Category: Social Media

What a Drag it is Getting Old … Not

Actually, I enjoy getting old, not because of the totally scary alternative but because it’s fun.  Old people get to do tons of neat stuff and get away with it.  It’s like being a child with porno and alcohol privileges.  First of all, you can bitch.  In fact, it’s almost expected.  When young people complain, there’s always some wiseacre who wants to talk about “changing the world” and “making a difference;” suddenly, the conversation goes from bad to boring.  However, when I complain, everybody just agrees with me and the conversation keeps on moving.  Nobody wants to provoke another old guy tirade.

You also get to wear comfortable clothes.  This is especially true for women who spend their formative years harnessed into those baby doll jeans that cut them in half.  At a certain age, both sexes can head for the uber-sized sweat (yoga) pants and nobody bats an eyeball.  Baggy shorts with polished dress shoes, evil colours, socks and sandals and those weird sweaters that old people never, ever button up — anything goes.  I’ve never tried it, but I’m sure you could go grocery shopping in your bathrobe if you wanted to.

Plus, and this is the coolest one, you’re never lazy.  You can spend all day eating cookies, drinking lattes and watching reruns of Bewitched on Netflix™ if you want, and nobody looks at you sideways.  If anybody under 30 tried that for very long, there’d be ki-yi-ing from here to Congress.  ‘Lazy bastard!  No wonder he hasn’t got a good job.”  But for people my age and older, it’s all about compassion, “Poor thing!  It must be hard for him now that he’s got nothing to do.”  Yeah, it’s tough.  Pass the Oreos™!”

And that’s the thing: when you start reaching into 60+, the rest of the world wants to drown you in sympathy.  It’s as if you magically caught an incurable disease.  Here’s a brilliant secret.  Leave a couple of Get Well Cards on the coffee table and you’ll never have to clean your house again.  Work it properly, and some of your younger relatives might even wash your dishes for you.  I’m not sure if this is true, but a friend of mine told me that once he left his lawnmower in the front yard to answer an important phone call, and before he could get back, the neighbours had made their kid finish cutting the lawn for him!  People open doors for you, you always get a seat on the bus and nobody complains when you’re late.  They’re probably just relieved that you made it at all, and they don’t have to go to the funeral.

Of course, like everything else in life, getting old has some downside, but trust me, it’s mostly minor.  For one thing, in casual conversation, you start sounding like your parents.  Making noises like your dad isn’t so bad until the stuff he said way back when begins to make sense to you: then you have to worry.

Another difficulty is contemporary music all sounds the same.  It’s like listening to Klingon.  Kanye West could be Kanye East, Snoop Dog (Lion?) is a jackass, and none of the women realize that breasts go on the inside of the dress.  So what?  There aren’t any ballads anymore, anyway and you can’t dance to the rest of it – so crack out the old CDs and carry on.

The only thing that actually is bothersome about being old is you keep getting outrun by technology.  This can be a serious problem, but if you remember that you’ve got the inside track on sympathy, you’ll be alright.  You’d be surprised how many people will make a special trip to reprogram your PVR for you, especially if you can pull a few tears.

The actual secret to getting old successfully is don’t take yourself too seriously.  Never forget that experience doesn’t always equal wisdom.  Even when it does, there’s no law that says you have to be wise every day.  Me?  I’m going to open another bag of Doritos™ and see what Darren and Samantha are up to this afternoon.

The Girl With The Anal Tattoo

Eighteen centuries ago, the Roman Empire was in heavy decline.  Nobody knew it, though.  It was still the largest, strongest and richest political entity on the planet.  Its reach extended from Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland into modern day India and perhaps even further into China.  Not bad when your fastest vehicle is a chariot.  It was the only superpower.  Inconceivably mighty, it dwarfed the disorganized and primitive tribes that skulked on its borders.  Yet, within a generation, it was physically disintegrating, and less than 100 years later, to all intents and purposes, it was gone.  To the average Roman of the day, though, this scenario was as unimaginable as flying a robot to Mars for a look around.  He would have laughed himself stupid at the very suggestion and gone back to the orgy.  However, because history’s telescope has 20/20 vision we can clearly see that the seeds of Rome’s demise had already been planted.

There are as many theories about the fall of the Roman Empire as there are scholars to write them, but most agree that somewhere in the 4rd century, the collective attitude of Rome changed.  It’s all tangled up in a series of complex political, economic, social and spiritual factors, but here’s the Twitter version.  Romans quit looking over their borders for new opportunities and sat down to partake in the spoils of four centuries of war.  From that very moment, the Roman Empire began its steady trudge from lean and mean to fat, dumb and happy — until there was nothing left but flab.  It went from social organization and engineering to orgies and entertainment, and that eventually resulted in 500 years of chaos when European civilization itself hung in the balance.

I said all this to say, the other day, I saw a headline on a most respected website whose name starts with an “H” and ends with an “ington Post.”  It read: “Anal Tattoo Girl Gives Important Interview (NSFW).”  I didn’t read the interview.  I’ve got nothing against tattoos, anal or otherwise.  However, I kinda have the feeling that an interview with a girl whose only claim on my time is an anal tattoo can’t be all that important.  For my money, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers discrediting Obamanomics was much more important.  But, actually, I was holding out for Congressman Todd Akin to explain what a “legitimate” rape was.  (I think there are a lot of people around who would consider that one a biggie.)  My point was (and still is) that although anal tattoos may be fascinating from a strictly logistic point of view, they are not important.  Actually, they’re distinctly trivial, and I was (and still am) surprised that a website of H…….ington Post’s calibre would give it the time of day.  However, since I first saw the headline, I’ve discovered (without much trouble) that anal tattoos are a serious trend among young women.  In fact, the girl with the anal tattoo has quite a following.  If you like, you can see her getting inked, as it were, on YouTube.  (I refuse to give the link, just as I’ve refused to give her a name.  She has all the notoriety she needs without my assistance. )  SPOILER ALERT – Curious as it seems, in order to get an anal tattoo, you need to take off both your blouse and bra.

I’m not a novice here.  I understand that the girl with the anal tattoo is a publicity hound.  She’s looking for her Andy Warhol fifteen minutes — in the hope that it will turn into something more Kardashian in scope.  No worries girl!  If that’s your only marketable skill (notice I didn’t say asset) by all means use it.  My real problem is that, in our society, this sort of thing carries a whack of clout.  If the girl with the anal tattoo had put the same amount of time, energy, money and what must be considerable discomfort, into feeding the hungry, for example, none of this would have happened.  She probably would have been born, lived and died with neither you, nor I, nor YouTube ever realizing her existence.  Her limited fame is based entirely on what seems to be the obscene amount of titillation our society now requires.

We are not Romans in our acquaintance with decadence — yet.  For the most part, our world still looks beyond itself for its reason to exist.  However, I don’t think it’s melodramatic to wonder, if, somewhere in the dark and distant future, some historian will point to the second week in August, 2012 and the girl with the anal tattoo as the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.

Olympics: The Spirit of Competition

Oddly enough, after two weeks the 2012 Summer Olympics are not getting stale at our house.  There seems to be a never-ending series of Olympic Moments that stalls the reality train for yet another event that somehow turns into a television afternoon.  And these aren’t just those Chariots of Fire flashes of exalted victory and weeping defeat that the media loves so much.  They’re revelations of what young people are capable of.  What constitutes dedication and excellence?  What brings these human qualities together in the same place at the same time and drives athletic performance forward?  It’s easy to dismiss the Olympics as the gargantuan circus it has become — and I’ve done it a number of times — but that’s just the glitzy bag they’re dressed in.  There’s more to them than that.

The Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) is actually a secret code that unlocks a hidden room in our human DNA — a tidy little place where the competitive genes are stored.  Yes, that’s right: as much as contemporary North Americans wish to deny it, we are genetically programmed to be competitive.

Human beings are social animals, not unlike a troop of chimpanzees or a herd of elephants.  We travel in packs and, therefore, have a burning need to know just exactly where we fit into the hierarchy of the group.  It’s Mother Nature’s way of making certain our species survives, by insuring that the strongest genes get passed along.  Once we establish that primeval, it’s not such a big step to London 2012.  Those young people running, jumping and lifting are doing what comes naturally.  Crudely put, they are just answering a call of nature.

Here in the 21st century, there is a strange idea that we should limit a child’s exposure to competition as if it were radon (Remember that stuff?)  In fact, the “everybody gets a rainbow” philosophy has pretty much taken over in North America.  This is just bad.  It’s like punishing owls for sleeping all day.  Take a look at any schoolyard.  Those little kids figure out who the Alpha dog is pretty quickly — even though they’ve been told repeatedly they’re not supposed to do that.  They know who runs the fastest, who has the coolest backpack or who knows all the words to “Call Me Maybe.”  They don’t have to keep score.  It all comes perfectly naturally to them.  This is because, from the day we’re born until the gophers start delivering our mail, we are constantly going head to head with something.  If you don’t believe me, ask any parent about the incredible duel they had with their two-year-old.  That kid is measuring his abilities, honing his skills, detecting and tailoring his talent — so he can deal with an unforgiving world someday.  In essence, he’s competing with the world that mom and dad have created to keep him safe!  They don’t call it “The Terrible Twos” for nothing.

Instead of trying to sacrifice 5,000 generations of the human condition on the altar of some Flavour-Of-The-Week self-esteem Dr. Phil nonsense, we should be encouraging competition.  Striving for excellence is not wrong, even if you get left behind.  The Olympics clearly shows that.  Forget about the glare of the klieg lights and the stabbing “how do you feel?” microphones, and take a look at that poor bugger who’s bringing up the rear.  They never stop.  They finish — even when they know they haven’t got a hope of ever touching an Olympic medal.  And when it’s all over and they go home, they aren’t “devastated” human beings, questioning their self-worth.  They’re standing tall, three axe handles across the shoulders, proud of their accomplishment because they hung in there with the best.  Not only that, but they’ll probably start training all over again, just for another chance to try.

The Olympics might be a five ring circus.  So be it.  However, we need to bring some of that spirit of healthy competition home to our children — because, these days, when every kid gets a gold medal, everybody (including the kids) knows damn well it doesn’t mean anything.