Getting Older is just Advancing to the Next Level

I’m not going to lie, I’m sore this morning. I spent most of the weekend camping out and getting beaten with foam swords and screaming like a little girl smiting my enemies in a heroic and masculine fashion. It was an awesome good time, but, I’m paying for it now. Apparently, there’s this thing that happens as you get older, and you don’t just pop back up from a weekend of extreme heat exposure, physical activity you’re not used to, and a largish bottle of some sort of white wine that was disappointingly not pinot. Of course, on top of that, as you get older the chances of you having a job that requires your brain to function properly in order to do it goes up. This makes everything about enjoying your weekend more difficult when it comes to Monday morning.

It’s okay. I don’t think of it as my body, mind and will to live slowly and steadily breaking down… no, that all just happens as part of natural entropy and has nothing to do with the fact that my arms ache so bad today that typing this is actually an extremely difficult exercise in muscle control. No, no no.

I’ve advanced to the next level.

I grew up playing video games. Back then, games were meant to challenge your skills, reflexes and abilities to concentrate at ever increasing speeds, with ever increasing complexities, so basically the opposite of the modern gaming model, which is to make things extremely easy so that everyone can finish it and skip straight to shooting each other on multiplayer mode. Those old games, though, didn’t have multiplayer modes, they had infinite growth difficulty levels. Ever growing, higher and higher, closer and closer towards impossible.

I think life is like that sometimes. You keep going, overcoming and defeating increasingly difficult situations until one day you hit level 87 and the bricks are falling so fast that you just can’t see them on the screen anymore, and boom, game over… input your initials, you’ve set a new record.

It’s meant to get more difficult to do things as you get older because you’re meant to get more skilled as a player.

I suppose you could say that knowing your limits is part of increasing your skill, but I don’t believe that I have limits that aren’t imposed by law-enforcement officers, so don’t bother with that. I’m just going to keep going.

Hell, I’m going to make a jump for the battle axe, do a barrel roll and beat PacMan.

I should probably expect to put up with some stiff muscles as a result.