The Conservative Cave
The Bar => Comedy Central => Topic started by: Chris on February 03, 2009, 02:15:39 AM
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5. If you've ever been trapped in close quarters with a not-altogether-there senior, some place like the back of a Prius, an elevator or a changing room (who are we to judge?), then you may have noticed that olfactory treat resembling a hint of urine and mothballs with maybe some Old Spice and perogies thrown in for good measure.
While it's possible your grandfather has misread the recipe for meth and is trying to set up a lab, it's also possible he's fallen victim to the fearsome one-two punch of scent markers that prey on our elderly like ravenous stink hounds falling on weak members of the pack.
Accounting for the urine smell isn't entirely difficult. Reports say upwards of 53 percent of elderly people suffer some incontinence as a result of losing bladder elasticity with age, which in turn means you simply can't hold as much as you used to. As the detrusor muscle--the muscle that lets you write your name so neatly in all those snow banks--also begins to fail, so to does your ability to hold in your musky morning dew. The result is, sadly, the occasional splatter across the inside of your old guy slacks.
The other ingredient to our crusty old fella bouquet is much more exotic and potentially comes as a result of the psychology of being ancient. For whatever reason, the older you get the more you never want to throw shit out. Hoarding is actually a serious issue for a number of elderly people. They have a difficult time understanding that those stacks of newspapers from 1963 really aren't going to become anymore useful and are taking up valuable space that could be used to store Hummel figurines or pictures of people who are dead.
The issue with hoarding crap or just storing everything you've ever bought since the 70s is that shit gets musty and gross. The natural weapon against this, if you think like someone in their 80s, is to scatter mothballs about like fairy dust. Behold the solution to one problem and the cause of another. Suddenly everything grandma owns smells like it's been hidden in trunk since the Depression, only opened so that grandpa can add a tiny sparkle of whiz for zest.
(more...) (http://www.cracked.com/article_16952_6-obnoxious-old-people-habits-explained-by-science.html)
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6. Old people are pissed off and want you to know it. They yell at you to get off their lawn and get a damned haircut when you're across the street, wearing a hat. They seem to constantly be venting hundreds of years of pent up, decrepit rage.
But the reason goes beyond, "Being old sucks and they're mad about it." Most misdirected oldster rage comes from fear that results from their vestigial "fight or flight" mechanism. Nothing makes a person more fearful than seeing their bodily functions slowly shut down before their eyes, and there isn't exactly a way to escape from it. So "fight" is all that's left.
It doesn't help that today's old-folks were raised at a time when it wasn't considered cool to talk about your problems in any kind of constructive way. You sucked it up and lived with it. If you committed suicide, they would literally call you a fag in the obituary. Well, if you "suck it up" for 80 years it eventually just overflows onto everyone who walks past your house.
So despite how thrilling retirement sounds when you're 24 and planning on spending every waking moment of it drunk and naked in a kiddie pool; for elderly folks who wake up seven times a night to go to the bathroom, hobble around with arthritis and spend half their social security on food for a cat that pisses on all their clothes (see #5), retirement can be a long, drawn out frustration of building tension with no release and no control.
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That whole thing sounds like it was written by the same guy who does Badass of the Week :rotf: