18-24 March 2016 #800

When I’m 64

The Ass gives humans a few tips on aging gracefully.
Ass


Before any of you get carried away and start sending me belated birthday greetings on Assbook, allow me this week to give you humans a few tips on aging gracefully. From a donkey that is getting long in the tooth and developing a double jowl, these suggestions should be treated with the courtesy and respect they deserve. You twit at the back in the hoodie, what are you sniggering at?

With advances in science, technology and genital engineering, we as a species have become so good at preserving our youthful good looks that we can fool most of the people most of the time. Like tourists, older people in our culture are regarded as gods. (If you are a 80-year-old trekker, people will worship you.)   But how can you actually tell that you are in the august presence of an elderly gentleman if he or she still looks like David Bowie? How can disgustingly young whippersnappers barely out of their diapers and recently weaned from mama’s mammaries accord senior citizens like us the reverence that we deserve in the autumn of our lives? 

As I was saying. Wait a minute, what was I saying? It’ll come to me in a minute. Meanwhile, without any further ado around two birds in the bush I’ll let you in on some tricks some of us have perfected over the past century to look younger than our age: 

1. Hair. With recent advances in Follicular Genetic Mutilation Techniques and the successes of the Community Forestry Program, it is difficult to tell that a guy is old just by inspecting his or her canopy. Hair can be deceptive. For one thing, a person may have a full head of hair, but it may not be his or her. I have devised a simple yet effective test for this: approach said senior citizen and without warning clutch a handful of the alleged hair and yank it. If old guy howls in pain, then Aha! he’s not that old. Us older chaps tend to lose hair from where it is supposed to grow (head, chin, chest, armpit, cockpit) and gain hair where it is not supposed to (ear canal, eye brows, nostrils, bath tub outlet). That is why a closer inspection of the ear lobe of a senior citizen is mandatory to determine his true age within a margin of error. If he has lobes like a lynx, then let’s face it, bugger’s getting on in ears. 

2. Teeth. It has been proven by scientologists that the older we get, the fewer of these we have. That is the general rule, anwyay. But some of us wily geezers try to fool society at large by donning a mouthful of 32 manmade molars. Some of these ivories look like the genuine article, but the test is to carefully observe the subject as s/he takes a bite at a guava slice. If teeth attach themselves to guava instead of the other way around, then said subject is a specimen for carbon dating and you should accord him and her all necessary respect and assistance. 

3. Belly. According to Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics and the Archimedes Principle, a body attracts another body with a force equal to the square root of the acceleration of both bodies. This is why my lower abdomen has of late started moving in general direction of the Centre of the Earth. When I hear young passersby say: “Geez, that one’s got guts”, therefore, I don’t take it as a compliment anymore. There are several ways to get one’s sagging tummy to defy gravity. One is to wear wired undies that give our soft underbellies some cantilever support, but the trouble with this bit of engineering is that it constricts the diaphragm and makes it hard to breathe. Which in itself can be the kiss of death, and reduce one’s average lifespan.

4. Clothes. One way to fool people that you are not as old as you look is to take tips from teenage magazines and dress like younger people. Which in this day and age, means wearing jeans that look like they’ve passed through a combine harvester,  have waistlines in the general vicinity of one’s pelvic tattoo, and offer passersby a flattering glimpse of one’s rectal cleavage. And never wear black underwear. That is so 2015. In vogue these days are fluorescent green boxer shorts that glow in the dark, which is specially useful when there is load-shedding. 

5. Speech. Clothes aren’t everything, bro, and it is important to learn, like, to speak like other young dudes and liberally sprinkle your conversation with the word “cool” (pronounced “kewl”) and make every sentence sound like a question, so no one can tell that you’re actually just another old dork? Speaking of sprinkling, I don’t even know whether I should tell you this, but when you get to ripe old age like some of us seniormost citizens, “toilet training” takes on a whole new meaning. But thanks to modern technology we can use our smartphones to geolocate urinals and arsenals in our immediate vicinity. 

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