Irrelevant Cheetah

Having a birthday makes me, like most people, ruminate a bit on the subject of getting old. Not that I am – oh, no. Rather, I’m aware of the fact that other people are doing it and it makes me sad for them and wonder what they see in it.

We seem to forget this, but modern medicine has increased our life expectancy to the point that we keep plugging along in the fast lane long after our bodies are begging to be sent to the recycle bin. Parts just wear out after a while, like the prostate and the ability to chew our food. (Interesting aside: the dog is the only other animal on the planet with a prostate. You’re welcome.)

The average life expectancy in the U.S. is now 78 years. Christopher Columbus lived until he was fifty five years old, and he was considered an old man. If you extrapolate this decline in life expectancy backwards, you can see that this means that during the Stone Age, you were generally considered an old hag if you were over the age of seven.

See, people didn’t live long during the Paleolithic, a fact that can be attributed to several things, including saber tooth tiger attacks and lack of HMO access. If you made it to thirty you were considered lucky.

 This, of course, means that were I to be living in the Stone Age, I would now have attained the status of “annoying old geezer.” Observe:

Offspring’s Offspring: We’re going mammoth hunting, Grampa. Want me to bring you back a tusk?

Me: (toothless cackle) Well, sonny, have fun! You’re just lucky you get to use those fancy spears!

OO: Oh, geez. Here we go again.

Me: That’s right! Back in my day, we didn’t have any of those new-fangled stone tools you’re so keen on. We had to use wood! Wood, I tell ya!

OO: Grampa, I really have to go now.

Me: And we didn’t hold with this ‘wheel’ nonsense, either. If you couldn’t drag it, you didn’t need to move it. Lazy – that’s what you young people are, these days!

OO: Bye, Grampa. I’ll bring you back a rhino turd.

Because I live in the modern world, though, I won’t get to be that old geezer for another thirty or forty years. Instead I have nothing but a mid-life crisis and yearly prostate exams to look forward to.

I guess it depends on who’s giving the prostate exam, eh?

 Humor-blogs.com is still in its prime.