Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I am turning sixty in a little over a week. If you are looking for a turning sixty humor essay that ends with wisdom and a gentle lesson about aging gracefully, I would suggest you keep looking. This one ends with fake pharmaceuticals and a sock. I am going to be sixty, and the part of my brain responsible for retrieving correct words has quietly unionized, reduced its hours, and started sending temps. The temps are doing their best. The temps mean well. But the temps are showing up with “antlery things” when I asked for “deer” and clocking out before anyone notices.
It started small. “I think I’ll notarize the potatoes for dinner,” I announced one evening with full confidence and zero self-awareness. Karie looked at me the way you look at a smoke detector that has started beeping for no reason. Not alarmed. Just tired.
“You’ll what the potatoes?”
“Notarize them.”
“That’s not a thing.”
I remain confident it is a thing.
The Antlery Incident
A few weeks later I was watching the back field when I turned to Karie and said, “There are antlery things out there today.”
She looked up from her book.
“Antlery things,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“You mean… deer?”
I considered this at some length.
“…Yes.”
She went back to her book. I have not been asked to describe wildlife since.
This is the pattern. The correct word is on vacation. The wrong word is sitting in its chair, wearing its name tag, doing its best. The words that show up are not random nonsense. They are almost-words. Plausible words. Words that feel like they could mean something if you tilted your head and squinted a little. “The wrenchy thing” for spatula. “The roof human” for contractor. “Pangea” for the coffee table, which happened once and which I maintain made spatial sense in the moment.
What I am describing is, in the clinical literature of people who write aging humor essays on farms outside Charlottesville, known as word retrieval comedy. Your brain is not broken. Your brain is improvising. I am about to be sixty years old and I am a pioneer.
A Room Somewhere in New Jersey
Here is what I have come to believe: there is a conference room, probably in New Jersey, probably at a pharmaceutical company, probably with a bowl of Werther’s Originals on the table and a whiteboard that says Q3 PIPELINE in dry erase marker. And in that room, there are people exactly like me. People staring down sixty, who have given up on completing actual words, handed a bag of Scrabble tiles, and told to name the next cholesterol medication.
This is the only explanation for Abilify, Xeljanz, Dupixent, and Ozempic. These are not words. They are not derived from words. They are the sound a word makes when it trips on the stairs and catches itself on the banister. Someone drew tiles, looked at the result, said “that’s a medication,” and went home early.
Prescription drug name jokes are easy, I know. But I want to be clear that I am not joking. I am making a sincere scientific allegation. Someone is drawing tiles in New Jersey, and I have evidence.
The Experiment
I have two Scrabble games and four Bananagrams sets, which is the kind of thing that happens when you live on a farm and have a deep, irrational fear of running out of tiles. I put all of them in a bag and drew letters, because science demands sacrifice and because Karie was napping and I needed a project.
What came out of the bag was, without exaggeration, indistinguishable from the new drug your doctor mentioned at your last checkup that you definitely did not look up when you got home.
Snorburt
For adults who grunt audibly when sitting down, standing up, bending to retrieve anything below knee level, or simply acknowledging that a task exists. Snorburt will not stop the grunting. Snorburt will help you feel that the grunting is, in fact, appropriate and possibly load-bearing. In clinical trials, patients on Snorburt reported a 61% increase in what researchers classified as “justified sighing.” Side effects may include lower back commentary, a sound when crouching that one test subject described as “a screen door making a decision,” and telling someone nearby about your knee for no reason they asked for.
Tambspy
Indicated for adults who walk into rooms with complete purpose and arrive with nothing. No memory of the mission. Just standing there. In the kitchen. Holding one sock. For reasons that are gone. Tambspy cannot restore the original thought. Tambspy works by reclassifying the experience as “a brief strategic pause.” In a double-blind study, patients on Tambspy were 44% more likely to stand in the kitchen with quiet dignity rather than saying “what am I doing” out loud to a chihuahua. Side effects may include going back to where you started to try to remember, remembering a completely different thing you also forgot, and a mild sense that the sock is a clue.
Fretterv
For adults who wake at 3 am with absolute certainty that they forgot to do something, lie there for 45 minutes mentally reviewing everything they may or may not have done, determine they probably did do the thing, fall back asleep, and wake at 6 am having forgotten what the thing was. Fretterv does not help you remember the thing. Fretterv helps you feel fine about the thing remaining unknown. The thing is probably fine. In clinical trials, 78% of patients on Fretterv reported sleeping past 6 am at least once. The remaining 22% remembered what the thing was, which made everything worse. Side effects may include brief morning confidence, a certainty that you definitely emailed someone back when you did not, and one reported case of sleeping straight through to 7:15 and feeling vaguely suspicious about it for the rest of the day.
Karie Has Thoughts
Karie, for the record, does not have this problem. She just completed her PhD in Education. She uses words like “epistemological” in casual conversation. Karie once corrected my grammar mid-sentence, waited for me to finish the sentence, and then circled back to correct the first part again.
She does not reach for Pangea when she means coffee table. She does not grunt when she sits down, or if she does, it is at a frequency I cannot detect. When she sees deer in the field, she says “deer.” She is, in the full taxonomy of people still in possession of their faculties. It is what scientists would call “fine.”
For those of us navigating the gentler senior moments of satire of daily life (by which I mean actually living it, not writing warmly about it from a safe distance), the picture is somewhat different. The words are going. New words are arriving in their place. I am notarizing potatoes and identifying antlery things, and I have named three medications from a bag of tiles that are ready for Phase 2 trials.
I asked Karie recently what she thought I should call this thing that happens to me. This reaching-for-the-wrong-word. This confident deployment of antlery when you meant to say literally just deer.
She thought about it for a second.
“I think,” she said, “the medical term is ‘Brian.'”
I am currently in Phase 3 trials. Side effects may include everything above. Do not operate heavy machinery or describe animals.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
