Aging Eyes, Aging Mind
As I went up the escalator on my way to work, and choosing not to take the crowded stairs full of desk drones like me on their way to an office job to be humiliated by having to work off debts incurred by shopping too frequently online and at Costco, I noticed the derriere of the person in front of me.
It was a woman, she couldn’t have been more than 20 or so, who had managed somehow to insert herself into a pair of jeans, so tight and form-fitting that spandex would have looked loose and flowing by comparison. I know what you’re thinking. He’s about to launch into some depraved diatribe about lascivious thoughts and reminiscing about his misspent youth. You’d only be partially correct.
You see, aging very clumsily and ungracefully as I am, my capacity for unholy thoughts has eroded over time, not unlike the Grand Canyon. It was once, millions of years ago, a vast plain, grassy, verdant, lush, rife with life. In the intervening eons, it has become a dry, barren place with many canyons, little water running through it and many stones. Come to think of it, that’s a great metaphor for my kidneys and the attached kidney stones (another quirk of aging and poor genetics).
Diminished But Not Defeated
Aging has made me think differently, largely due to diminished mental and physical capacities, and multiple frayed telomeres — due to refined sugar abuse — on the genes that control my sanity and body hair (they are interlinked and march in lockstep it would seem).
Back to the astoundingly tight jeans. This woman obviously felt the need to wear something that would make her feel good and perhaps even attractive in the minds of many men. Ok, fine. But my next thoughts were around her physical health. Encumbered breathing and a lack of circulation must have ensued three minutes after she zipped up those jeans. then I thought, maybe it isn’t fashion, maybe she has a medical condition like those post-op patients who have to wear those circulation stockings to keep the blood from descending to her feet thus preventing swollen ankles. Could be.
However, the father in me then took over the runaway freight train of thought and it led me to think I would kill my daughters if they ever dressed like that! It’s not that I would prevent them, I’d merely freak out and shout and holler. Paradoxically, it’s unbelievable and unfathomable that a person with my dark track record and multiple damaged, recessive genes could have such protective thoughts of my daughters and concern for others as opposed to my once default mode of launching into some pornographically themed tour de force. Parenting messes you up and alters your universal truths you held so dear.
Truth, Shmuth
What does this have to do with the theme of this installment of the comic once labelled as “the purest form of libel and a pretext for annexation anytime I feel like it” by President Vladimir Putin while skinny dipping in the Volga with his concubine? Like the subject of alleged (and highly fictional) secret diaries of Osama Bin Laden I make reference to, who knows what is truth anymore? It’s whatever we want it to be if we ignore fact-based science and don’t watch Cosmos.
What would have been considered once to be an absolute truth (e.g. I’m a pure deviant) may only partially be true now that children have crushed my will to engage in acts that could have led to procreation for fear of the results (more debt). What was once utterly unbelievable (butter isn’t so bad for you after all, mom) is now maybe sheer truth. Or not.
Then again, I am doing a comic about fake Bin Laden diaries because I couldn’t think of anything better to amuse you with so what do I know.
May peace, or at least stalemate, be yours and mine,
Henry Druker-Kissinger
