I’m thinking about retirement

I have to tell you that I’ve been thinking about retiring. But to be fair, I’ve been thinking about retiring since I started delivering newspapers when I was eleven.

Back then, I remember thinking that I was excited to get a job and have money to travel the world and buy nice things.

Soon I realized later that it wasn’t so much a job I wanted as money.

My nice things start with a nice collection of Cool Whip bowls that I use to take leftovers to work for my lunch.

Bubba told me that you have to get good at doing nothing all day long.

My too-kind-and-loving wife didn’t even look up from her book. She merely mumbled, “Oh don’t worry about that, he’s been training his whole life for just this moment. He is a Jedi Master when it comes to doing nothing.”

If I retired, I wouldn’t be working outside the home, so I decided to be more helpful around the house just to try it out. I learned a lot. For example, there is a laundry room in our house!

I tried helping with the wash one time by putting in as many clothes as possible of any assorted color or type into the washing machine and forcing the lid down so as to save water and electricity.

I usually sit a grandkid on the lid to hold it down and tell him it’s a roller coaster ride when it hits the spin cycle. Apparently, that’s not what the manufacturer had in mind.

Besides, my too-kind-and-loving wife knows this… Last time she and my daughters had a girls’ weekend and left me with the grandkids, I taught them how to throw a hatchet, split a pumpkin with a machete, shoot a gun, and blow-up gopher holes.

At the time it seemed reasonable to me that all five-year olds need to learn these important life skills. And I think learning how to properly do the wash while saving electricity and water is also a great learning moment too.

So, as I’m getting older, I’m starting to know people who have died. This is disturbing because, well, I’m getting older and there seems to be a correlation.

I don’t know if this is news, but it is certainly alarming.

That’s how the internet works, isn’t it? It may not be news, but if we can get enough social media hits, we can create a trend and become an influencer.

It may not be true, it may not be factual, it may be useless, but the internet gives us a voice, and by golly we can go about ringing the alarm...which I find alarming.

If I get too uppity my too-kind-and-loving wife reminds me that I may have invented fake news. She says I certainly invented no news.

She pulls out some of my old articles and challenges me to find one relevant factual truthful piece of information in any of them. I merely state emphatically that artists are never understood by their contemporaries.

And like old cheese and old wine, I get better with age. She seems to agree with me and old cheese.

But I think I figured it out. It seems as you get older you can retire or die.

I haven’t started a countdown calendar which everybody that is going to retire has. If you ever want a buzz killer, just ask someone nearing retirement age about insurance or 401Ks. They can drone on for weeks.

After they retire if they don’t die, then they move on to predicting the weather with their knee or hip. But preretirement is mostly about 401Ks.

If you would like an interesting conversation about 401Ks or the power of compound interest, come find me. I can’t really give financial advice as every venture I put money into fails.

I used to work with a guy named Ted (McDougal) and every day he would ask me where I was investing my money so he could move it to somewhere else.

Apparently, his strategy worked because he’s retired, and I’m not. But I’m thinking about it.