My aging body is betraying me and forcing me more and more towards a hiphop lifestyle.

As I get older, my stomach increases in girth while my butt remains nonexitent. That means I have two choices in wearing my pants: 1) I can emulate my great-uncle Elbert and wear my pants over my stomach (basically at my arm-pits with nine inch suspenders); or 2) do what most Southern males do and wear my pants under my dunlop, pretending I still have a 38 inch waist. Since I go with the second option, my body is now forcing me to sag. My belly pushes my pants down and there is nothing in the trunk to prop them up. Yes, every time I get out of a car, off of a couch, or walk more than twenty-five paces my pants are sagging. Since I have the legs of a stork, any pants that I buy are already baggy. So now, in my fifties, I am sagging and bagging in my pantaloons. 

Due to a foolish failure to use sunscreen in my formative years I have had a number of things taken off my head...chunks of skin mostly, not ears or other of the more important head-appendages, so I have numb spots. (Insert your own joke here, please, since I don't have all day.) Couple that with poorer eyesight and thicker eyebrows and I find that I have difficulty getting my ball cap planted squarely on my head so the brim exactly shades my face. I live in the South, so a ball cap is a necessity. Now, thanks to bodily wear and tear, I find myself wearing my cap to one side or the other most of the time.

Another great-uncle once pointed out that you feel young and invulnerable when you actually are young, but at some time everything you have ever broken starts hurting at the same time and you realize you aren't so tough after all. Recent cold weather means certain fingers wake up slower than others. Put me in the cold, and we have had plenty of that in Arkansas this winter, and voila! I am flagging some gang signs I cannot begin to interpret.

There you have it: flagging, sagging, bagging, and wearing my ball cap in an OG style through no real decision of my own as if I am a one man gang. It has been my major goal this winter just to avoid doing any impromptu break-dancing on the glaciers that have covered our sidewalks.  No wonder I avoid the malls. 

But perhaps it is a good thing for me that hiphop fashion exists. Without it, I would look simply like a battered old coot who cannot keep his clothes on straight. With hiphop around, now I just look like an ancient poser trying to keep up with kids thirty-five years younger. That is an improvement, right?