Lately, I’ve been receiving many urgent form letters professing concern for my overall health and well-being.
I’m touched. Really!
And, no doubt, as I barrel into my golden years, the spectre of age-related deterioration is certainly a condition to be resolutely on the lookout for. No one wants to grow old and feeble and senile, assuming anyone even uses that word anymore. We don’t don’t want to fall into the clutches of dementia either-assuming it’s somehow different from senility! Also, as we continue to live in a youth-obsessed culture, growing old is a most terrible thing.
This poses a problem.
While we cannot technically stop aging, apparently, we can fake ourselves out when it comes to the outer trappings that aging foists upon our unwilling psyches. However, plastic surgery (And is that a more appropriate term given the appearance it produces?) can only do its work on the outside, and cannot remake what’s on the inside. I’m talking the physiological versus the spiritual for which there are many self-help gurus and polemics.
It is into this land of wonder that I am now subjected. Did you know there are drugs and steroids and the like that will suspend the aging process and turn me into a later life he-man? So the pamphlets and advertisements assure me. I am agog at my many options. I can also have many full body scans that my regular doctors have thoughtfully not subjected me to, but that may simply be that they have no direct monetary reason to do so.
I know life has made me deeply cynical.
Then there are the lifestyle choices I can make that will earn me possible monetary rewards should I better my health in how I choose to physically debase myself. That beggars the question of whether I should have eaten more bad-for-you foods, smoked, doped, and spent more time on the couch surfing the detritus common to modern television viewing when I was younger.
I am depressed.
I got a flyer to fix that too!
©2019 David William Pearce
David William Pearce, Writer 