When one is young, such concepts as age and death are foreign, inconceivable. And why shouldn't they be? Young people are virile, their bodies strong, their minds sharp, and their senses fresh. Did you know that the ancient Greeks thought that seventeen was the ideal age, the apex of perfection in mind, body, and spirit? When they sculpted statues of people to commemorate their life, the person was immortalized as a 17-year-old. Which means that according to those nutty Greeks, many people have peaked and only gone downhill from seventeen. (I, thankfully, am still perfect for a couple more months.)

When you're young, you simply assume that you'll live forever, and never give any thought to the fact that someday you'll be a crotchety old fogy, smelling of formaldehyde and denture glue, shuffling around with a cane or walker. (Stereotypical and exaggerated, but perhaps not completely inaccurate.) Someday, your bones will become brittle, your joints squeaky, your skin wrinkled, and your nose and ears swelled as if by elephantiasis. Your memory, once a steel trap that captured even the smallest of details and retained its grasp for years, shall resemble a sieve, letting names, facts, and other such important things slip through its many holes. You will lose interest in just about everything but watching television and sleeping, as you just do not have the energy you once did. Slowly but surely, your life will degrade until at long last you shall welcome Death with open arms, thank the Reaper for finally coming as a salvation from boredom and depression.

This happened to my paternal grandfather, apparently once a dynamic man whose physical strength and mental prowess were difficult to match, a man who simultaneously awed and petrified my father and his siblings. Now, however, he is reduced to a mere shadow of a human being, bound to a recliner, half-deaf, and able only to watch television, sleep, and hobble either to the kitchen to have a meal of frozen pizza and Mountain Dew, or to the restroom. True, his mind is still there, almost as sharp as before, but everything else is gone. His philosophy, as he turns eighty this year:

"Don't live as long as I have."

Terrifying, isn't it? When you're young and full of life, it doesn't seem possible that anything that horrible could ever happen to you. It's like being raped or robbed: everyone says, "That could never happen to me." But it does happen to people, lots of people, and it is only self-delusion for the sake of warding off paranoia that keeps teens from thinking about what could very well happen to them in the future.

Granted, not everyone is doomed to this fate. If one takes care of his or her body, exercises regularly, eats nutritiously, and keeps the mind keen and memory fresh with mental exercises, he or she can stay perfectly happy and healthy into the sixties and seventies. Eventually, though, Time wins out, as it always does. No one can possibly expect to defeat the slipping sands of Time in the hourglass of the universe. Time is a mass murderer, a destroyer of empires, a defacer of temples, the grand solvent to life's graffiti on the wall of existence. Even if you never smoke, never drink, never have unprotected sex, avoid fatty foods, jog every morning, and stay on the good side of gangsters, you're going to die, someday, perhaps not tomorrow or the next day, but sixty years from now, or maybe sooner, you will succumb to destiny and become a corpse. A depressing but truthful saying that I've heard is "Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one may die."

I'll leave you with that cheerful thought.

p.s. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where my quote ("Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!") comes from.

[Exit Orpheum.]