Today is a day of self-reflection. My mom asked me to sort through a box of photos and newspaper articles she's been collecting over the last thirty-three years, of yours truly, and there were hundreds! Eighty-five percent of them were embarrassing to look at, but some were eye-opening. For instance, I forgot how buff I was in my late teens, or how doe-eyed and awkward I looked in my early teens. I forgot how curly and blonde I was at age three, and how bearded and stern I looked in my mid-twenties. Images of me with ex-girlfriends, cousins, classmates. A clip-out, quarter-page salute in the Ronan Pioneer to the Future Farmers of America, with my picture underscored with-- "Sheep." Other images painted me as a hippy, a mountain man, a tennis player, a baseball card enthusiast, a beach bum, a firefighter. I was a sweet boy, a lonely adolescent, an angry collegiate, a failed homeowner/fiance, a re-determined musician-poet. Ick! The stages of life are messy and indescribable. I think it would be a worthy experiment to hide all traces of my past and start again with merely a corn-cob pipe and type-writer. I could record essays about dirt or water-- or mud when they combine!!! I mean, why should I wait?
If the hundred-year-life is trisected then I will be middle-aged in two months. Today, then, I decide to live to be two-hundred. I can't grow up yet (nor maybe ever)!!! My parents will be alarmed, but it's not their fault, 'cause see, well, Capricorns grow in reverse of other zodiac signs. When I turn sixty-six I promise to examine the consequences of my decision, and, if deemed appropriate, renegotiate my life-span.
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