Tiptoeing past my middle-passage afraid of rousing (or worse, arousing) whatever cloaked figure awaits the creak of a floorboard or the sound of a stepped-on garden rake levering up to thwack my beak,

I am nevertheless confident in the New Day. May it bring an Elysian lawn chair or the romance of slaughter at the disputed Hot Gates.

​

Startled by the flying beige flag! Yes, teens, my decline and your prom are coincident, this bit of manufactured magic acquires a seam once the liquefied plastic is blown in and all the Wonder of wonder bread is its balloon-daubed plastic bag. Einstein fires a bullet in a car traveling 800 feet per second per second, and another per second thrown in.

​

I know exactly where you are: the sweaty, temporal nightmare of roiling youth and feeling good, when Elton murmured from my Panasonic ball and chain like a man singing through a hangman's hood.

​

So, yeah. Speaker tech and outerwear? Much later the radio "sounded" better. But we lost through that advance the letter of the law; Gilbert O'Sullivan stands down and in sweeps Ke$ha. We threw it all away for a pair of fancy-pants.

​

Really now; imagine actually waking one day, Samsa-like, to find you are an older man with sudden dappled paws. And I don't mean "Perhaps". That happened to me. Hand-backs shiny with Arbus cross-hatches and arranged spots like those that trouble the failing sun and indicating the same collapse.

​

The microwaves turn back around and the heat-death of All This sees God tiredly lifting the latches again, this time to let it all back in, tired energy pouring homeward from near and far, as was expected all along. "The day is done! Lamplighters, would you please snuff this dim embarrassed star? And turn up the stereo one last time on Billy Joel's 'Zanzibar'! Jesus, what a song!"

​

Star light, Star bright, the star our God turned off tonight, I wish I may I wish I might be delivered of this overbite. No more to burn the petals or leaves, and buh-bye melanoma. O teen you have some insufficient inkling but you won't grow comfortably into this weirdness any more than I will return to pinrail and glory in the wings of Oklahoma.

​

But I I I I...I have the plucky interiority of a 30-something and have retained, against every expectation of my own childhood certainties of decay, a sense of timelessness, and now see kids glance sidewise at me several times a day.

​

I used to shiftily spy on 'older adults' with whom I would periodically be trapped, utterly trapped and panicked, my expression naked with dread. "Kid" (I'll say); "as strange as you think growing older is going to be, I'm here to tell you that your untested powers of imagination are not up to the task of painting that picture on the inner walls of your earbud-deafened head".

​

Now it occurs to me that, in the space of some individual year, no way of knowing which one, in a future whose approach I only guess (not a calendar year, but I'm supposing about 1 year of adventurism from a stem to a stern, more or less)

​

I’m likely to unravel like a ball of yarn, my sensory nonchalance, this thoughtless unenlightened physical well-being of my middle passage will be cruelly undone, my spirits in flight like foul bats from a foul barn.

​

An inexplicable, sudden cascade of cancers, renal failures, plummeting bone density numbers, aortic blockage, and x-rays that cause my doctor to breathe hard and raise his hand to his mouth – a melting pilgrim's cornucopia of disintegration as my architecture takes the express line south.

​

That will stun me! Stun my hapless fa-mi-lee! Clusterfeck of bewildering setbacks and teary, faux-philosophical internal and external monologues (arms waving around like those of the over-earnest Branagh), hug the wife and kids and step onto that ceremonial last banana.

​

Questions, I have but a few; could we have been less murderous as our cowboys headed west? At the top of the Space Family Robinson's flying house what's that little bubble do?  This is what I have to look forward to.

​

Visionary thinking, an aching frame, every day the same sustaining pill. Don West and the older Robinson girl? Not Penny, but Carol or whatever? Thanks to Captain Robinson's intransigence and the finally distracting Alpha Centauri mission itself, they never got together, and now they never will.