This story is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
I’m an artist. In my youth, I associated that word with freedom. Today, after 25 years on the job, being an artist feels scary, not liberating. I never bothered with practical skills or backup plans. As a teen, my friends and I made fun of the local burnouts and stoners who went to trade school. We thought we were smart. We watched foreign films; we were going to art school. Today, those burnouts and stoners have steady work and likely own their homes. Me and my friends, not as much.
I first started showing my work in the year 2000. I made oil paintings and watercolors of goth kids from photos I found on websites like vampirefreaks.com. My high-school girlfriend loved Dead Can Dance and Sisters of Mercy, wore exclusively black clothing, and at 16 was already known in the extremely Lynchian suburb I grew up in for having a tattoo of a spider on her breast. My paintings were autobiographical, nostalgic. Nostalgia’s a funny thing, though. You really can’t feel the pain of it until you reach a certain age.
I turned 51 this year. Typing that, admitting it, feels strange, even wrong somehow. As a kid, I didn’t understand what adults meant when they described not feeling their age, or recognizing themselves in the mirror. Today, I’m bursting with understanding.
But, I am grateful to be here. I wasn’t odds-on favorite to enter a sixth decade. I’ve partied more than I’ve not partied, and for most of my life cigarettes were my best friend. Today, I’m sober and don’t smoke, and what I’ve learned about aging is that, as you often hear in 12-Step meetings, acceptance is the answer.
At 51, I understand what should’ve always been obvious: I’m not immortal. My body isn’t a perfect vessel hurtling through space and time, it’s a clunky vehicle operated by various systems, each of which is breaking down. And as I get older, the world, forever brand new, accelerates culturally, so that my past becomes increasingly historical.
This is my honest account. Forgive me if you didn’t want to know what’s coming for you. If time is the enemy—and it is—it’s wise to be forewarned of its weaponry. But it’s not just bad news. Aging is also the process of being pleasantly surprised, and there is no surprise better than a pleasant one.
HAIR
Every hair on my body, save those in my shorts, is rapidly turning white. ‘Silver Fox’ is a nice expression, but I think it’s meant to be more reassuring than it is complimentary.
I used to have a thick, lustrous head of hair. Not anymore. There are no bald men in my family, so I thought I’d be spared this particular humiliation. Wrong. I’m not bald, but I’m definitely balding, just at a glacial pace. I’ve been shaving my head on and off since 1992, when I first discovered Fugazi. Three months ago I decided to grow my hair longer. I foolishly, arrogantly, thought I could make the leap from Ian MacKaye to Robert Redford circa Three Days of the Condor. I was disabused of that idea quickly, and not just for want of Redford’s perfect face. The good news is that I’ve eliminated hair as a problem, and will now shave my head until the day I die. Choice can be overwhelming. My life’s become simpler.
Where hair is scarce on my head, it’s suddenly thriving in places I hadn’t anticipated. I need to trim my nose hair once a week, and, most frighteningly, I’m now confronted by hair growing not just in but on my ear. My dad’s father looked like he had the working ends of two paint brushes protruding from his ears. I thought I’d just inherited his blue eyes.
And the eyebrows. We’ve all seen old men’s eyebrows. When you can see your own without looking in a mirror, you know you’re a man getting old.
I was never a vain person, and I’ve been shocked at how much turning 50 has changed that. My wife, who will forever be wiser than me, reminds me constantly that I’m just contending with what women always contend with. That the world has forced her to be aware of her appearance since childhood, while I had four, five decades where these things didn’t cross my mind. So, aging has been another way to understand exactly what’s meant by ‘male privilege.’
“I’ve eliminated hair as a problem, and will now shave my head until the day I die. Choice can be overwhelming. My life’s become simpler”
DERMAL, DENTAL, & AUDIAL
I had a skin cancer screening last year, which, as someone ragingly Scottish and Irish, had me worried. My wife was concerned about a few new smears of blotchy, dry pigment on my back, that I never would’ve seen were I single. Screenings—of one’s skin, lungs, colon, and prostate—this is the world that awaits you. Luckily the spots weren’t cancerous, just “precancerous actinic keratoses.” Warning spots! The plus here is that having reached the age where my wife scans my body for defects, I discovered and burnt off potentially fatal freckles. If you don’t have a spouse to push you to see a doctor about your aging skin, pay a stranger. Everyone I know is looking for work.
Decades of smoking, and the aforementioned Celtic genes, means my dentist works hard for his money. Through Dr. Fung I learned the meaning behind the enigmatic expression “long in the tooth.” As you age, your gums recede, or your bone disintegrates. I can’t remember. Either way, your teeth appear longer as your face slowly shrinks into a skull.
Hearing. What? At events in loud venues (all venues here in New York) I just nod and smile. After a lifetime spent being a grumpy prick I’m finally agreeable, simply because I don’t want people to know I can’t hear them.
SLEEP
You need to drink more water.
Who can drink the obscene amount of water suggested by medical professionals? At my height and weight, it’s 87 ounces at least. That’s just over five pints of beer, which in my youth was the beginning of a night out. Somehow it feels different when it’s water, and I rarely meet my goal.
What does this have to do with sleep? When I passed out full of alcohol 20 years ago, I slept through the night like a baby and woke up to take a leak that could cut diamonds. Today, if I want to reach my water quota, I need to do so before dinnertime, because if I drink any liquid after 6PM, I’ll be walking half asleep to my bathroom multiple times during the night, stubbing toes along the way. The upside is that, as a result of struggling to fall back to sleep after my 6AM piss, I have become a morning person.
I watch the sunrise, because my bladder won’t let me rest.
HALFTIME SUMMARY:
- NOSTALGIA IS AN INJURY
- MY DENTIST WORKS HARD
- FACE SHRINKS INTO A SKULL
- BLADDER WON’T LET ME REST
SEX
I was really bossed around by my sex drive for most of my life. Now I’m in charge, and it turns out I’m not that horny. This registers as a relief. Time not spent thinking about sex is now spent enjoying a long walk, a nice meal, a good book. There was a period in my forties when pervy girls in their twenties would check me out on the subway. Today if they look my way, it’s to offer me their seat.
MUSIC & LAUGHTER
The older I get, the fewer male friends I have my own age. They’ve either disappeared into suburban marriages, distant rehabs, or the grave. My wife is ten years younger than me, and as a result so are most of the people I socialize with. Good comedy thrives on references, and I grew up on Barney Miller, Columbo, and Three’s Company during the time of Ronald Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bill Clinton. If I want to make a joke about politics, or Jack Tripper (see, you don’t know who that is), I need to call my 53-year-old friend Murray, who’s living on a houseboat in Sausalito, dodging his third wife’s divorce lawyer.
Just last week while playing basketball with my 26-year-old friend Dana, I made an allusion to Seinfeld. Dana said, “I’ve never seen that show, I’ve heard it’s funny.” Dana talks about things that are equally foreign to me, like ‘gooning’ and Twitch streaming. But this is OK. There’s absolutely nothing worse than a person who says “it was better when…” then explains how the music of their youth was the last good music ever made. My parents’ generation—hippies, boomers—often do this: bemoaning hip-hop (still), proclaiming Bob Dylan a genius and philosopher on par with Heraclitus. I like Blonde on Blonde too, but people made good music in the 80s and 90s, and probably still do today.
Me, I like Smog and Royal Trux, but I’m smart enough to not proselytize about Drag City. Everyone basically believes that the music, films, and books they were exposed to in their early to mid-twenties are unparalleled. Everyone is wrong.
THE MIND
I was never more depressed than between the ages of 35 and 43. My past preoccupied me, and I focused only on what had gone badly. But as I reached my mid-forties, the past became an object I no longer had time to gaze at. Today, I rarely think about the past, good or bad, because the future is rushing toward me at a breakneck speed. Did I save enough money for retirement? Do I want to retire? We didn’t have kids… who’ll take care of us? Like most young people, I spent my time thinking the future was something I could deal with later. Now, it’s here.
Engagement with reality—with the pressing concerns of right here, right now—has been the best remedy for depression I’ve encountered, and aging brought me that. Anxiety and fear are great motivators. I work harder, I get more done, and I don’t have the time or energy for things I used to love chewing on, like resentment, anger, regret, and self-pity. Dad didn’t play catch with me; Julie didn’t like me back… so what? How does whiny self-absorption help me today? If only one of the dozens of therapists I paid untold sums of money to had made things so clear.
I can bitch and moan about getting old, but in the end it’s a miracle that I’m here, typing this with two hands that still work, my mind not yet decimated by dementia. And I know, I’m just 51, not 85. It’s not that bad. I’ve done most everything I’ve wanted to do, and no one died in the process. I’ve got three, maybe even four decades ahead of me. My grandmother died four years ago, aged 101; meanwhile I’m still here, hitting the gym five days a week, drinking more water, and seeing not one but two therapists. I bet she’d rather be doing the same thing.
“Dad didn’t play catch with me; Julie didn’t like me back… so what? How does whiny self-absorption help me today? If only one of the dozens of therapists I paid untold sums of money to had made things so clear”
None of this would be true if I hadn’t suffered the pains of growing up. Nostalgia is painful. It’s also an injury, one you experience only after something important to you recedes into history. Those paintings of goths that I made 25 years ago were to some extent topical. They documented a contemporary scene that I thought was cool, populated by girls I found cute. Everything old is new again, people say. There’s been a resurgence of gothic imagery in art lately. Paintings that look just like the ones I made before 9/11 are up on gallery walls. I walk around my neighborhood and see kids in their twenties wearing clothes I wore in high school. Big pants, tiny shirts, dumb dyed hair. I get defensive, think they’re encroaching on my scene. But that scene was never mine to begin with. Like everyone, my generation dumpster-dived history, sought out whatever felt authentic and refashioned it to suit our era. Oscar Wilde said that youth was wasted on the young, and he was right.
It doesn’t matter if you’re my age, 36, or 22. All of us subconsciously hope we’re that one special person immune to aging and death. All of us know we can’t avoid either. So I’m going to notice that I’ve got it good now, before I lose it. I’m going to thank God for my wrinkles, my gray hair, weak bladder, and long teeth. And I’m going to take care of them all.
This story is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
The post The VICE Guide to Enjoying the Myriad Humiliations of Aging appeared first on VICE.
