My friend Frank recently posted on his Facebook page this photo of TV's MASH characters Cpl Maxwell Klinger, now 83, and Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, now 80. (The title is a nod to 87-year-old Clint Eastwood if you didn't catch it.)
And if you're curious, Marilyn Monroe would have recently turned 92, Neil Armstrong would have been 88, Elvis would have been 83, Sophia Loren is 83, and youngsters Raquel Welch and Roger Staubach are 77 and 76 respectively. Yikes! And to add insult to injury, this year will mark the 50th anniversary of me being honorably discharged from high school. These are things you don't really think much about, until you think about them. Then it's like, "Sumbitch, where has the time gone?"
This is not meant to be a downer post. Just the opposite. I've seen some pretty amazing things that Generation XYZer's might have only heard about on Twitter, maybe. I DON'T envy them at all.
Now consider this: The average American today lives to be 78.7 years old, which has dropped recently and is below the 80.3 year average of other OECD advanced nations. Some of that is due, they say, to poor lifestyle choices, and some due to lack of adequate healthcare. Regardless, all of us are one day closer to kicking off today than we were yesterday.
All the recent prescription drugs that are advertised on TV got me to thinking. One is a treatment for those who have non-small-cell cancer that has spread. It says Optivolumovoriousoptomoline (marketed as YippieJuice*) can "give you a chance to live longer". That concept, "living longer", baffles me. Why does everyone want to "live longer"? Is that some great virtue? Why would you want to squeeze out a couple of more months/years of feeling like crap? Just to prolong the inevitable?
S
* Now don't go running to your pharmacy asking for some YippieJuice. I might have just made that name up.
