So, I got my teeth fixed yesterday.
My two front teeth—literally.
Apparently, all that acid from my daily regimen of 4 AM fruit and black coffee have, alas, finally caught up to me and caused some unusual decay.
The dentist assured me though that it was "okay," and all quite normal. He said that he would not recommend that I change my average healthy diet in any way, because it was all bound to happen anyway.
The whole thing did not bother me all too much. Yet, I could readily see how as people grow older they quickly and exponentially become despondent. For essentially, what the good doctor was saying is—it is futile to dream of immortality.
Oh, we can try and maintain an innocuous lifestyle, but, lo and behold, age will become of us nonetheless, all the more. Besides, we might be able to slow it down a bit with copasetic initiative and berating self-discipline, but then we face the greater tormenting and slow death-by-boredom and the merciless hand of a meaningless and impassionate life.
Human history and the science of man teach and consistently remind us that corporal youth is quite irrevocably fleeting. However, it isn't until the body is bleeding interminably or begins to fall apart, that you truly understand the personal impact of this inevitability, which befalls us all.
The extra load of those holiday pounds, the perturbing stress pimples, the back which pangs as you carry the ever-accumulating burden of obligation—cumulatively all weigh in on this bitch-and-moan to say that it just doesn't get any easier as we get older.
And this northeastern weather surely hasn't helped either! Oh, my aching bones, my cold feet and the general all-around discomfort make me yearn all-the-more for the soothing climate of California.
"Well, move back there then! you whiner." Oh, it should be so easy.
On a positive note though, I will say that should you be one of the lucky ones—who is young, mobile, and not yet anchored to anything—go, while you have the chance, go to where the sun shines radiantly for much of the year and blesses every soul with a sunny disposition. For, based on a few decades of experience, I can quite confidently claim that the warmth and wonder of the West Coast truly boast an elixir to our aging demise.
"Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.
***
Last night, I lie in bed wide awake with my hands folded serenely over my chest. My heart beat and I became profoundly conscious of this amazing piece of machinery palpitating in the middle of me. I thought, "here is a heart inside of me and it does not have to be wound, oiled, programmed, or jumpstarted (at least not yet) by any means manual. All too simply, I eat and it beats."
And to know that each one of us tenders the same miracle of life at the core of our being—wow.
Some day though it will stop ticking—just like that. Thu-thump, thu-thump, thump. Bye-bye, and hello heaven, hello reincarnation, hello hungry earth (worms).
And so, sighing, I thought a little, thinking too much, about how ephemeral it all is.
Thinking. I also found it quite insightful to place my palms atop my head and think, "inside this skull there rests a spongy floating mass of a brain—cranial grey matter made of 100 billion neurons which govern, dream, control, cajole, patrol, reason, love, yearn, wonder, question and answer to everything that piques me—unbelievably, incredibly, utterly amazing."
For this machine-of-all-machines not only tells the rest of me what to do, what to write, who to invite, what to misperceive and believe and conceive as my life—it also touts a wild imagination which conjures the entertaining thoughts and obsessive things to do, the two of which work to temporarily disperse the ennui that we all must accept as the unapologetic truth—eventually. And, oh, how these grand delusions of amusing cerebration serve me well!, postponing that pondering of my daunting mortality.
***
And to think, that we all possess the awesome power of these two bewilderingly complex organs, the heart and the brain, inside each one of us. A power which most of us underutilize, sometimes compromise with our intoxicating indulgences, and ultimately under appreciate for the life-invigorating enigmas which they really are.
daily archives
l.m