Been away a while. I had fallen into a deep depression. I’m better now. I’ll explain.

You know how when you wake up in the morning and go to brush your teeth, or shave, and you’re kind of tired, and you don’t have your glasses on, so everything seems kind of blurry but okay? Well, about two weeks ago, I had the misfortune of putting my glasses on before the morning ritual. And what I saw, quite frankly, made my crepe-y skin crawl!

I finally got a good look at myself, and that’s what spiraled me into the depths of despair. My eyes can now be penalized by airlines for exceeding the 50-pound bag limit. From the back, with the size of my old-man ears, I look like an AMC Gremlin with the doors open. (No rear-ending jokes, please!) And I don’t even want to talk about the tangled forest growing out from my nostrils. So I dealt with it the only way I know how: I locked myself in my room for 13 days with nothing but two 1.75-liter bottles of Bombay Sapphire, until my wife threatened me with staying, so I came out. (Spoiler alert: She stayed anyway. Pass the gin.)

That’s when I realized, I gotta get in shape! As the great Mickey Mantle often said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” I wasn’t quite sure how getting in shape would reduce my eye bags or close the ear doors on my head car, but I needed a transition to this next part, and this is the best I could come up with.  #lazywriting #yougetwhatyoupayfor

One of my cousins, who works with seniors, has been hocking me (pestering, for the non-Yiddish speakers) for months now about playing this relatively new game called pickleball. Sounds like something you’d get at a country fair down South… take a pickle, roll it around in dough and breading, deep-fry it, and voila… a pickleball!

But what it is, is a game similar to tennis, played with a paddle instead of a racket, on a lined court with a net, only shrunk way down. (“What is this, a tennis court for ants??”) I asked my friend Matt if he had heard of pickleball, and here’s what he told me:

“To me pickleball is a blend of tennis and paddleball—it’s like a corned beef sandwich with cheese—you could put them together, except that you wind up ruining both.”

Apparently, though, pickleball has become the ‘in’ game among seniors. And there was quite a controversy at North Shore Towers here on Long Island, largely a senior community where Matt’s 90-year-old mother lives. It seems they converted the basketball court there for pickleball, but the players complained that the out-of-bounds area was too small and they could get hurt chasing down balls. Which leads me to wonder: Don’t you have to first get some kind of momentum going before there’s any injury risk? Could they shuffle into a fence and break a hip??

Meanwhile, Matt wondered who at the Towers is even playing pickeball, let alone basketball? Everyone who lives there has got a walker and a home attendant. For them, Matt said, WALKING is a contact sport!

In fact, he overheard a conversation from a senior league pickleball tournament at the Towers. This is actual dialogue:

“Murray, do you see the ball?”

“No, I can’t see anything. Am I moving yet?”

Personally, I’d like to get into a game with Murray and the boys.. I’m pretty sure I can take them! But after running them ragged and winning the day, I’d have to look myself in the mirror, and .. well, you know how THAT will turn out!