Greetings friend. I’m Gustav. But my friends call me Gus. Not that I have many friends. You see, I, like a lot of my fellow retirees, allowed my former employment to define myself as well as my social circle. Once retired, that social circle, barely active as it was, inevitably collapsed. My bad. As a result, I walked rather blindly into retirement, thinking adjusting to this new (and final) chapter would be no big deal. After all, there’s plenty of time to figure this out. My bad again. Maybe too much time on my hands is the real problem. Throw in a sudden health scare, the typical challenges of growing older, and my transformation not into wise old grandpa, but grumpy old man too easily fell into place. WTF? My own fault. I did this to myself. I certainly don’t want to turn into another old “bitcher and moaner” like some of the characters I’ve met and associated with in my sojourn into retired old man’s land. My wife will certainly thank me for sparing her that as well. So now (wtf) what?

I’m vowing to find and become a better version of myself. Not the retired version of my former self. I need to bury that shit and move on. It’s a new day. Only one day in the final countdown of days I have left to make the best of it. So if I want something better, I need to make that shit happen myself. I should have realized this before I retired, instead of comfortably floating through life by (very successfully) satisfying societal expectations of what a good employee should be. I was damn good at that. But what good is that shit to me now? The former employers moved on without missing a beat as if I’d never been there at all. And the real important shit that I neglected all those working years, like family, friends, and doing shit that made ME happy has turned into a bigger challenge than it really should be.