It’s class reunion time for the class of 65’, that would be number forty five, and as I enter this “golden age of living” appreciative of every additional day on the planet and knowing many in this generation are no longer here to enjoy the miracles of modern medicine, I still worry about my image. I’ve done about everything I can do for about the last two weeks, trying to pull and tuck but it looks like I’m destined to attend in the bag I’m wearing.
Actually, I worry about the image of all the “boomers”. We are now depicted as incontinent (living on various continents I suppose) unable to get up when we fall, using enough hair dye to turn the Blue Danube brown and riding around in our hover rounds hoping for that all important four hour Cialis moment.
Not a pretty picture. When your stomach’s as big as volleyball and your skin’s as dry as week old pork skins the four hour “whatever” is just not a major issue. I doubt that I could fish for four hours and my brother and I always preferred tinker toys to erector sets anyway. 
The image problem just might be the fault of cable news advertising. These guys see the “boomers” as their main source of revenue for at least the next ten years…longer if they can just keep us alive. The class of 65’ is the mother lode for medicinal miracles from the medicine doctors and if you tune in you can always find some quack selling something to make you feel longer, stronger, and more in charge of your life, however drugged out you might be. All this while taking ten different pills to help you stay happy.
We’re sixty-three, look like seventy three and feel like eighty three when the ads tell us we can be forty-three again if we just buy the right cream or drink the bark off a healthy tree. Well, the truth is, we’re buying it. And why not? We always thought we were something special and now just look at us... supporting the economy in a way in which no other generation thought possible, through chemistry. My real problem with most of the ads is their lack of sensitivity to my health problems in the first place.
Why do I have to have everything that may be wrong with me broadcast over the idiot box to three hundred million healthy people? My night sweats, my going and going, my aching arches, and poor timing when the “time is right”? And if I get one more email telling me there’s a Russian girl out there who wants to get to know me I think I’ll liquidate all my many “assets”. Oh, then there’s the one that lets me know someone has a great place for my “aging loved one”. That would be mom and she’s got more energy than I! She told me once that every ten years of her life was better than the previous ten and she’s in her eighth decade.
I now understand what Ol’ Mick’s quote, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” I hope I can say I never harmed any
one as much as I harmed myself. That would be a good thing. Can you imagine the gnashing of teeth that would take place if each one of us decided to take better care of ourselves, eliminate the necessity for drugs in our lives and take a positive attitude into the future? Who told us we needed drugs to make us happier in the first place? It probably began when some infomercial on television, kept us up later than we should have been to sell us on a product designed to give us the energy we wouldn’t have needed had we gone to bed in the first place.
Actually, I worry about the image of all the “boomers”. We are now depicted as incontinent (living on various continents I suppose) unable to get up when we fall, using enough hair dye to turn the Blue Danube brown and riding around in our hover rounds hoping for that all important four hour Cialis moment.
Not a pretty picture. When your stomach’s as big as volleyball and your skin’s as dry as week old pork skins the four hour “whatever” is just not a major issue. I doubt that I could fish for four hours and my brother and I always preferred tinker toys to erector sets anyway. The image problem just might be the fault of cable news advertising. These guys see the “boomers” as their main source of revenue for at least the next ten years…longer if they can just keep us alive. The class of 65’ is the mother lode for medicinal miracles from the medicine doctors and if you tune in you can always find some quack selling something to make you feel longer, stronger, and more in charge of your life, however drugged out you might be. All this while taking ten different pills to help you stay happy.
We’re sixty-three, look like seventy three and feel like eighty three when the ads tell us we can be forty-three again if we just buy the right cream or drink the bark off a healthy tree. Well, the truth is, we’re buying it. And why not? We always thought we were something special and now just look at us... supporting the economy in a way in which no other generation thought possible, through chemistry. My real problem with most of the ads is their lack of sensitivity to my health problems in the first place.
Why do I have to have everything that may be wrong with me broadcast over the idiot box to three hundred million healthy people? My night sweats, my going and going, my aching arches, and poor timing when the “time is right”? And if I get one more email telling me there’s a Russian girl out there who wants to get to know me I think I’ll liquidate all my many “assets”. Oh, then there’s the one that lets me know someone has a great place for my “aging loved one”. That would be mom and she’s got more energy than I! She told me once that every ten years of her life was better than the previous ten and she’s in her eighth decade.
I now understand what Ol’ Mick’s quote, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” I hope I can say I never harmed any
one as much as I harmed myself. That would be a good thing. Can you imagine the gnashing of teeth that would take place if each one of us decided to take better care of ourselves, eliminate the necessity for drugs in our lives and take a positive attitude into the future? Who told us we needed drugs to make us happier in the first place? It probably began when some infomercial on television, kept us up later than we should have been to sell us on a product designed to give us the energy we wouldn’t have needed had we gone to bed in the first place.
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