Aging with the Sleek Ferocity of a Jungle Cat

By Jeff Wing   |   May 27, 2025
Elder skinny jeans enthusiast’s self-regard (Public Domain)

I occupy a very particular demographic; balding older men who don’t know how awful they look in skinny jeans. We are many. It’s nearly an epidemic. A teary woman in the Vons’ parking lot shakily pointed her finger at me and used the word “plague,” which I thought was going a bit far. And for the record, I’m not truly oblivious. I have occasional fleeting doubts about the way I look in these skinny jeans. 

I swat these misgivings away like the meaningless little gnats they are. I have a righteous derriere and I’m working these jeans, baby! Zig-zag-zig! (snaps his fingers in that triumphant Z shape he saw on TV once). As you can see, I am firmly ensconced is this self-deluding demographic.

We Aren’t Hard to Spot

We aren’t hard to spot. We look like 17-year-olds who, in act two of a heart-squeezing two-billion-dollar Steven Spielberg parable, miraculously age 40 years in a seamless CGI moment, enlarging and sagging and swelling distastefully into youthful attire that is suddenly age-inappropriate and disturbing. Woo hoo! 

You’ve seen us walking casually about the downtown area, animatedly gabbing and gesturing, parting the pedestrian traffic as surely as would a mob of lipless zombies staggering up the main drag with their arms extended. People stare. Take a picture, baby! 

Strutting around in our ill-fitting get-ups, we stir in the previously happy-go-lucky crowds an indefinable dread. Some lovely weekend morning on Coast Village Road you may be quietly reveling at a sidewalk café, sipping your expertly prepared cappuccino in full sun, that first dose of caffeine infusing your bloodstream with warmth and gladness – life is marvelous! Not so fast. Here I come in my skinny jeans. Tremblingly put that cup of coffee down, relax your smile and take a brow-furrowing hour to review your own life in the sudden shadow cast by my skinny jeans. You’re welcome, and happy Saturday!

We Skinny Jeans Swingers 

We skinny jeans swingers are not only about finger-snapping to Petula Clark and slowly lurching into the middle of the room to do that awful ballroom dance swirl whenever any music of any kind plays anywhere. Growing older does make one ruminative, which is an olden-times word for “looking at my iPhone.” 

Many are the occasions I’ve been comfortably seated in public transportation, the other passengers sneaking frightened glances at the rivets on my straining skinny jeans, wondering if and when these faux fasteners will structurally fail and come flying off my tormented pants in a stinging cloud of ballistic copper. 

Then the bus will slowly negotiate a turn, and a bolt of beautiful unfiltered sunshine will slant in and bathe the heavily cross-hatched backs of my spotted hands – hands like chemically burned leather – and I’ll be moved to speak aloud in the sonorous voice of a poet. “Starring Vincent Price as The Abominable Doctor Phibes.” As I stare at the backs of my withered hands, I know the other passengers are smiling warmly and exchanging glances of endearment, because they don’t know that Doctor Phibes was a hideous 1970s movie ghoul with a mouth in the side of his neck.

The Phenomenon of Otherwise Dignified and Seasoned Persons

Forever Youngsters gyrate madly to Zeppelin (Public Domain)

The phenomenon of otherwise dignified and seasoned persons dressing like swaggering college freshmen – it’s taking the world by storm! California may just be the epicenter of this shift in the tectonic plates of Graceful Aging. Sociologists have been brought into the picture, but their papers and journals and peer-reviewed jibber-jabber have failed to answer this fundamental question; what the hell am I thinking? 

I can tell you from personal experience that simply walking into a Tilly’s fitting room at my age raises red flags, flags which are soon accompanied by signal flares as I loudly grunt and holler my way into apparel that no loving God should allow his creation to witness on a bag of ham such as myself. On exiting the fitting room it’s not uncommon to find a commotion that I’ve only recently realized has me at its center. 

On one occasion I flung the fitting room door open with a flourish, feeling powerfully attractive in my skinny jeans, and saw a family of four turn and run with such blind alarm they plowed down two racks of halter tops and a clipboard-clutching little sales associate in their panicked rush to escape. When the terrorized family hit the street I was, unfortunately, hot on their heels, believing us to be fleeing a common enemy. When one of them turned and glimpsed me pounding along behind them – my middle-aged t-rex arms held daintily aloft as I ran, my Older Gentleman ostrich legs prancing in their skinny jeans – well, their screams alerted me to the awful truth. So, yeah.

I Could Try Aging Gracefully

Please, Miss. You’re making a scene… (Public Domain)

I could try aging gracefully, like Howard Hughes, say. But what’d be the point? I don’t want people to look at me and say “My, he’s aging gracefully.” I’d rather they thought, “That previously dissolving older man has halted the passage of time by squeezing into those blood-crushing skinny jeans.” I know what I’m doing, even if you don’t. 

Then there are times I begin to wonder if my Western obsession with youth is completely facile. In those moments I dwell upon the archaeological evidence of Iron Age society and the veneration of the aged and wise sages among them. Recently discovered cuneiform records describe the glorified village elder being respectfully helped along to the Next World on some sort of entrapping bamboo edifice, fed a ghastly broth with fingers floating in it, and finally slathered with ceremonial mud and pushed over a thousand-foot waterfall. I snap out of my reverie and desperately renew my loud struggle with the skinny jeans until security begins banging on the fitting room door.

The point is this; I have no intention of retiring to Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Not for me the daily cardigan, the fey-voiced conversations with choo-choo trains and hand puppets. That time will surely come, as it must for all of us. While I can, though, I will fight that encroaching shadow world with all my strength, and in trousers that cleave like automotive paint. While I have my senses I will wear the armor of youth, prowl the streets with the nonchalance of the ageless and brave. You see, I want my outside to reflect exactly how I feel on the inside – like a quantity of finely ground hamburger poured into a mold. COWABUNGA!!

 

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