Geezah? Let’s Go

My brother was the first to call me Geezah. I was 38 and Dan, four years my junior, was getting his licks in early. We both hail from the north shore of Boston, where if you don’t have a nickname, you don’t have a friend. Though we’ve both moved West—he to Colorado and I to Utah—when we talk, the Boston accent paaahwks its caaaahar in the middle of every intersection. So, it was never Geezer. That would’ve been offensive.

Geezah, said with just the right mix of Masshole and mirth? A guy can live with that.

My kids started calling me Geezah when I turned 50.

How are the geezah knees? My son wants to know, as I’m icing both of them on the couch while watching a hockey game.

You won’t find Dad in my daughter’s phone favorites, but you will find Geezah. My wife is in on it too. After a parent/player hockey game, I’m posing for an on-ice photo with both of my fully grown kids, my smile big and dazzlingly white because my mouthguard (which is big and dazzlingly white) is still in. The Geezah grin! she heckles from the stands.

He’s so old, all his teeth are gone, my son adds.

Thanks, junior.

I give him an elbow in the solar plexus for good measure.

Recently, I became a grand uncle and took the tyke for a ride on the handlebars of my dirt bike. We putt-putt around some dirt roads in Saint George, Utah, and the kid is so stoked that he’s singing at the top of his lungs. I don’t recognize the song—definitely an original that seems to consist solely of the chorus, I’m flying through the air, and I don’t care—but I can sure relate to the spirit.

As we pull back up to his house, I put the bike in neutral and let him rev the throttle.

With a mischievous gleam in his eye, he twists the grip backward with everything he’s got. The engine wails, and he howls with joy. After a moment, I kill it, and he turns to me in the sudden silence. Then, at decibels rivaling the two-stroke, he screams, Thanks, Geezah!

Even the tykes are in on it.

What are you going to do? Correct them? Respect your elders, young man. You know, when I was your age… Yeah, not so much.

The truth is, I was amused with being called Geezah, but at the same time, I really didn’t want to be a geezer. What’s the difference? A geezer is close-minded, knows everything worth knowing and is more than happy to enlighten anyone in his midst. The geezer has long since stopped wondering about life and is no longer challenging himself.

He yells at kids to get off his lawn.

I did’t want to be confused with that guy.

Let it go, I told myself. Just show the world that you’re still young. Wriggle into some skinny jeans, ink a tattoo or two, post some spicy TikToks. Dad jokes in a Speedo, anyone? Anyone?

I know, it’s a rough visual and would virtually guarantee lonely golden years.

Instead, I accepted the nickname, telling myself that it was harmless because, after all, it was still wrapped in a faded East Coast irony, like calling a heavyset buddy Slim, or a svelte friend Chubby. Both of which I do.

Although I was chronologically old enough to be a legitimate target for the ageist slur, in my head I was still thirty-four—maybe 35 at the outside—and surely the world could see that. Yeah, I could swallow Geezah as long as it was served wry, well-chilled, rimmed with a sardonic twist.

Then, just as I hit 60, everything changed.

The sport-tech company I founded got crushed by COVID, and I lost more money than I had, as well as some of my family’s and best friends’ dough. That hurt more than losing my house, which I also did. My kids, who were my best adventure buddies, left the nest for a college and a boarding school that I couldn’t afford, and both my knees stopped working (turns out that a decade of professional mogul skiing actually does destroy knees… who woulda thunk it?).

Without knees, life got quiet. All the friends I'd spent my time skiing, playing hockey, and dirt biking with seemed to shrink into squiggles on tiny text threads. Although my dog did die and the pickup also broke down, my wonderful and loving wife didn’t leave me, sparing me the humiliation of having my life devolve into a country music lyric.

Needless to say, I no longer felt like I was thirty-four. Maybe it was time to just make peace with Geezah and go gentle into that good night.

As my head was thinking this, my heart took hold of my hands and did something very different. Surprising everyone (especially myself), I took my last $10,000 and bought two secondhand adventure motorcycles. Despite never having ridden an adventure motorcycle, I was suddenly on one on a trip to Canada along the Continental Divide Trail. Crashes, mechanicals, flats and dead batteries ensued. And I never felt more alive. A Baja adventure, Death Valley, and Backcountry Discovery Route trips followed. These were missions of escape to be sure, but they were more than that; inside the helmet, I was madly searching for a way to put my life back together, leap the threshold into life’s third act, but first, I wanted to understand it.

Just why did it feel so different and lousy? Unlike other thresholds that come with community and ritual—first communions, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, progressions from one sports team to another, graduations, first jobs, marriages—this one seems pretty lonely.

Gone is the gold watch; the retirement party was canceled by the 21st century. Today, you’re more likely to be whisked away in a whirl of corporate downsizing. Or maybe you’re rewarded by an acquisition that fills your bank account but empties your sense of purpose. Whatever that door looks like, you walk through it alone, and vaguely ashamed. Which kinda sucks.

The more I thought about it, the more it wrankled. While traversing large swaths of backcountry on two wheels, I began to feel indignant. Although it was a whole lot better than feeling defeated, those thoughts did little to comfort.

I’ve always felt a welcome calm that comes with the steady focus of riding a motorcycle, but it had always been fleeting. On a two-hour trail ride in the desert, the intense adrenaline hit of the motocross track, or even on a moto commute, the myriad voices in my head are never quite quelled. On a multi-day, backcountry trip, however, the time on the bike is multiplied, and eventually, all the voices just get tired of trying to be heard over the hum of the engine.

This is when a new voice emerged from somewhere beneath the moto armor: Yeah, I’m old, and yeah, I just lost some big battles, it said, but don’t you dare count me out. I remember how to win and I’m not done yet.

I liked this new voice and held long, rolling dialogues with it. Eventually, I realized it needed a name, so I gave it the one I’d been trying to escape: Geezah.

Oddly, this helped. Geezah was not considering going gently into any good night. All yang, there was not a lot of yin in the Geezah. And I needed that to get my shit together. I thought about the challenges that needed to be tackled, mentally listing them in order of priority—create better health, more time with the people I love, more income, stable housing, canine companionship, and a new truck—and then told inner Geezah to go to work in the background as I kept riding. A bit like a cantankerous AI, I set it in motion and checked in with it on a daily basis.

It didn’t seem to be doing much. It didn’t butter me up, tell me how splendid and gifted I was, not did it advocate for specific solutions. ChatGPT this was not.

But the secret Geezah persona did have a quiet power. Get out of your own way, it whispered, trust your sixty-year-old gut, and, most of all, keep twisting the throttle back.

Looking back on this period, I recall making decisions faster and with less fear. I felt like I’d finally let go of something that had been holding me down. If your world is crumbling, what good does it do to try to hold on to a rock that is falling along with you?

Velocity became strategy as I favored boldness over caution and let go of the fear of ridicule. Well, mostly. I’m as insecure as the next guy. But I did I look further ahead, and never back. And then, one day, almost four years later, I realized that gunning the Geezah mindset had worked.

I’d turned a company around and helped sell it, scheduled double knee surgery with an Olympic Gold Medalist as my surgeon, booked a three-week family trip to New Zealand, and parked a new (used) pickup at the curb in front of my house, which I bought back so that our new pitbull puppy could have plenty of couches and rugs to chew apart. The country lyric in reverse.

Unlocked from some self-created mental prison cell, I begin looking for others who might have discovered that they also held their own keys.

That’s when an email arrived that described a retreat in Baja, Mexico, to study radical transformation under the tutelage of skateboard/surf/filmmaking legend Stacy Peralta. I’d never met Stacy, but his film Dogtown and Z Boys had deeply influenced a film I’d made called The Edge of Never. He was a man whose work I admired intensely, and though I’d also never attended any sort of personal workshop and was, quite frankly, scared of them, the fact that he was leading this one was enough to type my credit card digits into the linked website.

Cut to a large, white van, pulling up to the hacienda-style Baja campus of Modern Elder Academy. Thankfully, there’s no sign out front, which makes it easier to ignore the word elder. I’m just getting comfortable with Geezah, after all.

Stepping through the front gate, I follow cool stone corridors through shaded courtyards where fountains murmur and sunlight spills across adobe walls, their earthen tones deepening to gold as the day fades. Wrought-iron lanterns cast soft shadows on terracotta tiles as I find my room, a well-appointed aerie overlooking a lap pool at the back of the property, and join twenty or so other aspiring elders on a shady balcony, overlooking the beach, where a long teak table is laid for dinner.

No one in the assembled group looks old enough to be called an elder. A disparate bunch, half men and half women, they look decidedly non-threatening, overtly friendly. What was I scared of?

Someone hands me a hibiscus margarita, and the week is on.

It turns out that Stacy is a master teacher, and I’m enthralled by his style and story. After a lifetime in action sports, and now midway through his 60s, he’s suddenly pivoted and become a painter. Not a house painter, mind you, but a real artist. Easels and canvases and gallery openings. And he’s crushing it. The guy continues to inspire.

Although I never get perfectly in sync with the closeness of the group—there are many who are fluent in workshop speak and are a lot better at sharing than I could ever be—I am well-versed in creating the space I need for the quick resets that have enabled me to participate in many a communal activity. My Mexican escape hatch involves a taxi to Todos Santos, where I rent a little Honda 150 dirt bike for the week so that I can ride on the beach at sunset and down the peninsula to the neighboring surf break in the morning. There, I can rent a surfboard, try my luck in the waves, and still make it back for the morning sessions.

Despite frequent time-outs, I nonetheless feel a burning kinship with the participants. They’d be surprised to hear it, but I find them all beautiful and brave, Geezahs in their own ways. And I mean that as the pinnacle of praise.

At night, with the pounding surf keeping tempo, I sit on a wicker chair in the darkness of my patio, and write the following sentences in the binder they’d handed out: These are the kind of people who, greased by gratitude, charge into another day with infectious optimism. They cultivate curiosity, wonder what’s still possible, over that ridge, behind that next wave, just past our quavering edge of anxiety. These are seniors who send it (as the kids like to say), the sunset generation on dawn patrol.

Re-reading this in the morning has me wondering whether adding hibiscus to tequila might somehow double its potency, but that’s soon forgotten as the air is redolent of strong coffee, the wind is offshore, and the waves seem to have cleaned up nicely. Time to fire up the little Honda and head over to the surf shack.

Although I’m saddened when the week is over and I feel I’ve frittered away the chance to better connect, I’m still inspired by the realization that I am not alone in my struggle with this tricky life threshold.

Flying home, I fill the binder with more chickenscratch: The Geezah is not a victim of time, but a victor. The Geezah can play offense, charge downfield, dance in the red zone, push back the clock. Geezah grinds until the pejorative becomes an honorific. Geezah dances to the pounding immediacy and thrust of a punk rock anthem. Geezah is rebellion redefined.

All of this gives me a grin that lasts for weeks. This is good because, without a doubt, an essential element of Geezah-hood is the ability to belly laugh at our own inevitable folly.

I’m laughing at myself right now, as I tap out this latest quixotic blog post. But why let off the gas when there are still so many windmills that need straightening out?

We all know how our stories end, but between now and then, there are adventures to be lived, boundaries to be bashed, and loved ones to be cherished. We’re all going to get old, but only some of us will confound expectations, veer away from the safe and sedate to become full Geezahs. And those are the people I want to meet, get behind, celebrate, and chronicle.

Here’s one: Dick Bass, another man I admire, tells a woman who he is trying to impress—a much younger woman, mind you—that he is going to climb the world’s seven highest peaks. Ignoring the fact that at 51, he’d never climbed a mountain in his life, and while the smug naysayers are chuckling in their beer, he steadily puts one foot in front of the other, and begins knocking them off: Denali, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Vinson, Kosciuszko, and Everest. Four years later, he’s done them all. And then he writes a book about it.

The guy was Geezah+.

He’s dead now, but not to me. His story still inspires. There are many other stories that speak to me—the lifelong lawyer and general counsel/director of a public healthcare company who, despite being in his mid-60s and living in a landlocked state, decides that he’s going to go from beginner to barrel-riding surfer, and does it; or the forty-five year old desk jockey who throws his leg over a motorcycle for the first time and nine years later is racing in the Dakar Rally for the second time—but as those folks are still alive, I need to ask how they feel about being called Geezahs.

It did take me a while, after all.

What about you? Do you have a story? Want to share it? If so, please write to me at bk@billkerig.com. I can’t offer you anything except an ear to listen, and if your story fits, I’m happy to write it and share it on this blog. I also plan to collect the best stories in a book, but that’s down the road a bit .

Perhaps some of these tales will resonate with you, help you innovate, and inspire you to participate. Accelerate. Here’s to throttling with humor, power, and grace into all our tomorrows.

Geezah? Let’s go.