This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

Not there yet myself dude. You might have to wait a while, wait for the return of Martin Skeedmore, who can out-[Controversial Moderator Edit] them all, whatever his age.

"ilxors in the '50s" would be a fun photoshop thread

ned at the sockhop

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

huh

I got it, it wasn't hard to follow it was a simple piece of business.

i just want to see abbott as a sexy cold war scientist is all

I am a 53 year old ILXor in the Naughties. Does that count? My only time in the 50's occured when I was aged 0-5, from November, 1954 until Dec. 31, 1959.

did you see ned at the sockhop

NO

The sockhop ended some time before I entered high school in Sept. 1968. I was not inconsolable over this happenstance. I was a rotten dancer.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

u cursed by the stars aimless

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM

yep -- that's where my pops was in '68 -- sent there two weeks after i got borned! booh hooh.

--a sometime ilxor in his 40s

everyone cool in those days were entering college WAS GETTING DRAFTED TO 'NAM WAS NOT ME, BY ANY STRETCH OF IMAGINATION! Skinny, geeky 13 year old, I'm just sayin'.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

aimless serious q did you at least smoke a lot of pot? and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

if not you have destroyed any reason i have to respect actual early 70s HS kids

I am 10 years shy of 50 but this thread is making me feel old.

momus is almost 50

There's a Guided By Voices song about this.

nED AT THE SOCKHOP OH MY GOD

I really, really don't know how to react to this.

weve all reacted by blotting it out

Well I know that you're in love with him,
Because I saw you dancing in the gym
You both kicked off your Keds.
Oh, I dig that rhythm and Ned!

(I thought JBR's suggestion at first was an age progression of ILXors into their fifties and was thinking "oh it won't take much to imagine some of that.")

Ned, all you have to do is put on the socks. That's all. And we need a hardwood floor, and XTC's "Life Begins At The Hop". Now who will film this????

did you at least smoke a lot of pot?

I think the first time I smoked pot was roughly summer of 1970. Didn't do much for me. My friends included several 'heads', but I was just a dabbler. My older brother was into it pretty far by 1971. He still tokes up now.

I didn't really get launched as a pot smoker until college, where I spent most of 1974 stoned. Made my own bong from a glass lab beaker. I quit entirely around 1977 or so. I can't say I miss it.

and at least know a kid like trip fontaine?

Hard to say, because I don't have a clue who trip fontaine is. I did know a lot of druggies and hippies in the 70s. They were as common as daisies back then.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3Pgo2kaznFU/RqsBjrRCKMI/AAAAAAAAARs/7wAJzhaYC3A/s1600/964.jpg

that link 404'ed me

(xxpost) Trip Fontaine is a character from the book/film "The Virgin Suicides"

Start at about 3:30 here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_smJP8oRnE

Btw, Frank Kogan, who posts to a couple of the rolling genre threads on ILM, is 54.

Also:
Most of the time I dwell in a state of unreality, where I have amazing superpowers. And I am 50 years old.

-- Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Monday, February 5, 2007 12:29 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

Our cohort is few, but mighty.

abbott being a sexy cold war scientist

OH MY GOD WHY WAS I NEVER THAT

I remember Howdy Doody.

and i thought i was old for remembering leaded gasoline!

madonna, michael jackson, prince and ME -- i am now 50 and 1/2.

sept 1968 was like the gayest time to enter high school

everyone cool in those days were entering college

there is truth lurking here -- people in our sub-generation have a complicated relationship w/our older sibs, the 60s baby boomers. this usage of "gay" is uhm, anachronisitic, or something. (I entered HS in 72 FWIW.)

anachronistic! edgy, you mean!!1!

so is bimble part of this exclusive club?

I didn't expect to get shoulder and back hair this late in the game.

ha was wondering what you meant in the 40s thread

what's up y'all

had a cardiologist call me at 7am to cancel my appointment (snow)

this morning the dentist said that my teeth with metal fillings will all eventually need crowns; seems legit, the youngest of those fillings is 40+ years old

i went to the dentist for lots of work this past year, first time since forever, and it was all space aged nano whatever shit and i think the dentist and his assistant were legit smirking at my one old iron ore filling from when i was a teenager, fifty years ago, in an eastern bloc nation

oh hi, I'm 54 now

peeing takes a long time

backache is a thing

(knocks on wood)

As hinted above, I have a cardiologist now! My primary doctor, who has pretty amazing raw skills -- like hearing -- apparently, thought he heard a murmur in my heartbeat last month. GREAT!

It turns out I have an "unconcerning" prolapse which is a "2" (not a 3 or a 4), so it just has to be checked every year from now on.

Aging is a motherfucker.

I’ve managed to hold onto my first record player, it played notched plastic discs and the “needle” was like a music box. Both my kids got to play with it as toddlers and now the mechanism is slowing down and all the songs sound like Ween versions.

Haha I had something very like that myself, if not the exact same model for all I know. A wonderful starting point.

I still have a stuffed lamb ("Lamby!") and a stuffed bear ("Smokey!") that are old enough to contribute to this thread. They're in pretty rough shape but after years of being stored in a closet, they're back on the bed. At this stage, I don't really care if anyone knows that I still have stuffed animals

Speaking of random shit I have a cedar box that is my “open in case of severe memory loss” container where I keep small things (photos, notes, other stuff) that remind me who i have been and who i am. Just in case!

not a bad idea!

Two weeks I threw out my 45-year-old stereo/turntable, the first and only one I've owned.

^^^this is such a good idea! Gonna steal it tbh.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Memento_a_l.jpg

I did replace it though -- the CD player had gone kaputt.

The dementia/TBI/alz box is yours to employ — any old box will do just make sure someone knows it’s there in the unfortunate event it becomes necessary.

I keep hoping/dreaming/wishing that in the next decade there will be a preventive cure for dementia and I won't have to worry about it

In the meantime…

Parkinson’s looms large for me and I’m not going out like that

I've had two relatives with dementia who often thought they were late for a meeting or having to be somewhere, which was kind of poignant and sad because they were at a time in their life where they were fully taken care of and didn't have to worry about such things. A friend of mine had an old-world Sicilian mom whose constant train of thought was that the people around her were stealing from her. All of that made me aware that dementia can mean having a smaller loop of thoughts, and that perhaps there are ways to practice easing the mind (meditation, etc.) that would make those eventual loops more peaceful.

that the people around her were stealing from her

This seems like a pretty common delusion

I have an aunt (not a blood relative) and her thing is just have a handful of phrases to get through most situations: "Well, isn't that nice" or "You don't say?" "Oh, that sounds fun" etc. etc. She'll also tell anyone who listens that she still has all her teeth, and then tell you again a few minutes later. It's sad because she was an elder care home health nurse in a different life

i’ve kept a postcard set of the 1981 Minnesota Twins

I’m sure my sister kept our Homer Hankies.

This seems like a pretty common delusion

makes sense, if you are unaware of how drastically your life has changed, so you go looking for that thing you want and can't locate it anywhere, you begin to suspect theft as the reason

My former next door neighbor was a child in Europe during WW2 … when her dementia got worse she would rummage in the garbage for food and eat it… a memory from her childhood.

Childhood stuff I still have:
A few dozen books
A Yamaha keyboard
A nightstand that I have had for at least 45 years because it is very small and only makes sense as kid’s furniture

Music is the thing that truly can connect people with dementia with their earlier life. I've seen it a few times now, how everything can seem foggy and then those barriers all fade away with a song. My dad started singing a song once, when we were going through various singalong songs, and I googled the lyrics and the only match online was with a 1940s Minneapolis Boy Scouts songbook. Apparently it was an old Scottish folk song where someone had swapped in the names of Minnesota lakes.

yeah, that was a thing I heard about Glen Campbell's last days... he couldn't remember who his wife was, but put a guitar in his hands and he remembered everything, all the chords and lyrics

Same with how Tony Bennett spent his last years essentially rehearsing daily at home with a pianist. There are much worse fates.

Put me in a room with a bunch of records/cds/books and let me fuss with them and reorganize them for the rest of my time. Give me the same box of used records to dig through every day. “Ha ha! Al Hirt! Remember him?”

The Oliver Sachs book Musicology has a lot of cases where people with diminished facilities completely bypass them with music. Heartening in many ways

Oh yeah! The one guy, I think he had experience as a choir director but due to brain herpes he couldn’t remember more than a few minutes. This poor guy was helpless but put him in front of some music and he was back to normal for as long as the song lasted.

Aaaaa why do the best conversations always happen when I am asleep, stupid australia.

Keeping things is (probably sadly) my jam. I still have most of the letters I wrote to various people over the years (including a few to the singer of the Mavis's who I was briefly penpals with in the mid 80s well before she was in a band). I wish I still had all my email but prior to gmail, it was scattered amongst ISP-based services that are long gone, and/or lost to old discarded hard drives I didnt back up.

But I still have all my Livejournal (kept since 2000) and all my gmail since 2004 (wow I had to look that up), save a batch I intentionally deleted a few years ago for reasons.

I still have the teddybear I was gifted before I was even born. And a bunch of old drawings/writings from teenage years, and loads of journals too.

One sad loss is all of the work I did while studying writing in the 90s at college. It was the zipdisk era, and as a result all the saved work has gone pouf.

When I say "letters I wrote" obv I mean letters written to me, I dont keep my own letters lol.

Mum recently gave me a pile of stuff including old school reports, drawings and CARDS THAT I MADE FOR HER

I’m like, “ma’am, these are yours for eternity I made them FOR YOU don’t act like you can give them back. “

LOL nice. Yeah for years my mum always gets at me "oh there's so much of your crap down in the garage please come and take it or let me throw it away". I never usually have the luggage space to take anything back, but I really should do it properly now - Dad's now died and Mum prob only has another 15 years. Sigh.

I'm entering the 'Swedish death cleaning' phase of life and getting really unsentimental about old shit... sometimes I wish I just had a blanket, cot and a lamp, maybe a toothbrush

Mum recently gave me a pile of stuff including old school reports, drawings and CARDS THAT I MADE FOR HER

I’m like, “ma’am, these are yours for eternity I made them FOR YOU don’t act like you can give them back. “

My parents have been doing this for years, and it always bugs me. They sent me all the pictures they had of me. Then they sent me all the pictures they had of my son, including several cute albums from when he was little that we put together as nice gifts for them. I know they have their reasons, but it just feels like they don't want to see us.

When my mom was dying she went through all the stuff she had saved of mine. School report cards, drawings I'd made, etc. Over a series of visits we went through it all. We ended up tossing pretty much everything. It was kind of sad, but at the same time I remember thinking, this is what you saved it for. So we could do this. So we could have this moment together and remember things.

Anyway Moodles I guess I'm saying maybe there's something similar operating with them - like, we had it, now we're coming to the end of our road, and it's for you now, if you want it.

When my mom was dying she went through all the stuff she had saved of mine. School report cards, drawings I'd made, etc. Over a series of visits we went through it all. We ended up tossing pretty much everything. It was kind of sad, but at the same time I remember thinking, this is what you saved it for. So we could do this. So we could have this moment together and remember things.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, May 28, 2026 11:05 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Damn, this post hits hard. I think our moms were sick at the same time from what I recall. My mom saved a file for me but we never got to do this before she died. I'm not sure my Dad knows where it is and I would at least like the chance to look through it before he just chucks it out.

One thing I did for my mom before she died was sort through 1500 photographs that she had been trying to organize and scan before her brain cancer progressed but she had gotten confused or it was just too much for her and they were mostly unsorted in ziploc bags in a big cardboard box. So I spent like 6 hours one day sorting through them with her. It was great. She was always the family repository of distant cousins, great uncles, etc., even for my dad's family. It was a little sad because she couldn't remember people in the photos as well as she used to, but who cares. Once we got them sorted, I sent them off to be scanned and I think it was a tremendous load off her mind to have gotten this done before she passed.

Tracer that's beautiful. Thank you. That's what it was always for.

I was walking though my oakland neighborhood a couple years back and saw where they must have cleaned out a storage unit in an apartment building, leaving boxes of old stuff on the sidewalk. One box was full of photo albums: mostly black folks in the 70's/80s, family photos, people partying in bars, having holiday dinners, rolling skating, etc. It was sad to see them left as trash on a sidewalk... I pondered bringing them home and trying to find out who they might be, but I was going somewhere and it looked a little overwhelming tbh. I hope they somehow avoided being hauled to the dump

Lovely, Tracer. I'm having sort of a prolonged version of this with my Mom, who ever since they moved down here two years ago has been slowly unpacking and sorting through boxes of her old files, which includes stuff about me and my siblings' childhoods. Every week or two she asks me if I want something before she throws it away. Most of them I don't, but some of them I do really enjoy reading or looking at. They're also good reminders to me that I was a child with her and my dad, and they were good parents or as good as they knew how. (True of most of us.) Which helps me appreciate them as we're all now in a different and sometimes stressful phase.

in the 90s i wrote enormous letters -- like 20 pages, handwritten. mostly to my best friend, who was in the peace corps in west africa. periodically to my parents, or to the woman whom i would later marry, or honestly to any number of people.

it was probably A Lot/Too Much, but i had words then, and no one in Niger, at least, would complain about having things to read.

(once i sent him the paperback of THE EIGER SANCTION by TREVANIAN -- and also the source material for perhaps clint eastwood's worst film -- but everyone in zinder still had to read it because that's all there was)

i still have most of the letters -- i xeroxed the african-bound ones before sending and certainly i have every return letter from everyone in their original forms. but i cannot remotely bear the thought of rereading them *at all*. so they sit in a filing cabinet i've toted around for decades.

Yeah, I can't throw away letters, and I have a ton from my teens and 20s. (Also xeroxed my own letters during a year when I was out of the country on a grant and wanted to keep them as a kind of second journal of that year.) I have two friends who currently have manual typewriters and send them; I haven't had my own to play ball regularly (luckily there's a bookstore near me with two available for use), but when I typed my own responses I was aware of the slowness and just deliberate brain activity that pecking out a letter involved.

A major shift for me over the past ten years or so is that I love, LOVE, getting rid of stuff. The dopamine hit I used to get from acquiring and keeping stuff I now get from decluttering. I’m no minimalist but the things around me need to be either useful of particularly awesome/meaningful.

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Wednesday, May 27, 2026 8:28 AM (two days ago)

i've pretty much always been more of a digital hoarder. i joke that if it wasn't for that, i'd probably have been crushed by a stack of newspapers by now. i have copies of emails i sent in 1994. i can't _find_ them but i _have_ them, somewhere. if my NAS failed and i lost all of it, though, i'm not sure i'd be _too_ bothered. all things must pass. i think the oldest physical object i still own is a yellowed paperback copy of "the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" that i got for easter when i was in the eighth grade.

the thing i'm coming to terms with now is the likelihood that i am in fact going to live maybe another 30 or so years. i don't have much of a family history of cancer. i'm mildly obese but nothing terrible. my blood pressure is a little elevated but not terrible. i'm taking care of my health better than a lot of people. my mom's alive and well in her late '70s, my dad died in his late '70s. i gotta keep trying to figure out how to live in this world.

i threw out most of my old shit when i got divorced. i didn't want anything that reminded me of her. mostly i wanted to die. i've mostly gotten over it. nostalgia is often painful for me. yesterday i listened to an old EP by The Simple Carnival called Menlo Park and realized that I've loved it since about the time it came out, in 2005, over 20 years ago... I cried, and I wasn't sure why until I remembered that I'd spent the last two hours having some very heavy conversations with friends about a mutual who suffers from chronic SI and has been in crisis for more than a week now. So it's probably not _really_ about the EP. There was just something that hit about listening to an EP that was, when I first heard it, a take on my own difficult, fraught childhood and then realizing that the EP was now, to me, a reminder of my own difficult, fraught late 20s.

Often, thinking about the good times reminds me of the things I've lost. Thinking about the bad times reminds me of the things I deserved, but (through nobody's fault, really) didn't get. Ah, you know. I'm severely depressed, not dead.

Okay so this isn't necessarily the health thread or whatever but it seemed like a good spot to share this:

https://nedraggett.tumblr.com/post/818607627035607040/so-let-me-tell-you-about-my-meningioma

thanks for sharing that Ned... heavy stuff obv but it sounds like you're doing all you can
And it sounds like you're in good hands

Oh wow, Ned. Sending you many good thoughts! What a lot to go through. You write about it so thoughtfully, too. (And of course a very fine tribute as well.)

Sending you the most beautiful thoughts.

Thinking of you Ned. What a crazy way that music and technology is linking us all together.

In other news. Shoulder impingement comin in HOT ffs

good wishes to you, ned, sounds like it's been scary at times.

who let you in here