Celebrity nympho hacking scandal

It’s time again for the new model year and the old model year-end clearance sales. Summer has come to its Labor Day ending and fall is in the air. For me, this means my birthday is around the corner.

This year, I will have hit the half century mark. The big Five-Oh, or maybe Five-Ow seeing as some part of me almost always has some kind of pain.

The new normal is a traveling soreness. My foot might hurt one day, my shoulder the next. The knee is acting up today or maybe it was a backache. Some days it even manages to mix it up.

The discomfort-free days are to be celebrated. That is, when (and if) you finally realize “Hey, no individual part is tormenting the rest of me today”.

To be fair, my father warned me this was coming.

Although I feel pretty lucky that the warning came when I was turning 40 and I spent those ochre1 years in relative comfort.

Dull pain aside, I’m still pretty spry2 for an ‘old guy’ and can still pretty much do whatever I set my mind to.

The downside is that setting my mind is a lot like setting a VCR3. There’s a lot of blinking 12:00 going on.

My eyesight is shot. This is not news. My eyes started giving up the ghost4 around year 29 after working at old model cathode ray tube computer monitors that were never quite in focus.

Lasik may be a thing to ‘look’ forward to at some point. It did give my step-grandfather 20/20 eyesight again — but somehow did not improve his driving.

The rest of my senses5 seem to be doing all right and functioning at a ‘normal’ level.

Sometimes they do manage to betray me though.

I am not sure if it is my attention span has shortened, or my eyesight and hearing have done a double team on my limited comprehension abilities, but occasionally I will quickly look over a headline that reads CELEBRITY NYMPHO HACKING SCANDAL. This was, of course, in real reality “Celebrity Photo Hacking Scandal”.

I will periodically hear someone read a headline like “Man found dead at workplace”, and somehow … somehow … I get “Man found dead on motorcycle”. That’s when I have to stop and ponder. Dead in his car, sure. But dead on his motorcycle6? Did he have the kickstand up or what? This has all passed through the grey matter before I finally ask “What did you just say?”.

My brain is getting a little too creative for its own good.

I am thinking of having it removed.

I am almost sure no one will notice.

There is a big upside to my birthday this year though. I will be spending it in Las Vegas.

No, that’s not the upside even though it is pretty good.

The upside is that my deranged father will not be able to give me the 4 a.m. “Hey, you’re over-the-hill! Feel any different?” harassment speech.

I will not be at home to hear the phone ring7, my cell phone will be turned off, and I am not divulging where I am staying.

Take that really old man.

As far as “feeling any different goes” the answer is always “no”. No, I don’t feel any different than last year. But I am pretty sure that I will feel different at 50 than I did at, say, 28.

Where does the difference start? It is surely different for everyone. I have seen people go from ‘young and sexy’ to ‘creature from the black lagoon’ in a year. I have also seen folks who could give Dick Clark8 a run for his money. Heck, I knew a 104-year-old lady who liked to go hunting right up to her final years. She looked pretty good for 104 too.

I know some of it is taking care of yourself. But it can’t be ALL taking care of your body. If it was, I should have been dead years ago. Between years of drinking, years of smoking, lots of time spent chasing anything that could reasonably put on a skirt and a forgettable9 amount of time partying, a coffin seems like a good fit.

If I do kick over anytime soon though and am robbed of the chance to get to the obituary I plan to eventually write for myself, feel free to use this in its stead.

Do be sure to ask if I feel any different though. I’m pretty sure I won’t — and if I do, I won’t tell you.

***

Sometimes I have a headline for these things before I write them. Sometimes they come after. After that last part, I decided “My obituary, first draft” would be good. You see what ended up as a title though. Sorry, I am an attention whore and I thought that this one would somehow get a little more notice.

I know that some of you are only reading this for the CELEBRITY NYMPHO HACKING SCANDAL, but I appreciate that you have made it to the end of the article. That’s birthday present enough for me. Thank you.

1. They weren’t quite ‘golden’.

2. When you turn 50 you become contractually obligated to use words like ‘spry’.

3. Remember those?

4. Or adding one.

5. Let’s leave ‘common’ out of it.

6. Figure out how to do it on your way out — I bet you make headlines.

7. Us old folks still like land lines and reliable appliances with cords.

8. Dick Clark hosted American BandstandA in the fifties and looked pretty much the same all the way up to 2012 when his mutant time-stasis organ finally blew up.

A. The fifties version of ‘Dancing with the Stars’B.

B. Isn’t this fun?

9. Really, I can’t remember a lot of it.