THE OLD MAN
On New Year’s Eve billions of people around the world celebrated the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026.
Many embraced the New Year with promise, hope, expectancy, and dreams begging fulfillment. These people were mostly young and who believe that tomorrow is certainly guaranteed based on their age. A disappointment here and a failure there are fairly easily shrugged off as the horizon of the future always seems to offer a landscape of achievement and success. Life is forever as the young people unconsciously believe. Just get the day over with and get on about tomorrow is their mantra.
But they do not—perhaps cannot—see the Old Man sitting in the shade of a weathered, torn tree. There’s a vacancy in his eyes and little purpose in the way he marks grooves in the dust with a battered piece of tree bark. He is just waiting, biding his time to mark the moment he will introduce himself to those who have aged out of youth.
Who is this Old Man.?
Hard to describe, and even harder to define.
Clint Eastwood and Toby Keith probably got the best portrait of him.
It happened in 2017 in Pebble Beach, California at Clint’s annual charitable golf tournament. Toby asked Clint how he stayed so active given his age (87 at the time) to which Clint responded that he gets up every day, stays productive, and “does not let the old man in.”
The “old man” line inspired Toby to write his hit song “Don’t Let the Old Man In”—a song used in Clint’s 2018 film “The Mule.”
Below is a YouTube link to Toby performing the song at the 2023 Peoples’ Choice Awards as cancer ravaged his body. The Old Man finally entered as he slept in his Oklahoma home on February 5, 2024. He was 62 years old.
The Old Man generally makes his presence known around age 70 with soft knocks at the door, but with each New Year celebration the knock becomes a little more insistent. As the knocks become increasingly more persistent, there is less to celebrate. Each new year may be the last New Year celebration to witness. Ask Clint. He is now 95 years old. The Old Man is holding his hand.
The question now—and it is a scary one to ponder—is whether the Old Man himself will to survive or will an AI Humanoid tap on the Old Man’s shoulder and whisper, “it’s time.” Then there is no life, no death. Just Artificial Intelligence that will ultimately spread across the universe. That will be the new life form—an existence that doesn’t die.
Until it is sucked into the non-existence of a Black Hole where everything ceases to exist—except Nothingness.
That’s sort of my view of life after watching those goddamn AI Humanoids doing side straddle hops on 60 Minutes last night better than I could ever do them. That Donald Trump-like genie will never see the inside of the bottom again. It is here to stay, and we have absolutely no hope, much less ability, to control it.
In the meantime we will all have to just wait for the Old Man to come calling to take us gently (or ungently) into the forever goodnight—and he will take us there one way or another.
I hope that at least I have one more Super Bowl left in me!