Mark Aldrich

‘Do People Your Age …?’

On the eve of 57, no less.

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I’ve strolled past enough of life’s temporal landmarks—birthdays that end in zero or five, or the first time someone called me “sir,” or when I turned 28 and AARP “free gift” mailers started to arrive—that I did not think one could jump out of an alley and surprise me, but it happened. And, yes, “surprised” is a euphemism for “enraged.”

Okay, “enraged” is an exaggeration. I did NOT hit the other person, nor did I try to.

Please allow me to set the scene for you: I am 56. (This is all anyone needs to know, right?)
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2024 (Covid’s Version)

Posted on December 31 by Mark Aldrich

My brain was producing a redacted document, live.

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There does not need to be a term more precise for the phenomenon of brain fog than “brain fog.” Of course, one may want to quantify things, determine a precise number with a decimal point and a percentage sign to let people know that under this number one does not have brain fog, but above it … hoo boy! Above this percentage point, one should not be able to complete, you know, those things that people write. You know, sentences!

I spent most of 2024 in a case of brain fog. It relented in August, eight months after my first and so far only case of Covid. I do not know how bad a case of post-Covid brain fog I lived with this year, and medicine does not have a firm, numbers-with-a decimal-point-and-percentage mark grasp on the phenomenon at this point anyway. I still have it, a little, and I now consider brain fog to be a part of what I refer to as me, like my gray hair.

Physicians around the world started to publish papers in 2020 that describe and measure cognitive deficits patients encounter thanks to Covid; patients score lower on IQ tests while sick and also after, and some patients of a certain age (around my age: mid-to-late 50s) exhibit symptoms of early-onset dementia post-Covid. Those who have contracted Covid more than once display even more serious cognitive troubles. The library of peer-reviewed articles in medical journals about the nervous system problems experienced during and after Covid grows each day. I do not have a comprehensive list, but there are many social media accounts that compile the articles, and I can direct anyone who is curious to those. The articles are cautious, as they should be, yet all describe a condition that is still only partly understood. Millions of people who have had COVID have suffered cognitive deficits if not declines.

I do not know if I am one of those cases. I only know what I experienced this year. I only know that until August I sometimes had trouble following what people said to me and what I read, and that when I started a sentence, both in conversation and at the keyboard, it felt like an adventure to reach the end.
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No Barium to the Future

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Mark Aldrich

Dr. Oliver Sacks gave me a gift for my birthday some years ago: a writing prompt that I use each year for my birthday day: Write an essay in which you equate your age with the corresponding element number on the periodic table.

Since I am a nonscientist, this seemed like an invitation to a find a metaphor in a reflection of the year past and in one’s hopes for the year to come.

Today, November 18, 2024, I am 56. A Scorpio, whatever that means. In fact, a dear friend composed my birth chart a couple years ago and informed me that I am a “double Scorpio,” which sounds neat and intense, and my ego-driven side (in other words, all of me) hopes that this makes me sound mysterious and sexy, but it just means that both the sun and moon were in the same sign at the moment of my debut on life’s stage. To my non-astrology believing ears it just sounds like “double thing I double don’t believe in.” The periodic table as the source for an annual metaphor about one’s age, though? I fully endorse this exercise.
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