"Ode to Cremation"

Y'know - and here's some phenomenal profundidty - I am not as young as I used to be.

I am on that delicate cusp between youth and encroaching old age; teetering ever so precariously along the edge of middle-age-dom, one foot raised and poised for the next step into that great vacuous space before me, the other so daintily balanced upon a banana peel. I look in the mirror in the morning and wonder what happened to the lithe youth who used to appear there, sans white temples and burgeoning man boobs.

I flash a grimacing smile at myself and look at my teeth, wondering if some future archaeologist will uncover my skull in what he would describe as a "late twentieth, perhaps early twenty-first century B.C.E. burial pit containing the singular remains of an elderly homo-sapien who we can deduce, by the wear on his incisors and rear molars, to have been a man of Northern Eurpoean descent who lived, primarily, on a steady diet of Captain Crunch with Crunchberries and broccoli..."

Gadzooks! Think of what distant future conclusions would be drawn by the condition of your earthly bodily leave-behinds. Yikes.

And then there's drinking. I used to be able to drink like a fish. Now, after a beer or two and six shots of a well-aged single malt highland scotch, I feel somewhat unstable in the morning. I think I need to cut back to no more than three shots per sitting.....

Coffee... where's my coffee....?