I’m damn near three years older than I ever said I’d be, and being so wrong has had surprising little effect on my self-esteem. Once, in my middle twenties, I overheard a television personality repeat that old standby of epithets, ‘Teenagers these days think they’ll live forever.’ And I created my own oft-repeated nonsense, ‘People these days should keep their prescriptions locked up at home in their medicine cabinets along with their anal itch cream, cause I don’t need to be reminded of that shit.’
18-year-olds do not think they’ll live forever. But it’s unlikely they think they’ll die anytime soon. Well, okay, the kids at school who smoked PCP might have thought they’d live forever, but they looked like 30, not 18. Which is sadly ironic, not because 18-year-olds on angel dust are tragic, but because most 30-year-olds think they are about to die at any given instant. Eff you very much, WebMD.
I remember as a child telling my mother that I knew I would die before I reached 30. It seemed to me so true at the time, in my heart, on my sleeve, written-in-the-books verifiable. What a wretched thing for a parent to hear her child say. Of course, it was not long after I told her that rubbing back and forth on my belly in the bathtub made my wee-wah tickle. What a wretched thing for a man to remember telling a parent.
My mother-in-law has been whispering warnings that I am too thin, but it’s hard to explain how I go on all these crazy diets just for the experience. Last year I did the fruitarian diet, whose most pleasing side-effect was that crazy hallucination I kept having that made both my dogs appear to me as walking cartoon weiners in a bun. The current craze is the ‘no food’ diet, which has allowed me to lose 10 pounds, mostly off my chest and shoulders, and great big heavy patches of hair in the back of my head that allowed me to take my trucker cap down two whole notches. Nah, I’m just messin. Ain’t got no trucker hat.
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I’m happy, but I don’t want to be too happy, mainly because I have the world’s most obnoxiously evil and painfully distorted laugh that causes my lips to curl up damn near to my eyelids. Apparently I was in a childhood accident that my parents have kept from me, whereby I lost my face, and they grafted cheek muscles onto my skull from a wolf killed in the act of defending her cubs. I told a friend today that were we ever to be attacked by muggers that she should tell me a really funny joke and my laugh would surely frighten them away. Who wants to go toe to paw with a rabid dog?
People tell me they love my dry sense of humor, but really, what choice do I have? I live in constant fear of finding a dart in my ass marked ‘Animal Control,’ and, of course, of Amanda B. sneaking in a comment before they’re disabled.
This round goes to me! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-GRR-SNARL-AHH-AHH-AHHROOOOOOO!