I am not like you.  You age on a progressive scale; each day you get a little older, and in the end all of your days add up to the age at which you’ll expire.  Your experiences, wisdom, and memories will be proportionate to the sum of your days.

I was seventeen for 14 years.  I finally made an effort of will to age appropriately, and inadvertently brought to life a machine that I cannot control.  Now, like so many cautionary science-fiction tales, I am lurching forward through time in unmeasured bursts, a victim of my own design.  I turned the aging mechanism on and somehow the lever broke off in my hand.

Last night I was at the karaoke bar with a few friends.  I sang a pop song while a group of obnoxious children behind me screamed the lyrics in their metal hardcore voices.  There was no malice in their accompaniment; they were attempting conviviality, I believe.  I turned to them during an instrumental portion of the song and said into the microphone “I get it.  I got it.  Thank you.”  They stopped.

Last year, they could’ve been me.

This morning I was walking to the bus stop and saw a man lying beneath a pickup truck parked at one of the pumps.  He was inspecting the undercarriage for whatever and my mind’s voice yelled “Please be careful”.  I immediately scolded myself for being one of those over-cautious old bastards.

I got off the bus downtown and while walking the last six blocks of my journey to work passed a recycling sorter climbing into a trash bin on the sidewalk and again the words “Please be careful” sounded in my mind.  Who the fuck is that old person shouting at kids in my head?  That can’t be me, can it?

I get to work and go to log into my e-mail and see that Arthur is being remade starring Russell Brand.  Seriously?  WTF? 

Somehow, between Monday and Saturday, I became very, very old.

Last night I unintentionally had a multicultural evening.  I read a novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the title of this blog; sadly I’d retired all my whores several years ago), then watched a French film while eating spaghetti and drinking Scotch.  It feels good to be well-rounded.

There was something else I was going to say about mankind’s propensity towards mindfulness, but I forgot when the word “mindfulness” appeared in my thoughts.  I hate that word.  Conceptually, what it represents is commendable, but it’s such a stupid fucking word.  So far as I know, the only people who aren’t “mindful” are vegetables and the dead.

I guess that’s all.  There was something more but my fragile old man mind lost it somewhere along the way.  Next will be my eyesight, I suppose.