25 June 1999, 965 words
I am not particularly interested in staying
young. When I was young, I was skinny and wore thick glasses and
didn't know how to talk to the opposite sex. On the other hand, I
don't want to get old. I don't want to be skinny and wear thick
glasses and forget what sex is. So, although I do not dye my hair, I
do take vitamins E and C. And although I don't put on face-tightening
cream at night, I do do regular sit-ups. And although I don't flirt
with every attractive female I meet - no, wait, I do that all the
time. Liming with women, I have found, keeps you youthful - it's
living with them that can get you old before your time.
I have also noticed that intellectuals and humorists tend to live
pretty long and healthy lives. You might wonder, then, why people
like Sat Maharaj, Dhanraj Singh and Adesh Nanan haven't dropped dead
already. One can only suppose that, when it comes to longevity, being
a joke is just as effective as telling one.
But since I am an intellectual humorist - although in the
Express I am a humorous intellectual - there's a reasonable
chance that I, too, may age well. But it takes a lot of time and
effort - all this thinking and exercising and watching what I eat.
Instead of trying to avoid getting old, it might be much simpler to
just stay young. But you always hear how it's not easy to be young
these days. I am not sure that this is true, however. To me, there's
never been a time in human history when staying young has been
simpler.
After all, when else in human history has any man been able to look
youthful just by putting on an earring? When he hits 30, he can put
on two. And when he hits 40, he can put on four (in each ear) and
wear a toupee. If he puts earrings in his nipples as well, he'll
never cross 25, at least in his own mind, and doesn't the old saying
say you're as young as you think you are? Of course, the man who said
that no doubt had a severe case of Alzheimer's.
There's also the crucial matter of vices. People often give up their
vices as they grow older. But hasn't anyone considered that it may be
our vices that keep us young? For example, one way I try to ensure
I'll be reasonably healthy in my dotage is by not smoking. Heart
attacks, I hear, are quite unpleasant and strokes can be downright
inconvenient, especially if you want to scratch your left testicle.
But, if one truly wants to be young, one should instead be buying
Craven A or Flamant cigarettes by the dozen (or is that tens?).
After all, all their commercials use dub music, so these companies
must be targeting that healthy and vibrant 12-25 age group. Whether
you are a youth or an adult, buying their products would even help
you save money, since you'll get a discount on tickets to Foxy Brown.
There you will hear - again - how dangerous HIV is. (Lung cancer, on
the other hand, rarely kills before forty, and who wants to be
forty-one, anyway?)
Foxy Brown herself is a perfect example of how easy being youthful is
these days: in former times, a woman would have had to be at least
thirty to achieve such droopiness of breast and doughiness of belly.
Foxy has managed to do so at nineteen, which brings me to a basic
error I have made in trying not to age too quickly.
It used to be that you could tell a youth from an adult by the
appearance of their torsos. Nowadays, thanks to a combination of
regular drinking and constant TV-watching and continuous slouching in
order to look cool, youthmen have stomachs as soft and protruding as
any 45-year-old man's. In other words, the very fact that I have a
reasonably taut stomach marks me as being really old.
Another essential difference between old and young used to be
smoothness of the face. Naturally, as one become older, bags appear
below the eyes, wrinkles line the forehead and the cheeks begin to
sag. But nowadays, these are signs of youth, not age: the bags from
getting up with a hangover every Friday, Saturday and Sunday; the
wrinkles on the forehead from puzzlement ("Who am I? What is my
purpose on Earth? If it costs $40 to get into Club Coconuts and I've
got a hundred, how much will I have left for tequilas?"); and the
sagging cheeks from going to sleep late (because they stay up to
watch Red Shoe Diaries on Showtime) or waking up too early (because
TV6's Cartoon Express starts at 8:00 a.m.)
I suppose I could do all that. But there's one problem which might
prove intractable - to wit, my rather extensive vocabulary. I do not
know if I can train myself to, like, you know, use "like" and "you
know" as parts of speech. It would also need a lot of practice for me
to abandon my very Trinidadian accent and speak in Jamerican. And it
would be completely impossible for me to use one particular
four-letter word as my main, or only, adverb. Youths nowadays have
inherent advantages over my generation: not only do they not read
books, but the UNC's educational policy will provide immense help in
further reducing their vocabulary.
Even so, I'm not as young as I used to be. So I'll be taking a much
needed break from this column. (No, it's not as easy to write as it
looks.) Be back on September 17.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh