Oracle, blind curse?
You could ask your GM to give you the Clouded vision Oracle curse and make it function exactly like the curse. You could work that into the story. Or be straight blind with all the benefits and drawbacks and get a +6 to all perception checks to "see" things around them.
How are you interpreting the "Characters who remain blinded for a long time grow accustomed to these drawbacks and can overcome some of them" line? Needing to make a DC 10 Acrobatics check at a -4 penalty to move more than half your speed without falling prone is pretty crippling at low levels.
Not only is your choice of blindness a difficult thing to overcome, your choice of being old and wanting Melee also hurts your capabilities. An Old character must rely on something besides your physical statistics to attack. I would actually recommend that you just go middle aged instead, and take advantage of all your odd numbers to get you something good at first level. Not to mention, you'll want Blind Fight as soon as possible to reduce your miss chance and keep you from being flat-footed against invisible foes, which for you would be all of them. Improved and Greater Blind-Fight would be good, but you can't possibly get them until levels 10 and 15, so they really aren't an issue at low levels.
So let's go through the options.
Other than oracle, a Drunken Sensei Monk is your best bet. If you go old, you can still use your wisdom for attack, defense, Ki points and Stunning Fist DC's. You can use performance and Drunken Strength to increase your damage and get yourself a Guided AoMF later for extra damage. You are going to want a high perception to find people in the dark, so a maxed out wisdom can help you with this.
But you said that you can't be a monk... Let's move on.
Another option is to go with Barbarian. Putting your 17 in strength will still get you an 18 after racial modifiers. You can make him like a Samson character. Going this route, you can get scent as a Rage Power and when you get Primal Scent at level 8, you drop total concealment down to regular concealment. With Blind Fight, that's only a 20% chance of missing rolled twice. At level 10 (or 11) with Improved Blind Fight, you ignore less than total concealment... On second thought, forget monk. This is probably your best bet. I would recommend half elf to maximize your perception score with a free skill focus and the Keen Senses trait.
As far as Rage Powers go, Spirit Totem might be a good bet. It gives a free attack based on Charisma, and since it is your spirits attacking and not you, you can rule that the miss chance wouldn't apply. Also, they can give you a miss chance from anyone who isn't adjacent to you, and so you can turn the whole miss chance thing against them.
It's possible that you could use this build and go Urban Ranger to pump dex for a ranged build, but you would have to be within 30 feet to really do much of anything anyway.
Another way of mitigating concealment is through the True Strike spell. The Inquisitor gets it as a spell, runs off of wisdom and is a decent ranged and melee combatant. Some interesting Choices for Deities are: Sarenrae for the scimitar which you could Dervish Dance, Calistria for the Whip proficiency, Shelyn for the glaive and Luck Domain, and Gorum. Your ultimate goal in this kind of build is to be able to cast as many True Strikes as you need. The ones with the reach weapons (Shelyn and Calistria) are good for avoiding attacks of opportunity and doing combat maneuvers. Your True Strike will allow you to pretty much Auto Trip or Disarm until really high levels. Dipping one level in Cleric can also get you Channel and you can make some interesting builds off of that.
A level one human cleric can also get Guided Hand at level one to run your attack off of wisdom. Channel Smite is the prereq, so you can use that to help your damage later since there is a feat to increase your channeling with inquisitor levels too. Let's say we make a Shelyn follower. At level 2, with one level cleric and another inquisitor, and a 20 wisdom, (easy to do if you are middle aged) you have a +5 to attack, You can cast True Strike seven times per day, You could use the Bit of Luck power to reroll 20s 16 times per day, avoid attacks of opportunity against foes without reach while disarming and tripping foes and supporting the heck out of your rogue and monk friends. Later you can pick up Spell Perfection and cast Quickened True Strikes all day long.
There's lots of ways to go after this, but here are a few options to give you a bit of an idea of where you can go with it. Hope this helps.