New Year, ‘Old’ You: An Excerpt from ‘How to be an Old Person’

Hi, Brian Boone, Humorist Books editor and Humorist Books Book Blog proprietor here. One other thing about me that most people don’t know is that I’m the world’s leading oldologist, an expert on Old People. Through by work at the Center of Oldological Technologies (C.O.O.T.), I’ve extensively studied what it is that makes people into Old People, and how they can maintain and strengthen their quintessential oldness. My findings are how a fully illustrated guide to being the best Old Person an Old Person can be. How to be an Old Person: Everything to Know for the Newly Old, Retiring, Elderly, or Considering is now in print. For certified Old People and per their frequent request, it’s available as “an actual book you can hold in your darn hands instead of having to look at on the computer” as well as in ebook format if you’re just a curious bystander about the ways of this fascinating subculture or you, yourself, are turning Old, about to be Old, or would like to be Old someday.

This guide is highly necessary, because being an Old Person comes with it a whole system of rules, regulations, and dictums honed by many previous generations of Old People. Here’s an excerpt that one of my research subjects dubbed “gangbusters” and “more tantalizing than Ann Miller showing a little ankle in one of those dancing pictures they used to play down at the movie house where I met your grandmother.” Coffee anyone?

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Care for a Cup of Joe?

Coffee is big in American society, and it has been for a long time, although what it looks like has changed. From shoveling spoonfuls of what looked and tasted like bitter dirt into stovetop percolators, to Mr. Coffee automatic machines, to the espresso and frou-frou Starbucks-type beverages of today, coffee has evolved. But not if you’re an Old Person. The idea of coffee is thoroughly stuck in the past for you, where it belongs, but it also extends its influence to many other areas of your life.

Being an Old Person means wiling away what little time you have left on this earth by filling your days with mindless rituals and routines. Your morning coffee ordeal can take care of some of that. Even though you’re only going to drink one cup, because too much makes you nervous, or have to use the restroom, or unable to sleep 14 hours after consumption, you should still make it count.

1. When using your yellowed Mr. Coffee machine with the blinking “12:00” clock you purchased 35 years ago, make sure to brew it extra weak — one small scoop into the filter basket and then fill up the chamber with as much tap water as it will take.

2. Get your accessories ready: a dainty sugar bowl filled with crusty sugar and a spoon you can just leave in there.

3. With sugar comes cream or, if you’re an Old Person, that weird Coffee-Mate powder they have in tire stores and at AA meetings, or the milklike refrigerated stuff made from vegetable oil, corn syrup, and assorted artificial flavors. So creamy!

4. Take an hour to drink your coffee, until it is cold. Throw the rest of the pot away by pouring it down the drain.

5. Save your coffee craving for a piece or two of coffee-flavored hard candy, which you will keep in a little dish in the living room or in your purse or pants pocket.

6. Save the coffee can — your coffee definitely comes in a can — for nails, pennies, and other random household artifacts.

Remember: This all can be avoided if you’re an Old Person who gets coffee with other Old Persons at the McDonald’s at 6 a.m. every morning and just hangs out there with the fellas or gals, discussing The Good Old Days, conservative politics, and how these kids today with the skateboards and rock music have no darn manners.