HOT OR NOT?

I once wrote--

Time
or the embodiment
of time
ticks on...
its tacit brass beating
the hours to pieces--
callous
like the cut
of his scythe...

Or something thereabouts... And the funny thing is, I was young when I wrote it. You know, young and looking forward, yet full of assurances that you understood the ramifications of getting there.

Tee Hee...

Ain't that somethin'!??

For shits and giggles, I signed up on this web site called Hot or Not? That's me in purple in the little linky thing. I'm doing pretty good score wise. I'm an 8.6.

The trouble is, that was me at 38. There was no grey in my chin then. I was twenty pounds lighter than I am today. I could get away with not shaving and wearing purple sweat pants and a purple BLUES hat backwards and looking all pensive and stuff... I was still young, for godsakes. I was allowed to gawk at the bikini clad girls because in so doing, I made them feel pretty.

Now I think they think I'm just another perve.

What a difference a few years makes...

So I'm thinking of replacing the photo on the website with the one above. I took that one sitting in Mum's office where I come to compute. That's me. That's recent. Those are my jowls starting to form and that extra padding I never had before is beer and age accumulating as they both so often do.

If you know baseball and ypu've followed Barry Bonds' career, you'll notice he has put on weight. A once sinewy line drive hitter is now thicker in all dimensions. His shoulders are thicker. His legs are thicker. His neck is even much thicker.

Some people are quick to point out the steroids. I say, its his age. Right around forty I felt my shoulders thicken up. I'm stronger now than I've ever been. It feels like nature is giving me one last chance to beat out the young bulls. Just one more moment of glory to impregnate the herd before my time is up and I'm sent to the showers.

You see it in nature all the time. Old bulls and lions and hippos and water buffalos and orangutans and rams still hanging on to one more season of rutting. One more shebang in the fields before the young ones finally roll them over and run them off. There they are, scarred and onery, beating down the youthful with their thicker shoulders and a few wiley moves learned over time.

I like to think of being in my forties as being like that. (Of course the rutting fantasies might be a bit animalistic and lacking in proper PC appropriateness.) An old bull still holding some grip on terra firma. Fartin' and snortin' and carryin' on. Full of DNA that somebody might actually want...

Is it the package or is it the content within the package?

That question never changes.


So many of the women who present themselves on that site are quite lovely and very attractive and are recently or not too recently divorced and have a kid or two kids or three kids.

It saddens me, in many ways. Moms without dads. Kids without dads. Dads living back in an apartment while he frets over child support...

All of it.

It just seems malicious and cruel for fate to do that to people. The rope you trusted to sustain you in your life frayed and snapped in two. So many people falling in space. They're shouting out "I'm here. I exist. I'm human, and need a rope, goddamn it! Can you tie a knot?"

I'm tempted in my old bull soul to grab some frayed ends and just hold on.

Do I hear an 8.7?