Age Rage

Okay, I told you I had made an important self discovery, and since many of you are, like me, in that ever popular Baby Boomer demographic, I'd be interested in knowing if you agree.
Here's what I've discovered...We (we, being Baby Boomers), are a very self-absorbed bunch of people. I thought about it last week while visiting some old friends in Florida. Did I mention I had a fabulous vacation? Not as fabulous as my fabulous trip to China last year, but fabulous.
Anyway, we were sitting around whining about getting old...how unfair...how miserable we were. You know the typical stuff we Baby Boomers are wont to do. Then it dawned on me. Hey, I thought to myself, if memory serves me correctly, we're not the first generation to get old.
Clever, huh? We're just the first generation to, as a generation, whine about it. True, no one, I suppose, enjoys getting old, but our parents and grandparents did it and I don't ever remember them complaining, or acting as if some unbelieveable plague had infected them. They just got old...and died (many of them).
We, on the other hand, want to document every wrinkle, every gray hair, every liver spot. We want some sort of miracle goo to pour on those wrinkles and gray hair (or bald scalp) or liver spots and make everything magically disappear.
We want to be virile and cool and with it and happening people.
And all the while that we're thinking we're still pretty cool, we're whining about being old. At least that's my observation. Maybe I"m wrong. Maybe I was too absorbed in myself ten, twenty, thirty years ago to hear my mother complain about her gray hair and liver spots. But, I think I'm right.
I don't know if it's television, movies, Madison Avenue, or what, but we act like old age is not something we thought would ever happen. We look at our tired, prune-like old faces and wonder what's going on. We act like we're in some sort of science fiction movie and the aliens are doing something horrible to us.
I don't want to be like that. I want to be cool, but cool in a "hey, I AM old" sort of way. I want to embrace my liver spots...maybe even take a magic marker and play connect the dots with them. I'm tired of the magic goo. There really isn't much magic in it.
In my mind, I think of myself as thirty, until I move or breathe or catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I want to start thinking of myself as 70. Even though I'm still more than a decade away from that age, if I think of myself as 70, I'll be really impressed when I look in the mirror. It is true, I look pretty good for a 70 year old man, and if I live another 30 years, I'll be a hundred in my mind. That'll be cool. Maybe Willard Scott will say hello to me.
What's the use of trying to pretend I'm thirty? It ain't working. I know it and you know it. And, while I have a few aches and pains, it's not so bad for this 70 year-old body.
So, I'm going to go out and embrace the day as an old man. Okay, I will dab just a little of that mushroom facial elixir on first, but then I'm out of here.