff like phono. Nice piece of gear, but 3x $ I was expecting to spend. But, I do keep things a long time.
• My April 99 Dell 2x500Mhz home computer with a 4x2.4Ghz Dell workstation, due in this week.

Then a few weekends ago visited my friend David in Columbus OH -- of the 4000 bottle wine cellar, the gourmet cooking, the 1Ghz ethernet home computing setup (plus 2.1 terabytes of RAID disks for his 100000 pictures -- he is a wonderful photographer and a photoshop wizard) and the house wired for cable AND satellite. 48 years old, he and his wife have no children and are consumers' consumers.

Then the next weekend had lunch with an old high school friend of mine in Louisville who is 3rd generation president of the family company. He has done a great job with it, diversifying and training his son to take over for him. He and his wife, empty nesters like us, recently moved into a huge, beautiful house across the street from Cherokee Park.

So, it's just been nagging at me. I was brought up lower middle class in a family of 7 kids, I just don't think I'm cut out to be nouveau rich. It just doesn't feel right. Goddamned catholic upbringing, you never get to enjoy anything.

Still, you look at our resource/carbon footprint, and despite the prius and recycling and keeping things for 10s of years, my footprint is still 1000x a third worlder's. And, my wife astutely pointed out, if you add in our 4 grown kids, our total footprint is much larger than our childless friends in Columbus.

Looked at vacation lake homes in Tennessee last weekend. Saw some nice stuff. The 2nd house will definitely help our footprint!

Well, I guess I'll just hope for Real Good Tech to fix all this up.

Haven't biked for 2 weeks. Biking will be over soon.

Meanwhile, I've gotten to drinking probably 1-5 oz alcohol per day, probably averaging around 3. I am my own science fair project, what fun! I think that once I got over averaging 2 oz/day, I could no longer drink enough water to rehydrate myself. So I think I am permanently dehydrated. The back of my throat/postnasal region is always scratchy -- but a few drinks in the evening and I won't notice it! My legs want to cramp all the time too. I sleep more and exercise and read less.

So, I'm going to have to consciously cut back to weekends and Wednesdays (LBJ), see if that helps the dehydration. Seems like I want to be addicted to something. I quit smoking so colds wouldn't last so long, the one I caught in Quebec still lasted 2 weeks, I thought, I should go back to smoking.

Plus, I think the alcohol is depressing me, to where the christians and other dumbasses who have always been there are getting me down more than they should. I guess we'll see.