Mick Jagger, the eternal boy, needs to get a facelift before he shakes his hips on stage again. A facelift might not do him any good, because he’s been a bit ugly forever, even in his youth; but it’d sure make the rest of us feel a whole lot younger.
My generation grew up with “Time Is on My Side”. I remember Mick and the Rolling Stones performing that song on the “Ed Sullivan Show” back in the sixties when TV was black and white. Time, the universal escalator carrying us hapless passengers into the future, is catching up with all of us—faster than our ear and nostril hairs are growing. In my case, I’ve given up on the tweezers and have contracted an entire salon to keep my unwanted sprouting hairs at bay. It was either that or getting a set of ear and nose brushes and a pair of hearing aids.
Nowadays, having had my share of birthdays and then some, I reluctantly acknowledge that time isn’t on Mick’s side anymore, or ours either. I suppose the years pass the same as they passed when we were five years old, but they sure do seem to pass much more quickly now. When we were five, a year was an eternity. Birthdays were always a lifetime away, and death, well . . . it just never happened.
As we age, cartilage continues to grow our noses and ears into wonderfully grotesque objects while our bones dwindle and become brittle. Like hair, middle- and old-aged cartilage grows everywhere except where we need it to grow, which is in our joints. Have you seen Apple CEO Tim Cook’s profile lately? He has one hell of a nose. It’s long enough to support any kind of eyewear forever. When he blows his nose, the results probably take a good five minutes to come out.
Aches and pains. My aches and pains outnumber the pills I have to combat them. Anymore, I need to take a half bottle of steroids just to get out of bed in the morning. It hurts to get out of bed at 4:30 a.m. on a workday, unless it’s a payday. But I do get out of bed, shower and shave, apply the skin creams, deodorant, and such, down the vitamins and the prescription pills with a shot of grapefruit juice, drink the coffee, put on some sunscreen and a hat for UV protection, and report to the office five days a week—on time. I’m afraid to retire. People have a habit of dying within two years after retiring from the state government office where I work.
Every morning and night for years, I’ve been liberally smearing an array of exotic “miracle” moisturizing creams, skin-bleaching creams, and anti-aging creams on my face, neck, arms, hands, and elsewhere in a futile attempt to look thirty again. The labels on all the creams claim incredible results, but it seems that I’ve only been breaking even. Despite my efforts and the money spent, people still keep asking me when I’m going to retire. Of course, maybe I’d look a lot older than I do if I hadn’t been so diligently using the anti-aging creams over the years. But I could avoid the hassles and the expenses of “dolling up” and kid myself by not looking in the mirror anymore.
Recently, I spent $20 on a 1.7-ounce jar of skin-firming, anti-aging cream whose label claimed that using just one jar as instructed would drop 20 years off my face and neck: “Visible results in days, not months”. After using the one jar as instructed, all I dropped was the $20.
Resveratrol. Resveratrol is the anti-aging answer, I’ve read. That’s the chemical in red wine that supposedly slows aging. I’ve been drinking red wine as if it’s a vitamin. The only problem is that you need to drink a case of red wine a day to ingest enough resveratrol to effectively slow aging. So the question is this: Do we want to live in pain and die looking old later; or do we want to live well and die of cirrhosis of the liver looking young earlier?