It is unfortunate that we live in a culture where we cannot freely discuss hemorrhoids, because I have so many jokes I want to make about these:
First of all, they're called "Anusol." Think about it. Secondly, they are shaped like little bullets and come in a magazine, so using them is remarkably like loading a gun magazine. Thirdly, they also resemble little missiles, which has earned me the nickname "Rocket Man" from my wife.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
-T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
I'm trying to not use Facebook. I realize that is a sad, pointless gesture but I have to do something. This summer I turned 45. The neighborhood where I live is filled with the elderly. They are wonderful people, who move and talk slowly and were once 45 too. Seeing them live their lives is like looking into my own future. I look at my hands and can feel the end of my life creeping closer, like a malevolent black snail. Due to a combination of riding my recumbent in the desert of Utah, never wearing sunscreen and probably genetics, my hands look like they could be used to grant three terribly, painfully ironic wishes. They will never look any younger. The writhing hands of lotion commercials are like specialized pornography, promising something you can never have again.
Facebook feels like a lemon squeezer, and the lemon is my life, with the juice being sold to strangers. Social media makes it so easy to share a link to something funny created by strangers, or post a throwaway line that my friends will "like," after which it will quickly be forgotten.
Finally, there is Bernard Gert. He gave a seminar this summer at Utah Valley University. He was a smart, kind man who shared the results of a lifetime of scholarship that addressed the question of normative ethics. Five months later he died of a heart attack, leaving behind family and a lifetime of focused work. If I'm lucky I've got twenty years left to accomplish something meaningful, and quit measuring out my life in status updates and LOLcatz.
Here is a Youtube video of Disneyland from 1957. It is a scud missle of nostalgia and loss. As noted in the comments, those sleeping toddlers are now grandparents.
