Ageless.

Hah, hah, hah, oh that is hysterical!!!!

Oh, hi! Hey listen to this. I love reading magazines from foreign countries, you know? And I came across this online one from England entitled BMJ. It must be some kind of underground comedy magazine, I guess because I had to read the story like eighteen times before I finally got it. But boy howdy, when I did, I laughed to beat the band.

Anyway the title of the article by Jon Hamilton (who I guess is a rising young comic over there) reads:

Middle Aged Brains Are Already Past Their Prime

Get it? Past their prime? It’s a brain, not the Rolling Stones for Chrissake!  OMG... I can’t stop laughing! Oh wow, those wacky Brits! Priceless, I tell you! Wait, it get’s better.

According to the article, a study of 7,390 British civil servants’ mental abilities shows that they are already in decline. Well duh? What self-respecting civil servant’s mental faculties aren’t in decline? Spending thirty, forty, even fifty years at the same mind-numbing, trance-inducing, synapse-rotting bureaucracy would reduce anyone’s brain to the consistency of Quaker Oatmeal. Fabulous stuff, ay what? It’s so subtle it's friggin GENIUS, mate.

Oh yes, and the BMJ also says that, get this, the decline happens even faster in men! And I’m like all... so how can you tell, you know? They’re men! It wasn’t that far a fall, right?

Wait, I’m laughing so hard I’m crying here. I have to get one of those things, uh... what the hell are they called? You know... the paper thingies? A ... tissue! That’s it.

There that’s better. I don’t know why I was crying, but it started out like laughter crying and then I thought about Booger Bear, my recently deceased cat and all of a sudden it turned into real crying and now I can’t find the tissue...oh, hah ha ha ha, guess where it was? IN MY HAND ALL THE TIME! Okay, back to the article.

 OOH, I just noticed something about the word article...if you put a  ‘U’, a ‘T’ an ‘I’ and another ‘C’ after the first ‘c’ you can spell the word Arti-cuticle, which isn’t a word, but it could be, right? It sounds like a fancy paint job from a manicurist. Oh and something else... wait, where was I? Oh, the article.

This Hamilton guy says that the men and women between 45 and 49 who were tested had lost about 3.6 percent of their ability to reason, although, for the life of me, I don’t quite understand why. Still, it’s pretty funny in that offbeat, British way. I can just hear him now;

“So me wife just turned 49, right? And criminy, I think the old girl is losing it. Why, just the other morning she went to make me breakfast and tried to make me toast with the bleedin’ hair dryer! What is up with that?”

And then he tags the joke with another one of his ‘facts’ from the article.

“And if you think that’s bad, the mental decline is even faster for people in their 50s and 60s!”

Hey Jonny boy, no fair picking on the older folks, okay? I can take a joke as well as the next reindeer, but for many of us moving up in years, that kind of stuff

The last part of this Brit’s patter says that faded memory and verbal fluency, which measures a person’s ability to quickly say words in a particular category also decreases, while vocabulary doesn’t change at all.

“... So me dad is like 62 now and he can’t even remember his name half the time, right? But he only ever had two words in his entire vocabulary anyway. Now, whenever the nurse comes to give him his daily enema, he just sits up in his bed and screams “Fuck YOU!”

I can relate to his Pop. In fact, I can relate to a lot of things in his article. That’s what good comedy is after all, relatable. Why just last week I uh...put something in the uh...freezer. Was it my car keys? Cell phone? Oh right, it was my bra. And I had a reason. I figured if the cups were frozen, they’d hold the old girls up just a little higher.

(Don’t try it; it doesn’t work)

Mama Julia is liking this BMJ magazine for schizzle. Let’s see what else is in here. Scrolling to the top... scrolling...scrolling... GOT IT. Oh, here’s what BMJ is short for; hmm... British Medical Journal.

Oh crap. It’s for real.

Heh, heh...I knew it all the time. I was just funning with ya. But there’s a reason. Yeah, some of us are hitting that age where we sit in front of the Philco Television on Monday nights, adjust the rabbit ears, and wait for the Milton Berle show to come on, even though Uncle Miltie has been dead for twenty years. But most of us, me included, are still pretty quick-witted. And for sure we are light years beyond the Gen X and Gen Y-ers when it comes to the wisdom department.

To sum it all up, let me just say that there is no shame in getting old. Sure we sometimes forget that our car is designed to go more than 4 miles per hour and that there is a fast lane and a slow lane on American highways. Yes, we argue with the cashier over a 10 cent coupon that expired last week. I know we can be a little deficient in the fashion department, especially the men. But you younger folks really should respect us a little more; especially because you’re next on the list.

I’m proud of my generation. Baby Boomers are responsible for many of the social changes that people take for granted today, such as Medicare and civil rights for minorities. It was my generation that went to the moon, had the courage to stand up to the entire government and told them to end an unnecessary war. Our music, which was the anthem of a generation, is still being regarded by those young’uns with taste, as moving rock and roll into the future. We, who are parents and now grandparents left you computers, fiber optics, cable television, satellites, and a belief that one person could make a difference. Some people, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy look at things and say why? My generation looked at the future and said, why not?

So cut us some slack if we are a bit ornery. Our bodies may be old, but our brains, despite what Jon Hamilton says, are not. Ask anyone around my age how old they think, and the answer will probably be, “oh... 26-27 or so.” Rock on grandma and grandpa... all is still groovy.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes my essay on The Sex Life and Mating Habits of the Guatemalan Bumble Bee.

That’s it. I’m done bitching. Everybody hug, everybody eat! Abbondanza!