I was hooking up my bike battery to the charger the other day and surveying how the old beast fared the winter — a broken rear blinker from a run-in with the snowblower and a side panel on the ground. Somewhere through my earbuds rang an old Social Distortion tune and there, in that moment of a gray afternoon, it all became clear.

I had finally figured out why guys my age like tinkering with motorcycles.

When I was younger, I just didn’t get it. I thought it was a failing coolness thing — age as a threat so vile to one’s manhood that there becomes an immediate need for a bike, a sports car and in extreme cases, the need to run off with the 22-year-old from the office and tend bar in some seedy California club under the new handle, “Bones.”

I was wrong, though, and as “Story of My Life” faded out in my Pandora and I pushed the oxidized glass mirror of my bike back into place I found the painful reality dawning on me like so many mice scritching the inside of a wall.

After all, I’ve been fiddling with this bike for about five years and the most I’ve been able to keep it on the road for was about 35 miles last summer before it developed another problem. I didn’t see myself as a biker. I felt more frustrated than macho ripping apart bits I knew little about and reconstructing them. There was more to it than fading coolness.

When I walk down Pleasant Street they’re there with me, lingering ghosts I can’t shake. My era in Brunswick, now faded and translucent just beyond my eyes. I near Maine Street and right about there, where a bank now sits, stood The Good Sports where I got my high school jacket. I went to get ice cream at Deering that day — ironically now, also a bank. LaVerdiere’s, Grand City, that cool record shop I bought the first Boston album at — the ghosts all gather and follow me on my tour of downtown. The gang’s all here and the many transplants that inhabit town now will never see my lonely specters.

Back home, replacing spark plugs and cleaning out carburetors, nearly reaching a state of compulsion, it dawns on me — I struggle to fix this bike because at my age, I need to have something I can fix.

It’s the indignity of reaching an age where you finally say to yourself “I can’t do that” and know that indeed that activity is beyond your grasp now. It’s the daily rub that in some ways, parts of you have reached the point of no return and with every dropper full of Rogaine, every ibuprofen you take because you hurt yourself horribly and can’t figure out why, every advancement of gray, you’re one step further from the fully-functioning you you used to be.

It’s been less than two years since I went from mildly myopic to full-on Mr. Magoo, unable to perform most daily activities without bifocals. Read the label on a bottle pfft — better get one of those 30- something whippersnappers.

We all had a different vision of what middle age would look like. I always figured I would be some sort of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark — you know, minus the money, looks, genius and Gwyneth Paltrow. Had I known the truth would more closely resemble John C. Reilly, I may have thrown in the towel long ago.

I realized I work on my bike because, unlike most of the rest of my world, I have control over it. I can make bad choices and with time and a lot of witless tinkering, I can figure it out and patch it up. Cleaning, patching and messing with hoses and cables are all in my hands and a more constructive thing to focus on than how I got a hair on my earlobe and worse yet — how did it get so long without me noticing it? And eyebrows, don’t get me started on those things!

Getting older isn’t pretty. So, the next time you see an older dude on a bike, give him a break. He’s not trying to regain his youth — it’s more likely he’s trying to take his mind off a colonoscopy.

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Douglas McIntire is a staff writer with the potential to grow Galdalf eyebrows at The Times Record. He can be reached at [email protected].