The Middle-Age of Aquarius

("Flower adult" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?)

Last night, while I was asleep, I bench-pressed a shrimp boat, beat two dozen bad guys to death (with the boat), and fell off a mountain. At least, I guess that's what happened. Because that would help explain how, sometime during the night, I managed to damage my back.

It's very disappointing. After all, over the many years, so many sureties have ultimately proved undependable. But I thought I could still count on at least one thing: I almost never screw up while I'm asleep. Almost never. (Daylight, of course, is a whole different story.)

But last night, it happened. I woke up, sat up, and let out a manly yelp as some giant invisible wrench-wielding auto mechanic mistook my Latissimus dorsi for a loose lug nut.

This kind of nonsense didn't used to happen! This was not part of the plan, back when I was eighteen, immortal, and had just the one chin. I used to run ten, twenty miles, and that before breakfast. Now I need to get a good head start just to run a bath.

What happened? And when, exactly? I used to be acceptably attractive, or at least minimally hideous. Now I have Presbyopia and bifocal-induced nose dents. Now I have eyebrow dandruff. Lately, I have to make a tactical plan just to tackle a spiral staircase. These days, I have to think through, in advance, the necessary schematics that will allow me to bend over and then stand back up in the same day. And, for some reason, I now have horizontal hairs spoking out of my ears, like midget neck bolts on some fledgling Frankenstein.

What happened? We used to stay up till dawn; these days, I struggle to stay awake till dark. And now it's not even safe to nod off? Lovely. I lay me down to sleep, I perform some nocturnal Herculean feat, some mega-macho maneuver like, oh, rolling over too abruptly into a pillow divot, and I wake up all Quasimodo.

But even on the best of mornings, it now takes me a little lead time to attain any public-ready level of presentable humanity. My initial pre-caffeine walk from bed to bath looks like one of those pictorial school posters of man's evolutional stages, from knuckle-walking ape to fully upright used car salesman.

Maybe society's to blame; after all, in our current culture, personal responsibility is just so out of vogue, isn't it? Tasteless. Gauche.

So let's blame something else, like society. Not exactly hard to do. I mean, look around. We have 175 million TV channels. We have streaming books and music and movies so we don't have to go out, emails and webcams so we don't have to go visit. You can order groceries, prescriptions and penance, clothes and cars, appliances and spouses and salvation, all online. You're penalized if you work, but subsidized if you don't.

We are becoming inert. Homo stasis.

Case in point: the last time I bought a car, I had a custom car stereo installed. And the custom system came with ... ready? ... a remote control.

That's just wrong.

A remote control. For the radio in my car. Don't think about that for too long, else your ears will start bleeding. Or growing hair.

Face it, flower chirren. We've simply reached an age where the rules have changed (or, if you prefer, have been dumbed down). These days, personal victories consist of a list of things you've managed to stop doing (smoking, drinking beer from holes punched in the bottom of the can, wearing pants with holes in the knees, drinking in some frat-hole until you end up on your knees, flicking a lighter and yelling "Free Bird" whenever you're confronted with live music).

Some of you younger guys won't understand. You won't get it. Yet. It'll take you a while to catch on ... to get the memo ... to learn that it's not, in fact, wicked cool to open a conversation by bantering in Who-Got-More-Sick-This-Weekend comparative contests.

It took me a while.

See, I was born a long time ago, in the late 1950s. People don't realize how long ago that was. The year I was born, there were still only forty-eight states, although we were already getting a little tired of Arizona. Gas cost about thirty cents a gallon, and thin, nondescript men named Jake would pump it for you, and clean your windshield, and hit on your sister. All the "stooges" and "rascals" were still in Hollywood, instead of in Congress. There were still only two genders. There were just three TV stations, and there had only been eleven "Die Hard" sequels.

There was no Internet. Imagine that! In those days, if you wanted to get your identity stolen, you had to go outside!

Now, of course, we have the Internet - history's largest collection of untamed, unedited information, a staggering suppository of data which, according to mathematical theorists, may contain as many as three actual facts.

(Yes, I know. No, I did not intend to say "depository.")

The Internet also opens up some promising new vistas for those guys who are stuck in that nebulous "neither here nor there" limbo, that middle-age mesa between Metrosexual and Medicare. For example, there are hundreds of targeted Facebook ads begging your attention, all featuring nearly-clothed professional contortionists who are desperately seeking the companionship of guys over fifty.

No, they're not. They're desperately seeking the companionship of the wallets of guys over fifty.

You've seen their pictures, these confused coeds whose legs begin just beneath their air-brushed armpits, painfully posed as if they had dropped something on the floor, right in front of the camera, just after having undergone a Mick Jagger lip implant. According to the targeted Facebook ads, this lithe young Shiva, Destroyer of Egos and Champion of Pre-Nups, is staring longingly at you, virtually whispering something in direct allusion to pages 87-92 of the Kama Sutra.

No, she's not.

Don't kid yourself, kid. Stay on the ship, Captain Rehab. She's not staring longingly at you. She's staring at the side of your jowly head, wondering with some concern if that wavy thing is an advance Recon unit from an extra-galactic mother-ship, scouting our planet in advance of a humanity-ending alien invasion.

Or just an errant ear hair.