I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Who reads banner ads on web sites? Someone must or there would be no ad revenue. I probably do, even with my internal auto-filter turned on, I see them, I scan them, I habitually disregard them. But today…there was one that created such
cognitive dissonance that it jarred me to actually ponder it.
The ad was for a car, and the banner line read “How Sick (sic) is Your Ride?” then it showed an animation of the car with “sick” new features like a rear spoiler, sun roof, alloy wheels, etc.
This is a mono-blog about getting old. A friend of mine and I were discussing slang and other adolescent features; about how fast it moved along, about how quickly we had no idea what “kids these days” were talking about—and how, by the time we do know what it means, it is already over.
TANGENT: A website featuring the
death clock has my death set at January 24, 2054. It then politely begins to count down the seconds l have left to live 1,513,309,307—6..5..4..3.. Ouch. I can’t sleep. Which leads me to another
TANGENT: Every once in awhile I come up with some marvelously clever idea that I am convinced is original only to find out that everyone but me has heard it a hundred times. One such idea, was the death pool, like a baby pool. I started one such pool when the Bush-Cheney ticket had just been nominated. It was the Cheney Death Pool. I was having a good laugh right up until the point that the President of my company called me in to discuss the ethics of my idea (something to the effect of "if you ever do something like $*%#@!) again"). Opting for continued employment, I cancelled my pool.
TANGENT: This is exactly what made the
Vampires of Ann Rice so fascinating. She addressed the paradoxical predicament facing those when faced with the prospect of eternal life. We may wish we could live forever, but actually doing it wouldn’t be so easy.
Which reminds me of one more
TANGENT: Apparently Ann Rice was a big soft porn...err...romance writer who set her novels in the once beautiful New Orleans. Despite a broad historical and philosophical context, and 1400 pages, she couldn't land a hit...until that is, she changed the main character from human to
vampire ...and then: bam!
1 comment:
I have a tangent about what it would be like if we lived Methuselah-like lives. I'm in my 30s, yet how many times have I been in conversations with my wife or with others where I can't remember details (or sometimes anything) about a particular shared experience. Sure, some things are burned into our memories. But I have the feeling that the details surrounding the majority of the occurrences in our lives fade into oblivion within a rather short amount of time. And I am not attributing this to the senility of old age or the haziness of a drug-induced stupor. This is a phenomenon that occurs in one's prime under the most healthy of conditions.
So if I were to imagine what it would be like to live to be 969 years old, I suppose I would not be able to remember much of what had occurred just at age 944, let alone 100, 200, or 300+ years prior to that. Talk about deja vu, it would be frightening the amount of times I'd probably ask myself whether I had been to such and such a place before or whether I'd met so and so before. The past would be a hopeless mess. And then to live forever, yikes! Without some sort of corresponding increase in brain and memory power, we would be doomed to constantly being chased by an approaching amnesic tide.
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