Young At Heart

I passed one of those tiny milestones today which indicated that I am getting old. I was having lunch in a Thai restaurant with three colleagues when one of them used the phrase "...kids today..." in a sentence, without irony. And he meant kids as in new employees, not as in "getting on the school bus". OK, it wasn't me who said it, but I believe in guilt by association when you sit with other blokes. It's one of those defining moments, like when a young girl in a bar keeps looking at you and you start to imagine you're a stud, and then she comes over and it turns out she thought you were one of her friends' dads.

Never mind that I can deadlift more than 400lbs, play soccer every week and can run the 200m in 26 seconds. Forget that I have hair on my head and my stalk still stands up without chemical assistance. Little things remind you that this is just a temporary phase, a mere point on the graph of performance versus time, and it's downhill all the way from here.

I can already see signs that it is my manifest destiny to turn slowly into my father. Or at least a taller and more offensive version of my father. For a start I'm growing more and more of those brown moles on my skin. Either I'm going negro on the installment plan or I have the same kind of skin as my old man, which means that by the time I'm sixty Mrs Bison will be able to read me like a braille book. The only compensating feature is that no-one will see my skin because of the body hair that I'm busy cultivating. I suppose this is another sign of "maturity", although I'm OK with this one because men with no body hair look disturbingly like mannekins, rent boys or hermaphrodites.

So no matter how much I work out, keep my hair, sport a healthy morning erection and listen to the latest sounds, man, I am doomed, as are we all, to descend slowly down a path that will include the following:

• Fluffy hair spontaneously emerging from ears and nose.
  
• Testicles descending in their sack to a point just above my knees.
  
• Paying more attention to old bastards on the TV advertising Medicare drug coverage supplement plans.
  
• Mowing down a bus queue in my oversize Buick and claiming I never saw them.
  
• Testicles descending in their sack to a point just above my knees.
  
• Repeating myself.
  
• Wearing more and more brown clothes.
  
• Talking about aches, pains and operations.
  
• Looking for friends' names in the obituaries.
  
• Considering dating a woman with a face like a giant scrotum, a downy moustache and tits hanging below the belt.
  
• Or, more likely, dying before my wife and leaving all my worldly goods so she can romance a flamboyant sixty year-old newsreader with perfectly capped teeth who wears a sweater draped over his shoulders like a giant cunt.
  
• Liking cats.
  
• Wearing bifocals and yet being unable to see either near or far.
  
• Having a colonoscopy.
  
• Suddenly not thinking that the AARP are a bunch of diseased old wankers whose primary contribution to society has been to ensure that senile old goats can continue to get their driver's license renewed automatically and kill the rest of us (in their Buicks) with impunity.
  
• No longer even imagining that the barmaid might shag me because of my great accent.
  
• Shortness of breath, sudden pains all down my left arm and a white light getting closer. Is that Grandpa's voice I can hear? I'm coming over now...

Ah, fuck it. I have a quarter of a century before I need to think about that shit. And let's face it, if I keep trying to run the 200m in less than 26 seconds in the middle of a St.Louis summer I won't need to worry about getting old - I'll expire early. I've heard it said that you're only as old as you feel; that doesn't help much because, with all the soccer and weightlifting, I feel like shit a lot of the time. I prefer to think you're only as old as the woman whose tits you'd like to feel; based on this theory I could clearly be somewhere in the twenty to thirty range, and quite possibly still eighteen.

That's something kids of today just don't understand - they're the dirty old men of tomorrow. It's only a matter of time...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison